Our culture is your story - Helen Ford

Twenty seven years ago I took a job at Booth & Co in Leeds. We soon became Addleshaw Booth & Co and from there I have gone through a number of roles as the business has gone through a number of changes, mergers and expansions.

When I joined the HR department a few years into my time at AG the team had probably less than 30 in it, the HR Operations team alone is now bigger than that. Despite lots of different roles in the business, lots of opportunity and lots of change, I have consistently been surrounded by great people in this firm. 

When you are with the right people, I think you can face anything that comes your way. This has been especially true for me during the last two and a half years. In March 2023 both my parents fell ill, they contracted Covid and that started a horrible sequence of events for the family. Covid accelerated my dad’s Parkinson's Disease and then my mum had a heart attack. Alongside all this my father then received a cancer diagnosis but they were unable to treat him because of his advancing Parkinson’s.

Understandably my parents needed a lot of support so I moved into their home to be there for them. I felt under immense pressure but the first thing I got from the team at AG was support and the promise of time to focus on my family. I worked irregular hours and balanced things as best I could, unfortunately things went from bad to worse for my dad when he broke his hip in a fall that hospitalised him, he passed away six months later. It was a truly awful period of my life and the support I had from the team was a lifeline. 

When people take on caring for family members I can see why many have to leave their jobs, they simply cannot be in two places at once and the mental burden is too great. AG never forced me to make that choice, they always made time and space for me so that I was never faced with awful decisions like that.

We talk to our line managers about how to look after people in the firm and we take pride in our approach to supporting people when they have challenges in life. 

I found it hard returning to work after the funeral, it turns out I couldn’t organise the different stages of grief into a timeline that worked for me. I always like a plan and I like to know where we are going, what we are doing and how we are doing it. Grief did not want a plan, so I had to go through a process of accepting that it was not going to be organised and that answers would not always be forthcoming.

That was difficult and really uncomfortable, but I never felt the need to hide that part of life from people I worked with. I could be honest and help was always there if I needed it.

The experiences of the last few years have absolutely changed me, how could they not? But everything I have been through has not changed how I view AG. We are who we say we are when it comes to supporting each other, and as long as I am part of this firm it’s going to be one of the things that continues to set us apart.