What a year 2020 has been for KBPR! Needless to say, when we wrote our last winter newsletter we were not expecting to shortly after be thrown into lockdown due to the storm that was, and is, the Coronavirus pandemic. Despite the turmoil, 2020 has been another successful year for us; we successfully recruited and onboarded two new members of staff virtually, welcomed new clients, and attended and judged many industry awards too. All this whilst juggling the dual challenges of work and family life in lockdown.
A massive thank you to you all. It has been a pleasure working with you this year, despite the technological challenges that Zoom and Microsoft Teams presented, and we look forward to working with you in 2021. Dare we hope that we might even get to meet in person too! In the meantime, wishing you all a wonderful Christmaswith your families and loved ones.
Love from the KBPR family!
What's happened
Kate attended the first virtual PLSA Annual Conference. To embrace the online event we created virtual avatarsfor ourselves and offered them to our clients, and industry connections, in order to engage with the event differently. We then used these across our social media platforms to fully embrace our current environment. To read our blog about the current virtual environment here.
Historically we have worked with the MNOPF to host their pension fund member forums across numerous locations in the UK. This year nothing could stop the MNOPF from communicating with their pension fund members; not even a pandemic. As such, we organised our first virtual client event and held a successful virtual forum for MNOPF pension fund members.
A time to celebrate...
This festive season, our team are taking our Annual Charity Christmas run virtual on December 9th. This year we are running again to raise money for Single Homeless Project (SHP). SHP is a London-wide charity working to prevent homelessness and help vulnerable and socially excluded people to transform their lives. We are aiming to raise £1,000 to match last years efforts. If you would like to sponsor us please find our Just Giving page here.
Wellbeing at KBPR
Back in March, after being flung into lockdown and forced to battle with working from home and the resulting challenges of childcare and the emotional turmoil of a pandemic, Andrew and Kate put their heads together to think about how they could better support the team physically and mentally. Here are some of the changes that we have made to support employee wellbeing:
We have implemented the use of wellbeingdays for our team, which allows them to take one wellbeing day a month to restore, refresh and recuperate from the stresses of the day to day routine. Our health and wellbeing strategy has helped to increase employee engagement, and create a more fulfilling place to work whilst we are all working from home.
We now work with flexible-working hours. We realised that being sat at your desk Monday to Friday 9-5 is difficult whilst working from home and balancing other demands, so we introduced core working hours of 10-3. Flexible working has allowed everyone to strike a better balance between everyday life and work, and through advance planning we continue to man the "office" throughout the working day.
We even celebrated how to destress during Self Care Weekin November by sharing how we, our clients, and connections de-stress in their spare time, across social media. Take a look here.
Our other news...
Our Managing Director, Andrew Pearson, featured in the Pensions Management Institute's Pensions Aspects magazine. Learn more about his pensions journey, from back office number cruncher to KBPR, by clickinghere.
Our clients have been extremely busy too! Check out what they have been up to here.
Awards
On the 25th November Professional Pensions hosted the Women in Pensions Awards online, with a special online ceremony. Kate was thrilled to judge for the second year in a row and was amazed by the exceptional talent.
2021 award submissions are right around the corner. If you have an award in mind, or need any help with writing your submissions then please to reach out to us at KBPR!
