Southwark Report 2020_NEW final -Single pages

Human Resources and Payroll
Twenty-twenty was, without doubt, one of the
hardest ever years for employees of the Diocese.
The Coronavirus crisis brought unprecedented challenges for
everyone. At the start of the first lockdown, when churches
were closed, we furloughed over 90% of our staff. Many
remain on furlough today. We also had 78 employees leave us
in 2020: 33 were unfortunately made redundant, 45 retired or
resigned for other reasons, many as a direct result of the Covid
crisis. We were fortunate that we lost none to the virus itself.
Those people who remained in work, worked harder than ever
before. We became experts overnight in remote working and
have all experienced the plethora of meeting platforms that
now exist online. When the churches reopened, staff in the
parishes became experts in PPE, social distancing, one-way
systems, safety notices and deep cleaning and we thank them
all for their efforts to get the churches safely reopened and to
keep them that way.
For HR and Payroll the Covid crisis created a monumental
volume of work. The furlough and flexi-furlough rules were
constantly changing, which frequently meant one step forward
and three back and generated significant ‘behind the scenes’
administrative pressures. We saw the amount of payroll
transactions increase by over 1000% per month for the period
that the furlough scheme was in place. We also brought the
payroll in-house as part of a cost saving exercise, which added
to the already massive workload. But everyone was paid and
the money we were able to reclaim via the Job Retention
Scheme has helped enormously across the whole Diocese in
these very difficult financial times.
We look to 2021 with hope that things will improve this year.
Thank you to all our employees who have supported the
clergy, parishioners and each other through these challenging
times and we pray for a return to something resembling
normality soon.
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