Acute challenges. New opportunities

“The amount of information and the need for information was acute. Most people in Norway went home, but our department stayed at work. In such a situation, it is crucial to take care of the culture, the team spirit and the community.

For the first few days, Tennøe and her colleagues worked almost around the clock. 4Service’s staff are the company's most important resource. The solidarity is strong. This is exactly what made the work with lay-offs so extremely difficult.

– The scope was, and still is, difficult to absorb. In total, almost 1,200 good colleagues were temporarily laid off in 2020. At the same time, the management did what they had to do to safeguard jobs and the company's future. These were tough decisions, but they were also the right ones”, Tennøe explains.

In the weeks that followed, the everyday life of most Norwegians was marked by major changes. This was also the case for the employees in the HR department. There were constantly new rules, recommendations and orders introduced by the authorities. To ensure that the laid-off workers received the public support they were entitled to, the department also assisted each individual employee directly through the HR department's COVID telephone service. Many of their questions were related to their applications to NAV.

“Normally, employees have to go through their manager to get assistance from HR, but few things remained normal in 2020. I especially remember one employee who was ineligible for any possible support schemes.

Of course, Tennøe does not go into the details of the affected employee, but fortunately the story had a happy ending. Later in the year she came across a letter in which the rule that made it impossible for the employee to receive support was changed. And it was with retroactive effect.

“The telephone call to the employee's immediate manager was the best I had in 2020. Together we informed and helped the person in question to get what they were entitled to”, says a happy Tennøe.

In collaboration with skilled colleagues, Haugsnes has carried out several planned upgrades during the past year. These were improvements intended to ensure further competitiveness for the company that she has been a part of since 2016. When asked what quality means, she is quick to answer:

“Quality is wholeness. This applies to customer and employee satisfaction, to sales and finished deliveries, naturally combined with all forms of sustainable solutions.

The work of obtaining the ISO certifications for quality and the environment, NS-EN ISO 9001:2015 and NS-EN ISO 14001:2015, respectively, was anything but a formality in a year of restructuring and redundancies. Haugsnes boasts of the work that was done in the operations.

“Even though we here at HMSK were responsible for the management, it was the operations division that did the biggest part of the job. Together we mapped procedures to identify what we already had and what we were missing. Many people contributed important insights during this phase. It was incredibly impressive that they managed to prioritize this, in addition to everything else they had to do!”

Haugsnes is enthusiastic when she highlights what many call 4Service's greatest strength, namely its staff. The employee survey from 2020 proves that these are more than just flattering words. In a year of challenges, feedback has been provided stating, among other things, that the company is a good place to work. That is something that both Tennøe and Haugsnes agree on:

“We have an informal environment, where there is room for differences of opinion. This provides a relaxed atmosphere, pleasant mood and a desire to contribute. No matter who you are or what you have done in the past, if you start in 4Service, you will have opportunities to grow”, they conclude.