Hi everyone, my name is Alun and I’m going to share a sad story with hopefully a happy ending so please stick with it. I’m a 36-year-old father of two, my kids are amazing and give me joy and happiness every day as well as stress and frustration (why can’t they just put their shoes on!)
In March of 2018, my wife and I were expecting our third child but we had the terrible misfortune to suffer the stillbirth of our beautiful baby boy, we called him Theo. We chose this name after Dr. Theodore Seuss, the children’s author who has brought so much joy and laughter to our other children. The pain of losing a baby is indescribable, it’s all-consuming and I have never known sorrow and anguish like it. During that extremely difficult period, I was also told I was being made redundant from my previous company which at the time I didn’t really care about as I was still grieving for my son.
Facing redundancy and still in a pretty dark place, I applied to Foundever in Exeter for the role of Learning Manager in July, just 4 months after my son’s death. Now I’ll be honest here, I wasn’t really sure I could do the role I had applied for, which was handy as during my interview I was told of another role that I was eventually offered and accepted. So I started as a Process Improvement Programme Manager in Aug of 2018.
Now as part of my interview I suggested that the best way to improve an onboarding experience is to experience it for yourself and that’s exactly what I did. I went undercover as an agent for three weeks where I not only experienced the interview process and training but also Gradbay where I spent time taking calls. No one knew who I really was apart from the Senior Ops team. This experience has helped me massively in my quest to improve our associate experience – something I am very passionate about.
I quickly realised that working for Foundever was not going to be like any of my previous roles, I am able to make my own decision and I have the freedom to develop my own ways of solving problems rather than being shown how to. I love working here and I have been asked to look after several UK wide roles since joining; including GOS champion, My Academy Ninja and more recently MAXpert for the UK.
I’m very proud to work for Foundever. When I first joined, although I think I was able to hide it, I was in a pretty bad place and I’m confident that working here has helped me personally to navigate a terribly challenging period of my life and although they probably aren’t even aware of it, the people I work with day to day have done more for me than they will ever really know in that regard.
The people we have in this business are truly amazing and I look forward to coming to work each day as I get to work with such talented and passionate people, it’s easy to forget sometimes that people really are the more important currency in any business.
I promised you a happy ending so here we go, while nothing will ever take away the pain of losing our baby Theo, we are expecting to complete our little family with our fourth child, also a boy, who is due to arrive in November of this year.
I’ll leave you with one of my favourite Dr. Seuss quotes which is also very appropriate for our MAX project.
“It’s not about what it is, it’s about what it can become.”