As we reach the end of 2020, I would like to take this opportunity to express my sincere thanks as to how wonderfully everyone at Grosvenor have worked together in the face of the immense changes to all our lives this past year.
Firstly, I would like to thank our dedicated employees across the country, who in what have been very trying circumstances have continued to provide a high level of service for our customers, maintaining buildings and properties as an essential services provider during the lockdowns. Our people have done an excellent job protecting themselves, each other and our customers, while also continuing to carry out their work duties. I want to thank everyone for their outstanding efforts during this extremely challenging period.
To our customers that continued to support us, especially during the lockdowns, we are very grateful. By working together we’ve been able to ride through this challenging period and make the most of a difficult situation. We take our responsibility to keep buildings operational and compliant very seriously and are proud to have assisted our customers however we could in keeping their property assets running as needed during these extraordinary circumstances.
Whilst we all look forward to a well-earned rest during the upcoming holiday season, celebrating and relaxing with family and friends, we can reflect on the year that was…
Relatively early in 2020 we experienced the COVID pandemic. All of us had to embrace a new way of living and working. This way of working was new and not something that we had prepared for. Not only did our jobs go online, but for many parents and carers, it was a difficult time as you coped with your own worries and tried to keep your children engaged and occupied, whilst working at home. At Grosvenor we found new ways of talking to our customers and keeping them up to date with industry updates and the latest innovations, one key way was through our webinar series. With some of our leading subject matter experts and guest keynote speakers, we covered an array of topics – The Shift to Digital; Optimising your Building Operation in a Changed World; Sustainability & Upgrading Infrastructure without Upfront Capital; Cyber Securing your OT Networks to Enable a Safe Journey to a Smarter Building; and finishing up with Constructing a Built Environment Roadmap for 2021.
A special thank-you to all our guest keynote speakers during the webinar series: Zoran Ovuka – Chief Technology Officer SmarterLite, Cal Jeffrey – GM Partners Tempered i.o, Tim Pryor – Senior Program Manager Smart Buildings and Innovation at CBRE; and Kieran Canavan – Chief Investment Officer Findex.
Partnerships are a key company value at Grosvenor, and we have formed some great new partnerships this year which I would like to mention:
Safety Path, a division of the SmarterLite Group – one of Australia’s most innovative building safety equipment providers. This alliance will see people and property owners benefit from reliable life-saving exit signs that use photoluminescent technology which stores light and emits it in an emergency. Without the need to use electricity, each sign can save up to 150 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions per annum.
We have also partnered with Notifier by Honeywell, to offer a full suite of fire and life safety products including fire detection, building notification and connected services. As a Premier Partner, Notifier offers industry leading training, priority technical and hardware support from the manufacturer, guaranteed stock supply and preferential equipment supply – all benefits we can pass on to our clients.
We have continued to work alongside our Indigenous corporate partners at Tranby. As COVID has changed the way we initially were going to celebrate NAIDOC week, we celebrated virtually with our employees. With the help from our friends at Tranby we provided our employees with information and content on Indigenous culture, throughout the week and embraced this year’s theme of ‘Always Was. Always will be’.
We also partnered with UNE to support a student Katie Barnett, through the GEG Indigenous Scholarship. The scholarship has assisted Katie in funding all aspects of her studies, especially during the pandemic. We look forward to being part of Katies educational journey.
In our quest to reduce our carbon footprint and provide sustainability solutions for our customers, we became the first major technical services company in Australia to introduce a dedicated natural refrigerant technology service for HVAC&R systems, focused on assisting the commercial office market not only by providing a green refrigerant alternative, but also significant energy savings. We are working to have all our HVAC technicians trained in how to work with natural refrigerant technologies within the next 12 months.
As property technology is at the forefront of many of our customer’s buildings that they manage or own, we have introduced a dedicated team of technology experts as part of our new Grosvenor Office of Research and Technology (G.O.R.T). This team of experts will be providing cutting edge technology solutions to our customers enabling them to better manage their properties. These services include our Cyber solutions, IoT solutions, Actionable Insights and Analytics, and BMS solutions, to name a few. We will be adding more technologies to our portfolio with the overarching goal of providing our customers with best-in-class building operational technology solutions.
With the days getting warmer, the holiday season is a very busy time for all of us. The Grosvenor team will be operational and on-call throughout the Christmas break as always. We can be reached through our National Call Centre on 1300 255 247.
On behalf of Grosvenor’s Board of Directors and Executive Team, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you, our employees and customers for your ongoing support and hard work. May you all have the most amazing time celebrating with your family and friends and we wish everyone a very Merry Christmas and a safe, healthy and prosperous New Year in 2021.
Yours sincerely
Nicholas Lianos
CEO – Grosvenor Engineering Group
