What did 2020 look like for iHasco?

Posted 4 years ago

A screenshot from the iHasco Virtual Team Meeting

The first iHasco Virtual Team Meeting

Where do we start with 2020? There were highlights, definitely some low points and it’s certainly not one that we will be forgetting any time soon. And while 2020 will be in the history books for its extraordinary events, we wanted to reflect on some of the 2020 highlights for the iHasco history book, in and amongst the life-changing events of last year.

So what did 2020 look like for us?

BETT Show

Before ‘it’ all began, we were able to attend our biggest exhibition to date, with our biggest and most impressive stand yet – The BETT Show! With the event aimed at the Education sector, we jumped at the opportunity to attend an exhibition dedicated to the sector that has helped build the company we are today – our first ever product was aimed at those in schools!

The 4-day experience hosted roughly 35,000 professionals working in the education sector the previous year from all over the world. We were able to speak to thousands of delegates about our training & LMS offering and potential working relationships, and all 18 attendees were delighted with how the event went!

Working from home

This became (and still is!) the norm for a lot of us. The 16th of March saw the iHasco team begin working from home. For a lot of people who rely on the atmosphere and buzz of an office and love seeing their favourite colleagues each day, the nationwide order of ‘working from home if you are able to do so’ was a new routine many of us had to adjust to. While it may have been easier for some than others, it’s safe to say that we have tried our best to navigate the pitfalls of working from home. We started things like virtual team building, our managers rose to the challenge of managing their teams virtually and from a distance, and, we had our end of year virtual party and awards ceremony online too.

And of course, this situation led the way for our Effective Remote Working Course, most of which was filmed at the home of the course’s lead animator – Matt Newport as well as our Managing a Remote Team and Working from Home White Papers too.

Helping the NHS with free training

There is no way to sufficiently thank all of the key workers across the UK for all of their hard work over 2020 but there was one thing we could help with. We offered key workers from all essential services free IOSH approved Mental Health Awareness and Infection Control training during the height of the pandemic. We also partnered with the NHS to provide over 4,000 care homes in the South East of England with free Mental Health Awareness and Stress Awareness for all their staff.

Maintaining supporting our Charity partner for the year

Each year we partner with a chosen charity to try and raise money for them through various activities. Our chosen charity partner this financial year is Age UK Berkshire. Of course, this year meant that we had to get our creative juices flowing to try and come up with some ideas that suited the WFH routine many of us were in. So we not only hosted our first ever online charity art auction, but we also had a virtual charity quiz too!

Digital Week

We were intending to attend the Safety & Health Expo last May, but the event had to be postponed. However, the Safety & Health Practitioner did run an online ‘Digital Week 2020’ event in its place which we helped deliver. We were able to provide white papers, guides, and offer surveys and competitions (see part one & part two of the Digital Week summary).

Customer Satisfaction survey results

Our annual customer satisfaction survey results saw our clients rate us 9.1 out of 10 overall – a great thing to take away from 2020. See the other results and takeaways here.

Skills for Care Endorsement

We officially gained our Skills for Care Endorsement, seeing Skills for Care endorse over 50 of our courses and endorsing us as a Learning and Development Provider. We have been supporting the Care sector for over 10 years now and hope that this endorsement allows us to improve our service to the care community and to further support the Adult Social Care Workforce.

Future of Work Report

We were able to feature in the Future of Work Report, published by Raconteur in The Times. The report explored some issues impacting businesses in the unprecedented times of 2020 and we looked how online training could make a difference and how business leaders could help to build a strong, resilient workforce in order to survive and proser. Download the full report here

Awards

Knowledge Base awarded Technical Author Merit
Top of Europe Regional Satisfaction Index for Compliance Software Providers
Mental Health Awareness training wins first place in Tomorrow’s Health & Safety Awards
Top 100 Small Company to Work For in the UK!

Our Milestones:

We hit a total of over 6.5 million training sessions delivered
We delivered over 2.3 million sessions delivered in 2020 alone
We released 31 new courses
11 new members of staff were hired
We published 307 blogs
More IOSH, IIRSM, RoSPA Approvals and Skills For Care Endorsements for many courses

And finally… Thank you!

We would like to take the time to thank every each and every one of our amazing clients, anyone that downloaded a resource, a white paper, read our blogs, or gave us a call!

We would also like to take a moment to thank every one of the healthcare workers, postmen & women, delivery drivers, cleaners, supermarket staff… the list is endless, for their part in the battle against COVID-19.

For iHascoNIAN’s, we will look back at 2020 as the year we came together, even though we were apart.