Goodbye 2022 | The Year in Review

It’s Been a Busy Year – Thanks For Sharing It With Us!

As 2022 is coming to an end, we thought we’d take the time to reflect on the events of another busy year for the Elite Group team. From top accreditations that bolster our expertise and specialist knowledge to awards and events that celebrated the hard work of our people – there’s plenty to reminisce about and we wanted to share our highlights with you.

The Move to Hybrid Working

Like the past couple of years, the last 12 months has seen a lot of change, as we started to return to ‘normality’ in the new post-pandemic world. At the beginning of the year, we gradually welcomed our team back into the office. It was great for our building to, once again, be buzzing with the voices of our team collaborating, sharing a laugh and working together face-to-face.

We made the move to make hybrid working a permanent fixture to provide better flexibility for our team and allow them to work in a way that suited them best. We wanted to find the right mix of maintaining our company culture by ensuring our team had the time and space to collaborate face-to-face, whilst having the flexibility that enabled a better work-life balance.

Many of our customers have also seen the benefits of this new way of working and have invested in solutions that enable flexible working without compromising on productivity. From internet-based unified communications solutions that allow teams to access a business phone system from any location to implementing cloud services and hosted desktops that allow users to securely take their office desktop and data home with them, we enabled many businesses to provide a better working experience for their team, whilst bolstering productivity.

Eyes On the Prize – Awards & Accreditations

We’re very proud to have achieved a number of prestigious awards and accreditations from our partners this year. We kicked off 2022 by receiving the ‘Champions Choose Mitel Gold Award’ for UK and Ireland. As the name suggests, this award is part of Mitel’s ‘Champions Choose Mitel’ initiative, where partners are placed within a leader board. Not only did we achieve the Gold Award within this initiative, we topped the Gold Award Leader Board, placing us as one of Mitel’s top-performing partners. This award and leader board position is a testament to the level of expertise demonstrated by our Mitel specialists and the service we have provided to our customers. Alongside this award, we were proud to also achieve Platinum Partner status with Mitel, an achievement that meant a great deal to us, as this award is presented to partners who consistently provide excellent experiences for their customers. The last Mitel Award that was presented to us was their Private Sector UK & I Partner of the Year. 

We were delighted to be presented with Cisco’s ‘Small Business Specialisation’ accreditation again this year. This award meant that, alongside our Premier Integration Status, we are Small Business Specialists with the Cisco product suite.

Later on in the year, we had our annual ISO audit. This year was even more important to us than previous years as, alongside our existing accreditations, we put ourselves forward for a new health and safety accreditation. You can imagine our delight when we found out that we had passed all of our ISO accreditations, including our new ISO 45001 Health and Safety accreditation with flying colours, across our Chorley, Isle of Man and Wrexham offices. These accreditations prove that our processes are efficient, effective and ensure we are providing the best service for our customers.

Welcome to the Team

We were also thrilled to welcome new numbers to the Elite Group team. In April, Matt Bannon joined us from VCG Group to become our new Operations Director. He brought over 20 years of experience covering support, delivery and customer excellence and is a fantastic addition to our Leadership Team.

At the beginning of this month, we were delighted to welcome Russell Simmonite to our Leadership Team as our Sales & Marketing Director. With a  wealth of industry knowledge and experience nurturing high-performance sales teams, Russell has already started having a positive influence within the business during his first couple of weeks with us.

Celebrating Success

Our team were treated to two events to celebrate their hard work. The first was our summer awards party, which was held at The Bentley in Liverpool. Alongside two Special Recognition Awards that were won by our Technical Solutions Director, Phil Scanlon and our Platform and Dev Ops Engineer, Michael Cornthwaite, awards were given to celebrate individuals who have embodied our values, as well, as Newcomer, Team and Employee of the Year Awards.

Our most recent event was our annual Christmas party that was held at The Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester. It was a glamourous evening of music provided by The Mersey Boys, plenty of sequins and a glass or two of bubbly. It was the perfect opportunity for our team to relax, unwind and let their hair down. After such a jam-packed year, they deserved it!

Looking Forward to 2023

Having overcome the challenges we faced during the pandemic, this was a year of rebuilding, strengthening our team and moving forward together and we’re so happy to have celebrated so many successes along the way. Now, we look forward to the future, with many exciting projects, changes and events already in the pipeline, 2023 is sure to be another busy, but very exciting year. We would like to take this opportunity to thank all members of our team, every customer we’ve worked with and all of our partners for sharing this year with us.

We wish everyone a merry Christmas and a happy and prosperous New Year. See you in 2023!