Annual Report 2021
Annual Report 2021
More than anything, however, I have been delighted with the progression of RINA’s reputation, both in Italy and internationally. We are recognised as a trend-setter and leader in markets such as decarbonisation, infrastructure and energy, and our reputation, experience and capabilities mean that many companies and organisations are now proactively asking us to participate in projects.
Our offices have been refurbished to create conditions that support increasingly flexible working. For example, we have eliminated desk assignments and have created an app where people can book a desk if they need to go to the office. The office is now a place to share ideas, projects, vision and strategy and increase a sense of belonging, rather than somewhere people have to spend eight hours per day.
We are a people-centred organisation, and, for our business and customers, people are the most important part. We have offices in over 200 locations in 70 different countries with around 4,500 staff. As a multi-cultural and multi-national company, we need to be cognisant of differences and have the capability to understand and meet different cultural expectations to facilitate growth in different regions.
Our multi-year Human Capital Management (HCM) project is bringing all HR processes and people information together in a single database. This provides us with a clear dashboard, which we can question and analyse to make smarter decisions. It helps us see employee journeys and identify every touchpoint, enabling us to define processes based on the experiences of our colleagues. It provides us with the perception each has of the company and is an important motivational tool.
In 2021, we focussed on soft skills and the adoption and creation of environmental conditions to make people confident in their approach to smart working. Our managers now lead teams that employ hybrid working. This requires a different mindset to keep people connected, motivated, and feeling like they are really part of something growing and important.
In RINA, a manager needs to demonstrate understanding and entrepreneurship. They need to create a sense of belonging and have the capability to present a positive brand to our stakeholders. Through a structured (and lively) workshop we built a new leadership model that delivers a basis for colleagues to define their career paths. We are also setting up talent programs to ensure people can envisage transversal career paths within the group’s business units and worldwide.
We are assessing over 2,000 people worldwide. This is divided into sections, with technical and logical testing for more junior colleagues (<2 years seniority) and assessment of middle management for talent potential. This will provide us with an objective view of where the right talents for projects are, something which is increasingly important as we become more and more international in our structure.
2022 will not be a year of drastic changes. We are a diverse group and want to maximize the sharing of skills across countries and industries. The work we have already done is bringing the strategic pieces of the HR puzzle together and creating a pathway that will provide, in a structured way, organisational mapping of hard and soft competencies, with a dashboard of all capabilities within the organisation. This will give us the clearest picture yet of the best people to allocate to projects and will add value to both the business and our customers.
We recognise that the digital services we provide are just that - services. We are not in the business of developing new software products, but we recognize the strategic contribution provided by state-of-the-art digital tools to support the services we offer in order to ensure our leadership in our market sectors.
Our software as a service (SaaS) approach is therefore fully harmonized with our business processes, as witnessed by the new Data Integrity Audited Service (DIAS) service within our certification business.
For this reason, we will proceed along our digital transformational roadmap that shapes company’s strategy into digital transformational initiatives, taking them from conception to realization, both internally and in the services we offer to our customers
Finally, although the need for secure IT systems may be perceived as a hinderance to internal working processes, we must recognize that the world has changed, and we will proceed along the digitalization path with a strong focus on IT security.
In 2021 the RINA Certification business won
market share in terms of marginality and turnover, and successfully met our
targets and goals to reinforce our value proposition and expand our
international network.
Results for the year saw our margin a few points above budget, reaching 18.3% against a target of 18.5%. Our remote auditing capability supported a boost in marginality, and we are currently working to create a remote audit policy to provide a positive impact on results for the coming year.
