Ashfield HR Ltd, owned by Faye Briffa, is celebrating its 1st Anniversary after launching in January 2020. After a 20-year career in various in-house HR roles, Faye had a desire to start her own HR consultancy business, providing HR support predominantly to SMEs who have no in-house HR team. Little did she know there was a global pandemic just around the corner.

Faye says

“you would never choose to start a business during a global pandemic. It’s been a year of ups and downs, and I am so proud of the business growth that I have managed to achieve. Even during Covid-19, businesses still employ people and consequently still need HR support, although the work has been somewhat different to what I was expecting.”

The focus over the past 12 months for Ashfield HR has inevitably been primarily supporting businesses through COVID-19, including home working policies and arrangements, COVID-19 safe workplaces, furlough, team building remotely, line managing remotely, mental health challenges/employee well-being and of course sadly there has been increase in redundancy work. There has also been HR support to a number of rapidly growing new start-ups, helping them to put good quality people policies and processes in place and supporting them in their recruitment.

Faye has faced, like everyone, the ongoing challenges of Covid-19 including lockdowns, home schooling and online only client contact.

“I received a piece of advice from another small business owner early on that was about personal resilience and the need to find ways to build that within yourself, particularly as a small business owner. I have come back to that advice time and again this past year. It really struck me that there has never been more of a need for personal resilience and self-care for all of us. When you add in starting up a business, it’s definitely been an intense time. I’m looking forward to continuing to grow the business over the months and years ahead in hopefully, somewhat, more normal times”

she said.

https://www.ashfieldhr.co.uk/