Team Collaboration

At ElectraLink we’ve been embracing flexible working across the teams for several years. This means people can chose to work from home or the office , depending on their preferences; only have to come into the office for external meetings; and can flex their working day around what suits them best with some starting early to avoid the morning rush and others starting later. To support this everybody gets a Windows surface, mobile phone and headset so that they have the equipment to work where they want. We’ve also combined this with a cloud infrastructure and SharePoint so people can access the documents that they want wherever they want, and the functionality is the same whether you are in the office, at home or using the Wi-Fi at a local coffee shop. And finally to help with communication with paired this up with Skype for business so that we can teleconference, video conference, share documents and message each other instantly. This has gone done really well, with our staff telling us that this is a great benefit of working at ElectraLink.

The benefit for ElectraLink is that we have managed to accommodate a significant growth in numbers within our existing offices; and only had to open a satellite office in Holborn last year when we finally outgrew our Soho office. This provides us with flexibility both in terms of desks and also access to a large number of meeting rooms without the fixed overheads. Combine this with our flexible working and its quite common to have impromptu teleconferences across multiple members of the team – all from different locations – including from Mauritius where one of our ElectraLink team is based.

All of this flexible working is great, and our staff do really appreciate the fact that they can flex their work time around their homelife, rather than the other way around; however, sometimes its good to all just get together and chat. It helps with collaboration, team identity, and is a good opportunity to catch up with colleagues. Today we had the first collaboration day for the Governance Services Team where we all got together in a room and worked today – along with benefits of pastries, coffee and lunch. Its great to see all of the team together, and a good reminder of how much we have grown in the last 12 months, but the highlight for me was to see everybody chatting and identifying opportunities to deliver a better service for our customers.