Six months at Quanta: What has 2020 had in store for us so far?

There’s no disputing that 2020 has been a challenging year for most, with Covid-19 impacting nearly every industry and fundamentally changing the way we work. And while our markets - and indeed Quanta as a business – have experienced hurdles, there have also been clear highlights and opportunities that have emerged in the past six months. Here’s what we’ve learnt since January: 

As the UK was slightly behind some other nations in terms of the emergence of coronavirus, we had the advantage of seeing how other countries, industries and markets were reacting around the world. This meant we started working remotely a week before lockdown was officially announced, with our amazing IT team able to get 80 people working remotely effectively overnight.  

The contingencies we had in place meant that we knew exactly who had the hardware at home to be able to work efficiently, so before lockdown we’d bought 15 new laptops for those who needed them in preparation for home working. We were able to rapidly implement new remote working technologies and policies, with our agile and willing team quickly adapting to their new environments. 

One of the projects we had in the first part of the year was Project Lifeline, which focused on introducing a new cloud-based phone system called CloudCall. The plan was to roll this out with a go-live at the end of March, but when Covid-19 hit, we had to rethink how we’d implement this. Thankfully, our IT team and CloudCall were able to deliver this project remotely, undertaking the planned training and ensuring the whole Quanta team were confident using it. This was perfect timing with the new home working conditions, and the direct interface with Bullhorn ensured a smooth transition. Hats off to the whole Quanta team for being so adaptable and helping to make this software transition seamless. 

We kicked off 2020 with Project Facelift, which involved transitioning from one Bullhorn system to their latest version, along with Project Tron, which is a bigger piece around establishing our Irish and American businesses. This is an extremely exciting development for Quanta and one that we’ve been working on for years; the Irish part of the business is already in place, but we’re now expanding this operation in a bid to build up our European headquarters into the future. Stateside, we’ve set an office up in Boston, which is a whole new chapter for us as a business and one we’re really excited to sink our teeth into. We expect to be opening our Dublin and Boston offices in Q3, so to see these evolve into 2021 will be fantastic and a superb achievement for all those involved in delivering this program.  

While the Covid-19 conditions have certainly been challenging, we’re extremely proud to have been able to introduce new work practices, keep pushing our business forward and deliver hugely important projects throughout this time.  

Working within life sciences, renewable energy and data centres, many of our candidates and partners were classed as critical workers who could still go to site or work remotely. This meant a large proportion of our contractor base could continue to deliver services when other markets had ground to a halt. And while we did notice a reduction in the volume of client requirements at the peak of lockdown, we’re happy to say that we continued to deliver first-class candidates and contractors to meet requirements over the past three months.  

We’re proud of the company culture we’ve cultivated at Quanta and have worked hard to nurture this during the trying times of lockdown. As many businesses have experienced, this can be a challenge when working remotely, but one that technology can help with. We’ve used Microsoft Teams to help maintain our high levels of communication, doing regular catch ups and the same Friday round ups as always to ensure every team is aware of what the business is doing. This has meant we’ve been able to uphold our One Team value, with plenty of quizzes and games taking place between teams to help keep morale high. We’ve also continued to support charities, hosted coffee mornings for Men’s Health week and ran an internal photo competition to help bring us all together from our remote environments. Finally, we’ve continued with our commitment to invest in our future, utilising our trainers to conduct individual checks with everyone in the business. 

Looking to the future, we see huge opportunities for growth in 2021, even under the shadow of Covid-19. We’re looking to continue to grow our business, develop existing team members, and focus on delivering a top-class service to our clients and contractors. 

Thank you to everyone who has worked with us and allowed us to keep striving during these difficult times, from candidates and contractors who have given us the opportunity to keep supporting them through to our valued team members who have kept pushing every day. 

We’re remaining cautiously optimistic and are looking forward to the new opportunities the next six months will bring, with huge potential across our three sectors, all over the world. Keep up to date with our blogs to find out more, or contact us to see how we can work together.