Reports/Case studies

Cobweb, founded in 1996 is an award winning and fast growing hosted email services provider based on the prestigious Cam’s Estate Business Park on the outskirts of Fareham. Cobweb’s growing portfolio of hosted email services have been chosen by over 4000 businesses, large and small in the UK and beyond. The solutions, centred around Microsoft Hosted Exchange, help remove the complexity and uncertainty of internally managing a modern email infrastructure.

 

The very nature of Cobweb’s business dictates that they need to be able to support and serve their customer’s needs 24/7. The MATISSE pilot came at a time when COBWEB was looking to expand flexible and home based working.   Alan Meldrum, Cobweb’s Solutions Manager explains: “Like many service based businesses, our staff costs represent a significant proportion of our operational costs. It is the area of the business where there is the greatest opportunity to improve the bottom-line which for us is all built around our ‘service to client’ ethic. Our technical teams in particular are ‘incident response’ based, so if that means they can resolve outages more quickly, including from home, that is good for us – in terms of less overtime worked and less stressed staff and happier clients.  Our development and management teams on the other hand find that for their type of work, home based working increases their throughput, accuracy and concentration levels”

 

Given the nature of Cobwebs business, the actual investment in equipment expressly for the purpose of home and remote based working has been minimal. Staff have Outlook Web Based access to email and use the company’s SHAREPOINT system to gain access to, review and revision key documents. PDA technology features widely, with Microsoft Push equipped Blackberry’s’ in widespread use.

With turnover expected to double over the next two to three years, the need to further increase productivity within the organisation remains paramount. Cobweb fully expect that expanded use of Smarter working techniques will feature in their plans.

 

In readiness for this, the company’s HR team have now developed and published policies aimed at supporting and guiding employees who’s role enables them to work flexibly. Training is an important part of the mix with both managers and staff able to access information on the company’s Intranet that will help them supervise and thrive in an increasingly flexible, 24/7 working environment.  Company norms include employee wide access to diaries and a results based gaoling with reviews carried out, typically, quarterly