COVID-19

July 2021

As restrictions relax, we are going to allow colleagues to work wherever they choose most of the time, but for most colleagues some time needs to be spent in the office.

Many of our members of staff joined us at entry level and they are keen to develop their knowledge and skills, often by learning from their more experienced colleagues. Collaboration, learning and teaching is better done face to face and we will be meeting our clients in person whenever they want us to.

We have a relatively young team for the pensions industry and many of them are keen to get back into the office but with the virus still quite prevalent and the risk of new variants we are being cautious.

We are allowing colleagues to return as and when they have been vaccinated, but we have had to reduce the number of people we can accommodate at once in our offices.

There are lots of precautions in place so our people feel safe, one-way systems, desk booking, screens around desks, meeting room protocols, housekeeping services for better hygiene etc.

Hybrid meetings with both face to face and in-person attendance will become the norm much of the time.

Spence has been a paperless business since 2009, with IT infrastructure entirely cloud based and no physical servers. Working from home has been a breeze in terms of IT and processes.

Almost all documents are now signed digitally and financial transactions are processed and authorised digitally.

The biggest change we have made is to build a scheme document portal and meeting packs into Microsoft Teams to support face to face, virtual or hybrid meetings in a consistent and agile manner.