Vulcain Engineering is an ambitious engineering consultancy firm whose UK base in situated in Gloucestershire. It is currently supporting the UK government’s policy objective of achieving Net Zero carbon emissions by 2050 through its involvement in large-scale energy and infrastructure projects. Over the previous two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, although the business has been able to enjoy growth, it has not done so without having to overcome significant challenges. Managing director, Nicolette Vyce, recently spoke to The Leaders Council to lift the lid on how they did it.
Owing to the nature of Vulcain Engineering’s work as a consultancy, much of the day-to-day running of the business could be performed remotely, which placed the company at an advantage within the circumstances as Vyce explained.
“We are quite fortunate as a business that a lot of the work that we do as consultants can be performed remotely, so we weren’t actually as hard done by as some other industries were when Covid struck,” Vyce said.
“However, that doesn’t mean it was an easy time for us and there were a lot of difficulties initially.”
Much of those difficulties involved making changes to the company’s infrastructure, to ensure that staff were able to work from home efficiently. Even then, Vyce and the senior leadership team at Vulcain were required to carefully manage their colleagues and be sensitive to differing home circumstances.
Vyce explained: “We had to put the infrastructure in place to get the IT and operating equipment set-up or people to be able to work from home. There were actually supply chain issues with a lot of that as well and we were really trying to get people up and running from home as quickly as possible.
“Once we established that, it was then about maintaining progress and productivity, which with people working from home proved quite difficult. Our staff were trying their hardest to keep on top of work, but we had to be sensitive to the fact that many of them had a number of things going on while at home. Some were juggling work with home-schooling, managing illness within the family either Covid-related or otherwise, and all sorts of things that made a nine-to-five job much more difficult.
“Fortunately, given the nature of work that we do, we can be quite flexible. Once we'd gotten people supplied with laptops, they were able to flex their work around what they needed to do at home, and we soon got on the right track.”
Reflecting on the pandemic as a whole, Vyce suggested that adapting to the challenge demonstrated the resilience and flexibility of the business, and provided beneficial experience of close people management, which even extended beyond lockdown restrictions and into the period when office spaces were allowed to reopen.
“I think it [Covid] has shown us that we're quite good at thinking on our feet, we're quite good at being reactive,” Vyce said.
“It has also shown us that we're quite good at being able to tailor what we do to the individual. We looked at the mental health issues that we were having, because some people were working at home with children and family around them and some of our staff were actually working from home where they were on their own, perhaps in a small apartment. To do that, for a prolonged period of time, could have a big impact on somebody.
“But equally, we also encountered the opposite problem when we were bringing people back into the offices or starting a face-to-face work again. We needed to tailor that return to work to the individuals as well, to ensure that we were actually doing it at the right pace for people. Everybody seemed to return to work with different levels of anxiety around being in contact with people again. But on the whole, I think with the size and nature of our business, we were able to be fairly flexible around people’s needs and that was positive.”
Although pleased that Vulcain Engineering has been able to enjoy growth during the pandemic through continuing to operate and been able to recruit more staff, Vyce remained grounded, revealing that the company has been forced to grapple with the recruitment difficulties that are associated with longstanding skills shortages.
“During Covid, we have still been growing as a business, too. We’ve been recruiting and mobilising people throughout the last couple of years, which has been an interesting challenge. Giving inductions to people when we can’t actually meet them means it is tough to really integrate them into the team, so we needed to really focus on that.
“Otherwise, recruitment in general is very difficult at the moment and the last two years has made a lot of people reassess what they want to do in their life. There seems to be a smaller pool of people who are willing to commute away from home during the week, and then for people looking to work closer to home there is certainly a demand for more homeworking which we can’t always marry up with the sort of work we do. There is also a big skill shortage in a lot of the areas we are recruiting for. Where we can prove that we actually need people with certain skills in the country, we can get visas and bring that talent in from abroad, but some of the fees are really prohibitive for the individual and that cost therefore falls upon the business. I think this issue is something that the government really needs to look at.
“In the last couple of years, ministers have been quite quick to do something about emergencies in certain skills areas, but it would be nice if we didn’t have to wait until things spiral into a crisis before we address them. So, we need to be looking at the challenges of the next five or ten years now. In our industry, this involves training people and we are doing our bit by investing into bringing less experienced people into the workplace and upskilling them. It also includes reskilling those who have perhaps worked in other industries before but maybe lack the specialisms that we need."
Photo by Christopher Burns on Unsplash
