Founded in 1992, Surrey-based Don’t Just Sit There, Sell Something! (DJST) provides a senior level telephone sales function to support and enhance field sales activity across the B2B marketplace. By running a non-scripted approach and only charging for success, the organisation tailors its telephone marketing strategies to meet the unique needs of each client. DJST works by first identifying decision makers, before going on to generate leads, set appointments and close sales for its customers.
As DJST’s reputation for success, its customer-base, and staff headcount began to grow, it became apparent the organisation needed to appoint a third-party employee relations (ER) specialist to protect the values it had thrived upon for so long.
Furthermore, HR and legal matters – which could often be complex and difficult to manage – as well as the drafting of contracts and letters, without in-house employment law knowledge, began to take up a significant amount of the management team’s time.
As a business with a demographically young group of staff – the average age of colleagues is 23 years old, over half of which live at home with parents – it was important for any third-party provider to be able to empathise with each unique situation.
Seeking a commercial legal advisory service to aid compliance and help the firm to make pragmatic decisions quickly, DJST met with several potential partners to understand how support might be provided – including the esphr team.
Wary of larger, ‘high-street’ traditional legal firms which charged by the hour – and had the potential to leave colleagues rushing conversations – DJST wanted a partner which displayed genuine commitment to customer services, while taking the work out of explaining the context of its business or cases to a new advisor each time there was an issue or an update.
Since appointing esphr in 2009, there have been 42 DJST cases dealt with and over 40 hours of advisory support logged – over 20% of which was used throughout 2020. In the past year alone, DJST has managed to successfully navigate a serious misconduct case – the nature of which the firm had never experienced before – as well as a significant number of redundancies.
As the pandemic took hold, the firm was forced to halve its workforce in March 2020 because of the financial impact of Coronavirus. Having not made a single person redundant for over 10 years, the company sought guidance around the appropriate legal procedures as well as how best to manage the process carefully and respectfully – whilst still trying to offer support and an aim of ‘business as usual’ for those employees which remained.
Further guidance was provided around how to manage furlough as well as the safe return to the workplace for other employees.
As well as a dedicated legal team providing specialist employment law advice, the company also has access to an online portal of HR resources and learning and development tools, as well as LiveHRDocs, which allows them to generate their contracts and handbook quickly and simply, whilst they are kept up-to-date and compliant by the esphr team.
Additionally, DJST’s workforce also makes good use of esphr’s market-leading, cloud-based ER case management application, MyHRCases – typically logging cases in the categories of disciplinary procedures, contracts, terms and conditions, and policies and procedures.
Businesses never want to have to escalate a case to a lawyer so, technically, you don’t want to be speaking to your law firm! However, when we do, it is always a painless process and we come away with confidence that we are on the right path.
When needing to present an employee with a letter or policy, the esphr portal of templates makes it quick and easy to download a template of the document you want – something which would previously have taken us days to draft in-house.
Working with esphr gives us the peace of mind that you, essentially, can’t make a bad decision, as well as the reassurance that you will get a solution to any issue that is legally compliant as opposed to guesswork.
Being kept up to date with new legislation in a way that’s easy to digest and avoids legal jargon – particularly over the past year regarding furlough via esphr’s Coronavirus Q&As – helps to remove the pressure of updating contracts and handbooks with legislation changes.
esphr is incredibly open and transparent about its charging method – because it’s a subscription service – which gives you, as the customer, the confidence that you can spend as little or as long as you need to on a certain issue to get an appropriate result.
Finally, esphr truly is an extension of the DJST senior management team. They are completely relatable and easy to talk to – and most importantly, understand our business and what makes us tick. The legal team always provide commercially focused, practical solutions.
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esphr from WorkNest is a trading brand of the ESP Group of associated companies.
Details of the companies that make up esphr from WorkNest can be found here.
ESP Solicitors Limited (SRA ID number 404647) is authorised and regulated by the Solicitors Regulation Authority and complies with the SRA Standards and Regulations, details of which can be found here.
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