How Secondments Can Elevate Client Service and Develop Your Team
Speaking as one of the Equity Directors at Bruce Gillingham Pollard, we believe that staff secondments is one of the ways we are able to provide a truly 360 degree service to our clients.
One of the key benefits of being a boutique commercial agency is our flexibility and agility – allowing us to fulfil client staffing requirements, often at short notice. Over the past three years, we have been able to support key clients with secondments ranging from 4 months to over a year across different levels of seniority; bringing enormous benefit not just to the client and the secondee, but also to us as an agency.
From the client’s perspective, our provision of secondees means that they can fulfil short – medium term team needs with someone who already knows the account inside out. It allows continuity and also provides them with an extra element of security – they know that our secondees are supported from afar by our senior team, ready to offer advice where needed.
The secondee benefits from the opportunity to develop their career within a corporate environment, gaining an insight into other areas of the business. Feedback from our team who have completed secondments at major clients including Landsec and Hammerson has been that the experience has provided clarity into their future career path and ultimately exposed them to new opportunities.
Finally, offering our employees for secondment brings great benefit to us as a business. Yes, it means we can elevate our service to the client but additionally, it helps us to develop our staff and give them a new challenge, diversify our team’s specialisms and provide an extra level of insight into how our clients make decisions.
Secondments carry with them a degree of disruption; teams must be restructured and staff given extra support outside the office. But in our view, that is an investment very much worth making.
Rupert Bentley-Smith is Equity Director at Bruce Gillingham Pollard