Ekco UK’s Spring Meetup (in Spring!)

At the end of April, the UK team came together in our lovely new office in Moorgate, for our Spring Meet. It was a day where our employees from all over the UK come together to not only hear important business updates, but to spend time with one another and to have an evening of food and drinks too!

By Kayleigh O’Brien

The event kicked off with Ekco UK’s MD, Adam Bradley, providing a Company update on Ekco’s key strategic goals for the rest of the year in both the UK and as a group, and some updates from our friends in the Netherlands & Ireland. Adam also chatted about Ekco UK’s two recent acquisitions, xTEN and iSYSTEMS, since we last got together in November 2022. It was good to welcome Ekco’s new family members in person.

Enhancing our structure to support growth

Stuart Jones, our Head of Technical Operations, then took over the mic (literally) and gave an update on his division. He started by thanking all of our teams who have recently come together to show solidarity and collaboration on projects that we’ve needed to resolve at lightning speed. The efforts of the teams involved were second to none.

Stuart joined Ekco just over 12 months ago and has since formed a UK Engineering structure that created individual practices, consisting of DC & Hosting, Projects, Service Desk (1st & 2nd line queries), Modern Workspace, Networking and Backup & DR. This structure has enabled us to support the growth in our teams and promote some of our superstars into Practice Manager roles. In early 2022 Ekco acquired Frontier Technologies, and since they joined our senior leadership team has partnered with them to integrate their workstreams, practices, and employees into the Ekco Group. We’re committed to ensuring the acquisition of any new company is a smooth transition process and is one of our main goals when we look at acquiring like-minded businesses.

Through the client’s lens

Stuart then passed the mic over to Chris Dean, our Director of Client Experience, who gave us an overview of the Client Experience function and how his team collaborates and brings together our other teams at Ekco through a client lens. Client Experience predominantly focus on delivering an excellent Ekco Engagement (the Experience) to the client (clue is in the name hey!) and as part of that, they centre on what the business and IT strategy of that client is and how Ekco can support that strategy. The Client Experience team also develops a governance structure, a programme of work, and a continually improving service for clients to keep their IT as a business differentiator.

Our company values – Engage, Empower, Collaborate and Grow

It was shortly my turn to take the wheel and speak about all things people! I’ve been at Ekco for five months now, and every day I meet a new, friendly face. I spoke about how we’ve developed our presence outside of Europe over the past few months, now having a footprint in Malaysia, where our new acquisition Caveo are based. Since xTEN and iSYSTEMS joined Ekco, our UK headcount now sits at 128 and counting!

It’s important to maintain our Company values when we acquire new companies, and both xTEN and iSYSTEMS show the same values as Ekco do. We live our Company values every day, even if we don’t realise it, as we’re Engaging (Engage), Empowering (Empower) and Collaboratiing (Collaborate) with each other, which helps us Grow as an organisation and as people. The Ekco People Team is now devoting a lot of focus to our Udemy and skills based platforms, which support our employees’ growth by providing them with the necessary training they need to develop personally and professionally, which is in addition to the external certifications they obtain. There’s more to come on our Ekco values this year, which we as a People Team will continue to drive, along with all of our other strategic priorities.

Supporting and empowering our team

Talking of strategic priorities, I shared a further update on what we as a People Team have helped to deliver this year and what else we want to achieve. Some of these exciting activities include introducing new employee engagement activities such as Ekco Eats, our monthly get together in our Moorgate office full of food and fun; new family policies, such as an extension to our already enhanced maternity leave offering; and training and toolkits to help managers and employees when they need support; and supporting employees who are suffering from life stage conditions such as menopause, or mental health matters.

This year we also announced our plans to increase our benefits offering further, by sharing our new dental insurance benefit and EAP (Employee Assistance Programme) which is a service our employees can access at any stage should they need life support and coaching on mental health or financial matters. As part of our 2023 People Plan, we’re aiming to increase our DE&I efforts with more events such as Pride, International Men’s Day, and Mental Health Awareness Week. We also want to further drive our one Ekco Ethos, where we continue to build our high performing culture, which every single one of our employees plays a part in and helps us be one of the Top 5 security-first cloud companies there is!

Last but by no means least, Mick Cooper, MD of our latest  acquisition, iSYSTEMS, then presented an overview of the company, their service offerings, and core competencies. iSYSTEMS provides hybrid cloud, modern workplace and cyber security consulting, professional services, transformation and migration services and solutions. Their tag line Advise > Transform > Manage > Protect summarises what iSYSTEMS delivers simply and succinctly. iSYSTEMS also boasts a small but very effective sales team, with an operating model that is focussed on winning net new customers. Recent new logo acquisitions include IQEG, Zotefoams and the commercial operating company of a well-known media personality (we can’t say who!).

That brought a lovely end to our session and from then on, the food and drink (more drink than food) were thoroughly enjoyed! Looking forward to our next meet-up in a few months time!

Would you like to be part of our awesome team? Email us at peopleteam@ek.co