When the Strata Communities Association recently hosted their annual awards dinner, things were back to normal when it came to revealing the winner of the Strata Services Business Award.
Fire and Emergency Services won the prestigious prize for the third time in four years.
Only in 2020 did someone else win and for a good reason:
“We simply did not enter in 2020 because of COVID. We focused on our customers and did not engage in any corporate promotion but we are very happy to win the prize again and it only sweetens the deal that we beat last year’s winner in the final”, Managing Director Alan Short says.
According to Alan Short there were a number of reasons for Fire and Emergency Services winning the award.
“An important reason is that we don’t pressure potential clients into signing contract with us. We service the need of the client first, so we support the body corporate manager, whether we have a fire maintenance contract with them or not. We are there to help and to offer advice”, he says.
Another thing noted by the judges this year was the transition Fire and Emergency Services has gone through from having a workshop and an office to not having an office at all. All administrative staff are now working from home full time, but feel more connected to colleagues across boundaries than ever before, but how does that make sense?
“It certainly is counter intuitive that people feel more connected after we closed down the office, but that is the feedback we get from our staff”, Alan says.
He has an explanation as to why it is like that.
“Being in the same room in itself does not connect people. If you haven’t designed it in, it does not happen. But when our staff actually do meet in person weekly, fortnightly, monthly and quarterly they don’t have to talk about work. They do that via daily Zoom meetings, so when they meet they can talk about what goes on in their lives and that connects them and seems to dissolve the boundaries between our four teams”, Alan Short explains.
Fire and Emergency Services also won the Best Essay Award for an essay on emergency planning and why we should have emergency plans for high rise apartment buildings, more about that in an article to come.