Covid-19 Update

An update from Constructionline COO Robert Walton

Given the continuing development of the Coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak in the UK, I would like to provide you with an update as to the steps and measures Constructionline is taking to ensure the safety of our staff and the continued delivery of the services you rely on from our teams.

Since the start of March we have had a COVID-19 incident management team in place with senior representation from across the Supplier Assessment Services group. This team is meeting twice per week, or as and when new information dictates in order to oversee our approach to ensuring the health and safety of our staff and the ongoing continuity of the high quality services we provide to our customers. For several weeks we have been reaffirming the advice from the NHS and the Department of Health and Social Care to our staff regarding preventative hygiene measures, education on the symptoms of Coronavirus and the measures to be taken by any member of staff believing they have symptoms or have come in to contact with someone is confirmed as having the virus.

Various measures have now been implemented as a result of incidents related to the COVID-19, these are summarised below:

We have taken the decision to close all of our offices and asked staff to work from home. This decision was taken to mitigate the transmission risk for our staff travelling.

We have been undertaking preparations since January to support the possibility that some or all of our offices will be closed as a result of infection of staff or under guidance from public bodies. As a business we already have very effective remote working capabilities in place and many of our staff have regularly worked from home as part of their day to day duties. These capabilities have now been extended to all of our staff throughout the business. All of the systems we use to run the business are cloud-based meaning we have no dependencies on any of the physical offices. As such, we have the capability for the entire workforce to undertake their duties in full from home with remote working collaboration technologies in place to ensure their effectiveness. As a result of these arrangements, aside from any staff becoming unwell and being unable to work, we do not anticipate any degradation of the services we provide to customers in the event of an enforced requirement for our staff to work from home for a sustained period of time.

More broadly in respect of the impact of the Coronavirus on the underlying platform; our engineering teams have undertaken risk assessments with our key 3rd party providers of technology and services used in the delivery of our supplier assessment platforms and we are similarly confident that they are able to support our business over the coming weeks and months as the Coronavirus/COVID-19 outbreak develops.

In the meantime, we will continue to monitor the latest government information but if you have any questions please do not hesitate to contact me.