July 2021

It won’t come as a surprise to anyone that the last year has been an extremely challenging time for individuals and businesses alike, with waves of uncertainty sweeping the nation and the world. As a customer service business, it has always been vital for us to ensure our customers continued to receive a consistent and first-class experience throughout the various lockdowns.

I was absolutely thrilled to recently receive the news that our clients and parent companies, Wessex Water and Bristol Water, retained their positions at top of the regulator’s league tables, measuring customer experience. To achieve such a fantastic result, and to receive it during a global pandemic, is a complete testament to our amazing customer service teams and their consistent passion for innovation and simplification and dedication to providing an outstanding customer experience every single time. #Proud

So, what else have we been up to over the last few months? Well, there has been some fantastic work taking place across our business in a number of areas, but I wanted to touch on a particular theme this month, diversity and inclusion.

As a business and as a community of people, we are extremely passionate about ensuring that diversity and inclusion remains at the very top of our agenda and interweaves in everything we do.  
It is extremely important to me that we have a diverse and inclusive culture. This will not only help to set our business up for the future, by ensuring we hire and retain a diverse workforce, with different approaches to problem solving and innovating, but to allow each and every one of our team to feel comfortable in bringing their authentic selves to work every day.

On Monday 8th March, it was International Women’s Day and this year’s theme was #ChooseToChallenge. I started the day with a live broadcast to our team where I was pleased to have the opportunity to be quizzed by our Director of Customer Services Oliver Jerrome, on my experiences as a woman in business. It was lovely to also receive so many questions from those joining the call. Our Senior Leaders and I each made a pledge for how we #ChooseToChallenge which we have made visible and transparent across our business and we have been having some great conversation in all our teams.

In my opinion, diversity and inclusion is about what makes us different, celebrating those differences and recognising how various life experiences can support other people across our business. At Pelican, we work together to not only break the taboo of discussing perceived ‘difficult’ topics related to our bodies, our health and our wellbeing, but to also ensure that anyone experiencing a difficult or challenging time in various areas of their life has access to as many options of support as possible. With this in mind, in May we created our Shared Experiences initiative.

Shared Experiences confidentially connects team members across our business, who would like support across a variety of topics including cancer, domestic violence, eating disorders, learning difference and menopause. Since the launch of Shared Experiences, we have seen an increasing number of team members reaching out for support, guidance or just someone who will listen, understand and empathise with their particular circumstances. I am very proud and thankful to those of our team who originally put themselves forward to provide this support.

Continuing the theme of diversity and inclusion, as many of you know, June is Pride Month, an opportunity to celebrate the fantastic progress made towards LGBTQ+ rights whilst continuing to raise awareness for the huge amount of work still left to do as we fight for true equality.
Usually, #TeamPelican are the first to proudly march through the streets of Bristol during the annual Pride event however, with the uncertainty caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, this year the team have done something a little different.

To launch Pride Month, we joined with our friends at water2business, Flipper, GENeco, Wessex Searches and COMA to create a short video sharing what Pride means to us. I was so proud at how passionately the team spoke on the topic, and it was heart-warming to hear the very individual reasons as to why Pride is important to them.