2021 has been a year of recovery for the country and this has been a theme for Illuminet too. We took a hammering at the start of the Covid pandemic seeing a sharp fall in business for us and across the world as disruption caused supply chain issues, shortages and loss of business confidence. 2021 saw the glimmer of hope with the rapid deployment of vaccines and improved government responses across the world. Supply chains, although still more fragile than before Covid have recovered well and there was no shortage of turkey at Christmas despite the best efforts of the media to convince us otherwise!
2021 marked a year of relentless business focus for us that led to a completion of our Recovery Plan in October. The last quarter of the year has been focused on growth and getting into the right shape for 2022. The year seems to have rushed by!
We set out at the start of Covid to ensure we didn’t make anyone redundant and achieved this. 2021 allowed us to start growing our team again with hires in Recruitment, Client Delivery, Development, Business Operations and Service Delivery. We refreshed our ambition in the form of new objectives for the coming years and a new Exco to help deliver the strategy. Our team doubled in size in 2021.
We invested in innovation and launched our Knowledgeflex online ordering platform in the US, developed our Risk Radar app and Top Trump (now called Illuminet Select) apps to begin testing. We started work on our Benefits Framework Spin Cycle and further finessed our other Spin Cycles. We also created Problem Management Masterclasses and a PMO framework too!
2022 offers lots of opportunity but with the dark clouds of Covid still hovering over us. As labour forces are hit by Omicron absenteeism and business under more pressure from the need to adapt and keep costs low now is the time to be bold and more innovative in how we approach our clients. We launched our ‘Good to Great’ challenge designed to keep us close to our client thinking and this will be an asset to us in developing business. We also launched our ‘Hot Hundred’ associates with a view to getting these great people into work for us as quickly as possible – helping those clients needing fast deployment of resource.
The environment hasn’t gone away and one of our biggest achievements in 2021 has been the planting of over 6000 trees in the UK to help combat global warming, provide homes for nature and reduce flooding. We will continue with this policy and hope to get to 15,000 trees planted by the end of 2022, perhaps boosted by a spring event that we can all take part in.
Last year we set ourselves five green new year resolutions. This year we plan something different. We will be issuing everyone with a deck of 52 different environmental challenges. All can be achieved cheaply and with little effort and you can do as many or as few as you like. I am looking forward to hearing how everyone gets on with this and hope that you will take part!
2022 will be a great year, let’s approach it with the confidence of a four year old in a Batman suit.
Best regards,
Greg Wood, CEO
