People Matters HR are nine years old today!
I can’t believe it’s nine years since I set up People Matters from a simple dream of wanting to work for myself and look after SME businesses and give them decent professional people management advice.
On birthdays I always look back at the previous 12 months about what we’ve done and I can’t help but think this has been a challenging but rewarding one.
Who would’ve thought 12 months ago that we would all be told to stay in, stay off work, work from home, not go to the pub, don’t see your family and now you have to go to the pub to see your family! The word Furlough was invented and people realise how important it is for leaders to give information! What is clear is that this has changed the way that we work forever.
The pandemic brought our investment in technology, usiing teams, one note, and zoom to communicate, SharePoint and BreatheHR came into their own so we could operate seamlessly and remotely.
We were involved in in several ask the expert panels, creating daily updates for clients, making our own videos so you could still see our faces, creating “rough and ready” explainer videos on our website to support people because we couldn’t go out to show to meet people in the usual way. This has all lead to me being a panel member in a high-profile webinar with several leading industry experts next week.
Also during the last 12 months we have won several great towards – the Theo Paphitis small business award, BreatheHRs Advocate of the year for the second time, BreatheHRs Platinum partner award, Manchester’s best organisational development company of the year and recently being named the most trusted HR consultancy in the North West!
Alex joined us as our first apprentice which is been a great experience for us and for him, it’s sad they will be leaving us in only six weeks to to pursue his dream of becoming a dentist at Sheffield University it’s helped his overall development proved to us that we have to make this role permanent going forward to support our clients and the team. Jen left us yesterday for a new challenge but we are excited for her, she started with us as a student, got a first class HR degree we are glad to have played a part in her growth, but we are excited to welcome Emma as our newest HR Advisor in September.
I was motivated by the pandemic working arrangements to begin a project that I’ve always dreamed of, to run the business from home. Next week work can start to build the new People Matters “hub” which we can all work from as part of our new flexible working arrangements. We are really excited to see this take shape over the next few weeks and we will welcome you to see us as soon as we can.
I’ve been really proud of the way People Matters has developed we met every challenge we faced, stuck to our values support our clients with professional and ethical advice, have fun & look after each other, so I’m raising a glass to People Matters HR happy 9th birthday!