Ardent & Two Years of COVID-19: Embracing the change

Two years since we entered the first COVID-19 lockdown, yet Ardent have grown in number and celebrated numerous achievements and milestones since the beginning of the pandemic.

Life is always two sides of the same coin. On one side you have the positives, continuously giving us energy, inspiration, and a drive to move forward. However, on the other side, you have the negatives, the times that strain our persistence and willingness to keep going; oddly, it is during these times that we witness just how strong we are.

The COVID-19 pandemic hit everyone hard; whether it was professionally, personally, or both, the unprecedented nature of world events left many of us feeling like a deer in the headlights. In the immediate aftermath Ardent rushed to move into a remote-working environment, utilising new technologies and digital software we seldom needed in a pre-pandemic existence. We saw wobbles within the infrastructure sector too, as collaborators, partners, and other entities tried to solve the problem of working safely around a deadly virus, and the lockdown safety measures. However, through the leadership of Ardent’s Board of Directors, the ingenuity of the Ardent team, and an unwillingness to cease helping our clients, our company learned how to adapt to what became known as the ‘new normal’.

Life may have looked different, with workdays left tangled with home life, but our ability to take the best aspects of our office-based life; our multi-faceted skillsets, innovative minds, and teamwork, enabled us to begin building a new approach to our land assembly delivery service. The result of our efforts to reflect, react, and rebuild was the development of two new directorates: the Atlas & Geospatial Insights (AGI) Directorate and Consents Management Consultancy Directorate (CMC). Our AGI team designed and created an effective land information database called ATLAS, which collects and stores vital information and data needed to help our clients during the land assembly and compulsory purchase process. Using this database was a key factor in our success of delivering over six projects during lockdown, which ultimately led to Atlas’s recent nomination for Digital Transformation at the Digital City Festival Award.

With our roster of clients and projects on the rise over the course of Lockdown Ardent saw a huge employment drive which has bolstered our team numbers. This combined with the two new directorates means that now more than ever, our teams are diverse, with a more varied skillset than before. With the changing regulations, our company has pivoted and now offers a hybrid working set up, with flexible hours now part of daily life. This has greatly increased not only the wellbeing of our people, but it has made our company a more modern environment in which to grow a career. To say that the pandemic was trying would be an understatement, but fortunately we were able to see opportunities when there were very few, and we were able to identify the good, when the world and all other horizons looked bleak. But now the end of the pandemic is in sight, and we ask ourselves, will the world return to ‘normal’? The answer could be yes for most, but here at Ardent the answer will be no, because the one thing we have learned from this unprecedented event is how to develop new and exciting ways for our teams to deliver for our clients. So why not stay on this road and see where it takes us.