Guaranteed Irish member Peninsula has provided HR and Health & Safety services to small to medium-sized businesses across Ireland since 1997. The Guaranteed Irish newsletter is kindly brought to you by Peninsula, for the month of January.
Moira Grassick Managing Director, Peninsula talks their latest tool VaccTrak, the impact of remote working, why Peninsula decided to become a Guaranteed Irish member and more.
Can you tell us a bit about Peninsula?
Peninsula provides HR and Health & Safety services to small to medium-sized businesses all over the country. Our services include our award-winning BrightHR software which has helped our clients to remotely manage HR issues like holiday management, rota planning, redundancy processes, health & safety management and the latest tool VaccTrak will help with the rollout of the vaccine.
The support our clients and their employees receive through our Employee Assistance Programme has also been particularly helpful with the many challenges of the past year.
Our staff are based in our Dublin and Cork offices along with our field-based team who conduct on-site visits at business premises. Our 110 strong team advise nearly 6,000 clients on a wide range of HR, employment law and health & safety issues.
What are the challenges that you face in your business and how do you work to overcome them particularly in the current climate?
Social distancing poses various challenges across the business. Internally, we’ve taken a lot of measures to make sure staff are safe and the way we interface with clients has shifted online to a large extent. IT upgrades that were scheduled to take years were completed in months.
Like many businesses this year, many of our staff moved to working remotely through the restrictions. To keep communication channels as open as possible with both staff and clients, we relied heavily on video calls, screen sharing, and virtual consultations.
It has been a challenge to adapt to this new way of working but thankfully our staff and business model have shown great adaptability to ensure that service levels never dipped.
What do you see as the biggest opportunity for Irish Businesses that Peninsula can assist with in 2021?
We do see light at the end of the tunnel. The stop start nature of the last year has been particularly difficult for business owners that have been forced to close. Once the vaccine programme progresses, we expect to see more certainty around reopening businesses. And with spending so low last year, we also expect to see the savings people made being spent this year so there are reasons to be optimistic. Our goal is to manage all the HR, employment law and health & safety compliance that business owners face to allow them concentrate on serving their customer base and return to profitability.
With the increase of remote working how important are HR and health & safety support services for businesses?
The Government has recently launched the National Remote Working Strategy so we do see a hybrid style of work becoming a permanent feature of the workplace. This certainly poses challenges for businesses. Managing productivity remotely could take the focus off the main goal of bouncing back after a difficult year. There are also health & safety challenges and employer side costs involved in setting employees up to work from home. If the expertise to handle these challenges doesn’t exist within the business, it’s vital that business owners seek external help to avoid employee relations and health & safety issues.
What made you decide to become a member of Guaranteed Irish?
As a business with clients all over the country, we saw that the goals of Guaranteed Irish in promoting Irish business aligns perfectly with our goal of supporting Irish business owners. Being connected to a like-minded business community in Ireland provides us with the support of the team in Guaranteed Irish and opportunities to connect with our fellow members.
Do you have a special message (or offer) for Guaranteed Irish business members?
We want to help Irish business owners to get back trading as quickly and as safely as possible this year. Our HR and Health & Safety experts will provide a complimentary phone consultation to any Guaranteed Irish members who need assistance with HR, employment law or health & safety issues. To claim your free advice, simply click here.
How has being a member of Guaranteed Irish helped during Covid-19?
It’s been such a difficult year for so many Irish businesses. Our membership of Guaranteed Irish has allowed us to remain connected to the Irish business community during a year when we all had to remain distant. We look forward to seeing fellow members in person again soon!
