Our response to COVID-19 and plans for business continuity

We are all aware of ongoing the impact of the  coronavirus (COVID-19). It goes without saying that the safety and health of our staff, clients and visitors are of paramount concern to us.

We take care of our people — including employees and our subcontractors — and the communities they work in. We took actions to remove any need for people to come into our office, closing it for all but emergency controlled access. We have continued through-out in that way of working. We are continuing to review our options and will only look to reopen our office when it is right to do so.

From Epimorphics’ formation in late 2009 , we have promoted work policies and practices which enable staff to work from home whenever appropriate, both to provide a family-friendly work environment and to reduce the carbon footprint engendered by commuting. Our computing infrastructure services are outsourced to cloud-based service providers and can be accessed from any location, with strong SLAs and good resilience plans in place. We have infrastructure to enable distributed team meetings and other ad-hoc meetings via voice, video and web conferencing. These are well tested and everyone is up and running to work that way for a considerable time.

This established infrastructure forms the basis of our Business Continuity Plan. As part of that plan, which has been implemented, we have shifted to a daily morning web-conference sync meeting with other ad-hoc web-collaboration sessions through the day. Our flexible infrastructure is well tested with clients and ad-hoc meetings or web based workshops are already replacing previously arranged face-to face client meetings.

We determined from the outset not to have any essential dependencies on any particular physical location. This means that secure access to what we need is resilient to changing access locations.

Telephone access to our help desk and technical support functions use VOIP telephony technology, so these functions can continue to be provided in the event of losing access to our offices. We have made some changes to ensure that any support messages are emailed to key staff, even when the office is closed.

Epimorphics team members working from home during the Covid-19 pandemic

We keep our COVID-19 risk assessment under constant review and will adapt it as necessary. We are currently maintaining a fully-working from home stance.  We regularly review both advice from Government and our Health and Safety advisory services and will re-open our offices in a manner that works for our staff and meets the guidance that is appropriate at that time.