COVID-19 and its impact on social distancing and physical meetings demanded that Morson shake up how we deliver the onboarding process for clients who wish to transfer away from their incumbent recruitment provider.

Interim Head of Implementation, Charlotte Lewis, explains how we’ve taken implementation online, creating an efficient, effective and engaging onboarding experience for our clients.

Usually, during this time in a relationship with a new client, we’d spend months working physically alongside the different teams requiring our services to hand-hold them through the process. The Coronavirus restrictions meant that wasn’t going to be possible in 2020, but our ability to adapt has revealed a new way of working, which will now create major efficiencies in our typical method and will prove useful for businesses way beyond the virus.

Early in 2020, when news of the pandemic began to emerge, we started considering how the Government’s EAST communications framework could be applied to clients who require it – but digitally. We needed to make everything we would normally do face to face as easy, attractive, social and timely as possible, using only online platforms. Our usually day-long sessions had to be more easily digestible and designed to establish partnerships that could be strong from afar, rather than in close proximity, which is what we and our clients have always been used to.

It’s something we were considering ahead of the pandemic, but it became a priority when COVID-19 hit and we were requested to deliver an online migration by a new client. We’d recently been appointed as its Managed Service Provider (MSP) for contingent labour resource, supplying specialist and niche contractors more time and cost efficiently, and the company was as keen as us to ensure the pandemic didn’t halt the transition away from their incumbent. As such, the groundwork we had already put in place to develop our digital implementation strategy came to fruition while being tested in a real life scenario.

The client team was already familiar with using online video platforms to deliver training and professional development to its global workforce, and we worked with their preferences in mind. We held online conferences, interactive workshops, seminars, forums and drop in sessions to gain all the information we normally would in face to face settings, but made the sessions shorter to avoid Zoom fatigue.

We also enabled an element of socialising online; the client’s finance, systems and operations teams had the opportunity to learn more about our MSP, meet our team members, hear about the benefits we could bring to their company and challenge us on anything that they were unsure of. At times, we had more than 70 team members actively participating in what we were offering. It provided the reassurance to both parties that, thanks to technology, we could take on the challenge lockdown presented to us and achieve brilliant results.

Typically, implementation periods take a minimum of 12 weeks and include an eight-week buffer to mitigate for the usual delays that come with running businesses. However, in this very first experience of putting our digital strategy to the test, the entire implementation process was completed on time, in less than three months – even with a pandemic rumbling along in the background.

What’s been most pleasing about this project is that we’re now able to offer a completely new service to other businesses. It’s been tried and tested and proven to be successful thanks to our agility; we were able to pivot and accommodate the client’s needs, on-demand, to enable better outcomes and increased productivity for them as a result.

We’ll now use this same process to provide other clients with an analysis of the ever-changing labour market, looking at how the economic unrest around the world might be mitigated using different recruitment models. And we’ll be able to do so without limitation, knowing that technology enables true value and benefits for our clients.

“We understand that so many of our clients bigger strategic goals are linked to talent.

Thanks to our in-depth market intelligence, vertical expertise, industry-leading technology and collaborative approach, we can support our clients businesses through these challenging market uncertainties, the diversifying of workforces, preparing for IR35, fulfilling local employment quotas, and any other tests our clients may face.”

If you would like to find out more about how we can support your business and it’s ambitions, get in touch with myself, Morson director, David Lynchehaun at david.lynchehaun@morson.com