Ongoing Covid-19 pandemic is not easy on businesses worldwide. Many businesses are struggling every day to sustain their bare minimal operations.
CMS is a leading Sri Lankan offshoring service provider to US and EU clients for over two decades. CMS has proved over and over again to both it’s employees and clients of its organizational stability. It’s the secret recipe of still having many employees with over decades of service at CMS and having clients with decades of thriving partnerships with CMS.
We immediately went to 100% WFH (Work From Home) according to our BCP (Business Continuity Plan) to ensure the safety of our employees and the business continuity of our esteemed clients. Our ISO-27001 certification was instrumental in this seamless transition. Of course, being a company renowned for great work-life balance; WFH requests and flexi-hours were not strange practices to our HR or employees.
Till now we’ve been operating WFH without any loss of productivity to our clients. We need to appreciate the support of our building owners at Access Realties for their never-ending support during the curfew period. It’s one of the best places to host critical business operations in Colombo, Sri Lanka. SLASSCOM – The national chamber for the IT/BPM industry in Sri Lanka, as usual, took the lead in supporting its member companies including CMS to quickly arrange curfew passes to server room staff for any critical outages. Kudos to the SLASSCOM team!
Our well prepared IT support team and ISMS teams played a huge role in enabling all employees to work smoothly and securely.
The forte of our strength has always been the backing of our investors. CMS is a BOI (Board of Investment, Sri Lanka) company from its inception and hasn’t frequently changed ownership ensuring its rock-solid, non-chaotic nature. A big shoutout to our investors!
We’re very happy that we managed to not only pay monthly salaries on time but also fortunate enough not to introduce any pay cuts at all. We did not have to lay off a single person due to the prevailing situation. The biggest part of the story is our annual bonus which is usually paid in July. We just paid this year’s bonus to all eligible employees as usual. Our employees and candidates understand the value of such stability. It’s a key factor for our low employee attrition rates, bringing value addition to our clients.
Being a people-centric organization, we never forgot the support staff whose job roles did not support work from home while the offices stayed closed. This even included outsourced janitors to whom we continued paying out of our goodwill to ensure that they have a continued income.
Going beyond, we understood that our employees’ home internet quotas were getting exhausted with daily WFH. From day one, we’ve paid a fixed reimbursement to cover any decent internet rental for all staff without company provided internet access.
All of this does not mean that we’ve not been cautiously reviewing our financials. We’ve carefully reviewed and controlled our expenditures while trying to expand our new service segments. This includes supporting organizations worldwide to securely work remotely improving productivity through virtual desktops and web-enabling desktop applications without rewriting code. We’re also expanding our managed IT and Cloud services segment providing AWS, Azure, GCP & Salesforce services to clients.
We are happy that we’ve been able to help our clients grow while reducing operational costs despite many US/EU organizations undergoing hire freezes. Some of our ongoing vacancies include big data administrators to manage Hadoop clusters with over 40 PetaBytes of data for a US customer, Java full-stack developers for a US client listed as Inc. magazine best workplaces in the US for 2020, and C# developers for a leading European fintech organization.
As we all know, this situation too shall pass and we would shine as a beacon of resilience as we’ve been known over for Two decades successfully facing various challenges such as the Asian Tsunami, Easter Sunday bombings in Sri Lanka & the Great Recession in 2009.
We wish to thank all of our staff for their amazing dedication, support, and flexibility. We wish all of the CMS family, investors, clients, and vendors safety and good luck as we slowly progress to normalcy.
