How we've helped NSN Electrical

Like many other businesses who have put things on pause during the COVID-19 lockdown period, Joss Sullivan-Norcliffe from NSN Electrical in Penzance was forced to put his team of engineers on furlough and take stock of where his business was at.

When the country moved its way into lockdown, NSN’s work came to a complete standstill. Phones went quiet, no new enquiries were coming in.

“It’s heartbreaking for local trade. We’re in and out of people’s houses so safety has to be taken into consideration. You can put in measures to help the situation but you just can’t social distance,” Joss said.

However, it hasn’t all been a period of quiet for Joss and NSN, having connected with the Skills Hub to use the pause in work to his advantage, learning a range of new skills from optimising his website through to enhancing the customer experience via his business.

“When the company is at full force you haven’t got the chance to work on this as you don’t want to disrupt it. When we were on pause we’ve been able to look at making the customer service flow easier for the customer.

“The advantage, if you can see any, is having that headspace. Like most companies we always get stuck in the day-to-day workload that has to be done, but the things you need to work on get stuck down the bottom of the list,” he said.

With NSN now moving from pause to go, Joss has his engineers returning to work and the 'next normal' has begun. With that in mind the next step is to look at furthering learning and development for his own staff, to be able to better cope with this new way of doing business.

“This has given us an amazing insight into what different people want from their careers, and we want to work on people’s careers within the company. If everyone has their own self-development the company is going to be better as a whole,” Joss said.

The Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Skills Hub from October 2017 - June 2023 was part funded by the European Social Fund and match funded by Cornwall Council and the Cornwall and Isles of Scilly Local Enterprise Partnership. The project  received £2,885,993 of funding from the European Social Fund as part of the 2014-2020 European Structural and Investment Funds Growth Programme in England.