COVID-19: what we’re doing to ensure business continuity

To help guide our people, clients and other stakeholders, we have created a dedicated COVID-19 hub on our website, detailing important information and useful insights in relation to the pandemic, including guides for senior executives, updates on the government’s response, and sectorial analysis.

In addition, we have established a weekly webinar series, Responding to COVID-19: Updates and practical steps, offering insights on the impact of COVID-19 on the global economy. Chaired by Ian Stewart, Deloitte’s Chief Economist, a panel of industry experts discuss our insight on the challenges organisations are facing, how they are responding and recommendations on actions they can take today.

Here are some of the ways we have been ensuring business continuity in the UK:

Our people

• We have been closely monitoring and managing the COVID-19 situation since its inception in order to be able to respond as necessary. The health and safety of our people and clients are our priority.

• Throughout this period, our people have received regular communications from our CEO, Richard Houston. Our focus has been to communicate regularly and transparently, providing advice, support and assurance wherever possible.

• Deloitte has long been a proponent of agile working and we have had up to 20,000 people working from home safely and securely since mid-March ensuring business continuity throughout this time.

• In July, Deloitte opened several offices across the UK with reduced capacity due to social distancing measures. These will remain accessible for our people where they cannot easily work from home and for those who express concerns around their well-being.

• Our return to workplace strategy continues to follow government guidance across the devolved nations.

• We remain fully supportive of agile working and have the technology and capabilities in place to enable our people to work remotely and securely should they wish to. We recognise that in these unprecedented times some of our people may need to work in an agile way to support their family and friends.

Our clients

• We successfully moved more than 20,000 of our people to remote working ensuring they are able to continue to support our clients and deliver projects.

• We continue to work closely with clients to ensure the safety of our people and the continuation of business operations.

• Our people will be able to return to client sites only in circumstances where the site has been agreed as being COVID-secure, and the required work can’t effectively be delivered working from home. We will not ask anyone to go back to a client site if they do not feel comfortable or safe to do so.

Our suppliers

• We have a comprehensive Third Party Risk Management (TPRM) process based on a three lines of defence model. This process involves initial scoping, risk assessments, background checks and ongoing monitoring against multiple risk categories including resilience.

• Since the inception of COVID-19, we have been working closely with our critical suppliers to review their contingency plans and integrate them as part of our response to ensure continuity of service where possible, across all aspects of our supply chain.

Society

• Our priority is to continue supporting our existing society partners, both by providing business resilience support and working with them to achieve their aims.

• Our CEO has launched a firmwide fundraising campaign for all our One Million Futures charities. The money raised will fund a range of important initiatives, such as accommodation for homeless people, equipment to help schools move learning online and allow increased access to helpline calls to mental health charity Mind. Further examples include:
  • We’ve helped the Trussell Trust, which supports a nationwide network of food banks, by providing financial donations and project management resource.
    
  • Alongside this, our schools programmes remain a key focus. We have provided funds to our national partner, Teach First, which will help train 12 new teachers. We’ve also direct our efforts around online learning by providing laptop donations.