Unify's Long Voyage in the Nation's Recovery!

From the very beginning of catering to our client’s facility management needs, Unify had never foreseen such dramatic changes due to the Coronavirus and the lockdown that ensued. When the COVID-19 situation struck us, like everyone, Unify wasn’t ready with the best solutions. However, as we went on facing various situations and challenges and our client’s demands rose for critical facility services, we knew we had to act, and act fast!.

While we saw a lot of facility service providers being seriously affected by the COVID wave, we found ourselves in a better position to sail through the times. We continued providing comprehensive services for maintaining facilities with a holistic approach.

1. Staff Assimilation

Unify’s major success and undying efforts are a result of our frontline workers and employees choosing not to give up on us. Our first goal was to get the right amount of people on our client sites. We first identified the number of employees who were available and willing to cater to our clients. Then, we convinced our clients for on-site accommodation of our workers so that no property was left unattended. Explaining the pros of our heroes being there on their sites round the clock wasn't a very tough job, thanks to our understanding clients. And once these things were sorted, we employed the right number of people on each client site. This did include a few days of preparing workers to adapt to the situation. But eventually, our workers paraded towards providing uninterrupted services by extending their helping hands to create a safe and secure environment.

The working periods usually soared up to twelve to fourteen hours straight. The support of both our workers and clients eased up our situation of not appointing any new workers to handle the sites since they bore a potential risk of carrying the virus with them.

The backend team worked amazingly, too. Missing out on any of the information would’ve cost us a great deal of disruption in rendering satisfaction to our clients. Hence, constant communication and coordination were efficiently taken care of by our backend team. Some of our essential employees were requested to work from the office and were divided into teams of two - Team A and Team B. If even one of the members from one team were infected, the entire team would be asked to quarantine while the other team would be required to resume their duties.

2. Incoming Challenges and Enhancing Adaptations

Deploying our frontline workforce to the residential complexes was one of the challenges Unify faced in the initial stages of the COVID-19. However, we can proudly say that many of our clients did not budge from providing our workers with all the comfort they could have possibly offered. Some clients even provided comfortable accommodation and catered to our workforce’s needs during the month of Ramzan.

When a lot of businesses lowered their shutters and paused providing services due to the lockdown, we knew it shall be a challenge for us, too. Some of our clients were hit by the COVID wave. This led to Unify suffering a minor setback in the revenues. However, our diversified portfolio of catering to a wide range of industries helped us considerably. Our workers dispersed rigorous services towards critical aspects of clients that needed continued operations during the time.

Just as we went on treading the challenges, the need to make our workers resilient to the environment without getting infected, rose. In the presence of COVID-19 and the lockdown, we couldn’t arrange an in-person training. That's when a step taken about a year back came to our rescue. Unify adopted technology to render online training to our staff in order to promote staff and worker safety. Unify’s Cloud ERP helped us to manage projects, communicate internally and with our clients, keep track of frontline workers, and cater to all the training requirements of our workers.

Apart from that, we faced a massive diversification in the SOPs. While Unify had safety protocols in line with the government guidelines, our clients had their own set as well. Unify’s attitude of coming up with better solutions and improvising constantly helped once again in providing customised solutions to our clients. We discussed with our clients, understood their SOPs, and tweaked our approach so that we had everything to provide that our clients wanted. A big credit goes to our employees as they adapted to the newer guidelines as soon as they were instructed with it.

3. Service Productivity

Our work in the field has been admirable! We are lucky as our clients have been praising us on our swift delivery of services. While we were busy doing our usual jobs of always providing comprehensive services to our clients, it was positive feedback and words from our clients that made us realise about how exceptionally they think of us. We are always naturally committed to our service delivery and pushing our boundaries further. What really motivated us further is the collaborativeness and healthy competition we saw around us to help recover the nation. We also saw a silver lining when our peers acknowledged and appreciated our work while also doing their bit with great efficiency.

Having long-standing credibility among a myriad of facility managers had its perks. We acquired new, esteemed clients during a difficult phase because of their strong belief in us in strategising a safe place for them. And it's not only about us, but our clients were also gracious too. Some of them came forward and remitted us with advance payments so we could effectively support our frontline workers. Having clients like these keeps us going and makes us feel fortunate to be associated with them.

4. Journey of Infinite Learning and Responsibilities

We are proud to claim we are still focusing on adapting to the entire situation, and we wouldn’t want to stop learning and improvising just yet! It is times like these that make us realise that we work with amazing people - our employees as well as our clients. Our learning times like these let us know that we aren't just facility management and maintenance service providers, but we are problem-solvers and solution-givers. With the internal adaptability, various situations at hand and the critical aspects that our facility workers constantly cater to, we have a long way to go. However, while we do so, we are also willing to incorporate all our expertise and knowledge in creating a safe and effective environment for our clients.