Celebrating 2021 and Preparing for 2022 – A In-House Reflection with Team TELECO!
It’s been five years now that we have closed our office a few hours early on the last Friday in January to gather the whole team together to review and celebrate the previous year. It’s a time to reflect on what we accomplished the previous year, what goals were met and not met and any impact on the community. It allows us to take a breath and recognize the accomplishments achieved. It also gives us a chance to press reset and start fresh with new goals for the new year. We pick three goals for the company and discuss why they are important and how we as a team will achieve them. Of course, there’s also pizza, cake and drinks following the presentation!
It’s my favourite presentation to give to our team. I forget myself until I start gathering all the information on how much can happen in one year! It’s so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day minutia of tasks that you can’t take a breath to stop and see the bigger vision. Every person on our team is required and contributes to the company’s success. It’s also a great time to remind everyone why we are here and review our Mission, Vision and Values. It’s a reminder to our team about our priorities and goals. It’s also a reminder that we go back to our values and core beliefs when making significant decisions about the company.
Our team has grown both physically by adding new people to our team and professionally through our Personal Development and Training program. Last year our team had 1,379 hours in training, certification, and personal development. This training is in alignment with two of our seven values.
Innovation – embracing and driving change.
Personal Growth – the pursuit of continuing education and professional development.
We get to highlight each employee and the hours they contributed and what they focused on and achieved last year. But, unless we make a point to sit down and reflect, it’s easy to forget all the investment and progress to personal growth and education we have made over 12 months.
We also celebrate company wins. Our goal is to help our clients use technology effectively in their business so they can be profitable and efficient. Through this process we hope to provide exceptional customer service and treat their business like it was our business. By celebrating company wins it allows us to look at these new opportunities and evaluate if we did that and how. It allows us to provide meaning to what we are offering and shows the value to the team. It’s important that we are providing meaning and also boosts employee motivation.
It’s also gratifying to review the philanthropic initiatives we were fortunate enough to support, and all the fun team-building things we did. If you follow us on social media, you will know we are passionate about the United Way Thunder Bay, volunteer locally as a group and like to golf and therefore support many local charities golf tournaments. We are also foodies, so we have a lot of Friday lunch BBQs in the summer.
Highlighted are new vendor partnerships formed to provide unique and advanced services and or hardware to our clients. We are always looking for like-minded vendors who believe in delivering a superior product and have a vested interest in working with us to create a culture of collaboration, teamwork and trust. In addition, we vet all new products and software by trying them out ourselves first; if it’s not up to the standards we want for our company, we will not stand behind.
These last few years have been challenging both personally and professionally with COVID-19. However, we can be proud that we have continued growing, learning, and maintaining resiliency. Tough times create good people, and we will continue to work hard together and come out of this strong. We will work diligently towards our goals for 2022 and continue to anticipate what’s coming and how we can be of service to our clients. Things will not go back to how they were, and we are forward thinkers embracing new technology to help local businesses.
While we can’t predict the future, we can control today. I am proud of what our team accomplished in 2021 and excited for what 2022 offers!
