One Symcor: Resilience and Strength

As the world shut down to slow the spread of COVID-19, Symcor employees in Operations have continued to work onsite with rigorous physical distancing measures and strict hygiene protocols in place. Due to the essential nature of our services, approximately 1000 of our Operations employees across Canada have been working to provide uninterrupted support to our clients’ business.

Symcor has been trusted by the country’s largest institutions as a business process outsourcer for the past 23 years. Through past adversities that included fires, floods, postal strikes and ice storms, our clients have looked to Symcor as a source of stability as they pivoted and adapted to meet challenges. During COVID-19, we are committed to supporting our clients with resilience and innovation.

As a Symcor Operations team member shared with us, “we all take pride in understanding how our company impacts its customers. Today we have even more pride in knowing that our Symcor teams are working together, nationally and locally, to support our clients through the many challenges presented to them during this pandemic. Our team is proud of our strong sense of team spirit and our commitment to keeping each other safe and well.”

Apart, yet Together as One Symcor

In these unusual working circumstances, where many employees are remote and the rest are onsite, we have seen extraordinary examples of Symcor teams collaborating with our clients and partners to achieve major technological milestones and to solve problems in real-time. In one example, our offshore supplier was unable to operate as their country entered a lockdown. In response, our teams joined forces to repatriate the work onshore by training internal resources and operationalizing tasks within 24 hours, with no impact to client services.

Such levels of dedication and accountability have been the norm at Symcor for the past 23 years. But now more than ever, through this uncharted time, we are finding that our employees are leading, innovating and most importantly, taking care of each other, as they support our clients.

The resilience and spirited teamwork shown by members of our Operations teams highlights our overall employee culture of One Symcor, which has gained momentum over the years. It is our strong belief that the alignment and collaboration of our employees forms the foundation for a successful company with a fulfilled workforce. Today, we see this philosophy in practice as Symcor employees operate with the mindset of One Symcor.

There have been heartwarming instances of employees lifting each other’s spirits. Recently, we learned that a team member baked fresh bread for a colleague and dropped it at their home, continuing a practice that had started in the workplace. Many are switching their shifts to accommodate colleagues who have children to care for. Some are sharing funny text messages to lighten the mood and others are spreading positivity through motivational words and posters that are handwritten and displayed at our sites.

This expression of One Symcor draws its direction and purpose from our North Star, Connecting for Common Good. This is our definitive goal as a company. It underpins all our actions and inspires us to conduct ourselves through our core values of accountability, integrity and performance. We want our industry to connect for the common good of our society, and we know that we cannot mobilize this effort unless we do it together.

Safeguarding our employees is a key priority

A proudly Canadian business for over two decades, Symcor believes that our collective efforts as a community will bolster Canada’s fight against the spread of COVID-19. We have a responsibility towards our employees and to the communities that we are a part of. The actions we take today, affect not only us, but also the vulnerable members of our community. To support this, Symcor is maintaining a rigorous health and hygiene code, in line with Health Canada directives, across our nationwide facilities.

We have rearranged workstations to maximize physical distance between employees. Apart from frequent cleaning of common touchpoints, all surface areas are disinfected with specialized cleaning agents. Employees are also equipped with personal protective wear to perform tasks as required and if using public transit or carpooling.

This global health crisis is very much a test of our resilience as humans. Our personal and professional worlds have dramatically changed in the last few weeks, and uncertainty and worry can affect any of us. Symcor wants our employees to thrive in what is certainly a changed environment, and one that continues to evolve. While Symcor continues to be results-driven, we are amplifying our efforts to support our workforce in diverse ways. We have been delivering virtual resources to help our employees manage working from home, caring for children and family, and their mental health and well-being during COVID-19. Within the company, we have created virtual water cooler spaces for employees to exchange inspiring stories that bring a smile to our faces, and to share ideas that boost team engagement.

The spirit of One Symcor continues to find new ways to express itself through our employees during COVID-19. One of our teams sums this up well, “when we think of Symcor Pride, we think about how proud we are of our colleagues in Operations that continue to keep the business running. Your dedication is truly inspirational.”