By David Jault, Business Support Manager
The Work Behind Our Accreditations
It always seems to be the summer months when I have multiple external auditors booked in to keep our accreditations up to date. I sometimes think it is a bit of a stressful time of year, but then when I dive in to all the areas that are to be audited, I remember; we are actually quite good at running our business and everything is in place to pass!
When we announce that we have achieved a certification or successfully renewed an accreditation, it is easy to focus on the badge, the certificate, or the audit result. These milestones are important, but they are really the visible outcome of something much bigger. Behind every accreditation sits a huge amount of routine, often unseen work. It is the daily effort of teams across the business, the discipline of following processes, the willingness to learn from experts, and the commitment to continually improve how we operate.
At Empowered, our approach is shaped by a wide range of interested parties. Some requirements come from customers and our contractual commitments to them. Others are driven by industry best practice, regulatory expectations, or guidance from specialists. Alongside these external influences are our own internal business needs – the practical requirements that help us run an efficient, sustainable, and secure organisation.
For me, there are three corners to the tasks that underpin our operation and work in these three areas affect almost everything we do.
Cyber Security
Cyber security is one of the most visible examples of continuous improvement. Certifications such as Cyber Essentials Plus provide valuable independent validation, but the real work happens throughout the year.
Maintaining secure systems, managing software updates, multi-factor authentication, monitoring risks, delivering staff awareness training, and responding to new threats are all ongoing activities in our ever changing and challenging world. Technology plays an important role, but people and processes are just as important. I often think people are the most important, our systems are built to bounce bad requests away, our people have to make judgement calls multiple times every day with a backdrop of social engineering and cybercrime getting more and more clever.
The objective is simple: to protect our customers, our colleagues, our business, our data. Achieving certification demonstrates that we meet recognised standards, but maintaining those standards requires constant attention and commitment from everyone.
Environmental Responsibility
Environmental standards such as ISO 14001 help organisations take a structured approach to understanding and reducing their environmental impact.
The value of these frameworks extends far beyond compliance. They encourage us to review how we consume resources, manage waste, work with suppliers, and identify opportunities for improvement. They provide a framework that helps good intentions become measurable actions. Environmental responsibility is increasingly important to customers, employees, and partners alike. By embedding environmental considerations into our everyday decision-making, we ensure that sustainability becomes part of how we operate rather than a standalone initiative.
With our business structure, most of the effect on the environment by our work falls to our suppliers, so we are always looking at ways to measure them and make them aware of their impact. Many of the processes that we use here are quite new, so we work to improve them and reduce our impacts.
Business Process and Operational Excellence
The third area is perhaps rarely considered just one subject, but it is arguably the most important: business process.
While the phrase may sound simple, it encompasses the systems, controls, procedures, and governance that enable the business to function effectively every day. It is how we ensure consistency, quality, accountability, and continual improvement across all areas of the organisation.
Good business processes help us meet customer expectations, support growth, manage risk and adapt to changing requirements. They connect the work of different teams and provide the foundation upon which security, environmental management and customer service can all succeed.
Bringing It All Together
The common theme across cyber security, environmental management and business process is that success is rarely achieved through a single project or audit. It comes from the cumulative effect of hundreds of small actions carried out consistently over time.
The certifications and accreditations we achieve are important milestones, and we should absolutely celebrate them. However, they are also a reflection of the culture, discipline and commitment that exists throughout the organisation. We all work with tracking tools, in projects, in finance and in HR (to name just three), these tools and their processes provide the solid frameworks to run our business and provide the management information to enable us to always be aware to measure and improve what we do.
Ultimately, the certificates on the wall are evidence of something much more significant: a business that continually strives to improve, meet the needs of its stakeholders and operate with quality and responsibly for the benefit of customers, colleagues, and partners alike.
