Strong progress amid the unpredictable: Saying goodbye to 2021

By Hassan H. Rmaile

This was supposed to be the year that everything got back to normal. Instead, 2021 brought us highly constrained supply chains, the worst inflation in several decades, and not one but two variants of the COVID-19 virus causing many restrictions and disruptions globally. 

It hasn’t been the year any of us expected, and it’s definitely a bit different than what we envisioned at the conclusion of 2020 with the optimism about vaccine availability.

But thanks to the resilience, agility, and relentless hard work of our teams, LGM EMENA is ending 2021 in a strong place. In 2022, our primary goal is to continue our progress for all our stakeholders, our customers, employees and communities. Here’s a quick flash back at how we’ve advanced some of our most important initiatives during a tumultuous 12 months.

Sustainability 

In our ongoing effort to reduce our environmental footprint and build a sustainable business, we substantially increased what I call our “SQ,” or sustainable intelligence quotient, integrating sustainable thinking into more of our business. As a company, we’ve set clear sustainability goals and targets for 2030. We’ve also announced our ambition to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2050—a huge step, and a fundamental one that will touch much of our work. Rather than applying our focus to one single stream, like single-use plastics, we’re taking a more holistic approach that begins with building a strategy to reduce emissions (even more than we already have). The next step is to integrate that strategy enterprise-wide alongside our other top priorities, such as innovation, customer service and strong financial results. This year we also began looking past simple sustainability toward regeneration—toward restoring more to the environment than we extract. We have a long way to go to get there, but regeneration is our North Star. 

There was more: This year we also introduced our Sustainable ADvantage portfolio, including  several exciting new portfolios of materials that enable the recycling, reuse, or composting of packages; that contain recycled or renewable content; that reduce material consumption; and that are responsibly sourced. And we launched AD Circular, our program that helps the end-users of our materials recycle label liner instead of landfilling or incinerating it. 

Perhaps most exciting of all, this year we moved closer to piloting a pioneering new intelligent label solution that, with the scan of a consumer’s smartphone, can show the carbon footprint of a product and its package in much the same way that a nutrition label lists nutrients and calories. We’ll have more news about this innovation in the coming months.

Diversity, equity and inclusion

This year we also made progress in our efforts to expand diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) in LGM EMENA and across our company generally. Companywide, we established four DE&I “pillars'' that we’re integrating. They include increasing fairness by ensuring that merit and transparency are foundational; increasing the number of women in leadership positions; increasing the inclusion of our shop floor employees; and increasing DE&I across underrepresented groups.

Because diversity, equity and inclusion mean different things in different parts of the world, we also set additional pillars for each of our operating regions. In EMENA, we’re working to increase DE&I for LGBTQ+ employees and employees with disabilities, while also providing a platform that enables employee voices to not only be heard, but heard in their local language. We held a town hall with more than 400 shop floor employees in Belgium, scheduled listening tours that will provide a forum for hundreds of women in our company, and formed a new ERG for our LGBTQ+ employees. These are all promising building blocks for realizing our DE&I vision, and there’s much more good work to come. 

Ecosystem 360

Finally, in regards to our “Ecosystem 360” approach, in which we reach beyond our usual patterns and partnerships to find inspiration and opportunity in new places—or, as we like to say, to disrupt ourselves—we continued to broaden our networks and scope of inquiry. We kept up our dialogue with key customers through which our customers shared their insights on materials and end-user demand and the trends shaping packaging. That conversation continues to grow richer over time, and it goes both ways: Just as our customers share their insights, we inform them about emerging new materials, sustainable solutions, and more. 

Besides staying in close conversation with our customers, we continued to track packaging-related innovations in the world of venture capital, and we participated in Pack Expo in person this year—all to help us stay on top of potentially transformative changes in our industry. 

All of this progress, achieved during another historically volatile year, is a testament to the grit, expertise, and dedication of our entire global Avery Dennison team. This is a team that, against all odds, has helped our region grow double digit over 2021. That number would be impressive in any year; in a year like this one, it is a testament to the will and determination of our teams and their relentless focus on helping customer needs in a very tough environment. As we move deeper into the holiday season, many of our highly committed and hardworking people will be taking some well-deserved rest. 

And what about next year? Well, if I’ve learned anything after the last 22 months or so, it’s to not make predictions, rather double down on scenario planning by “planning for the worst but hoping for the best” mindset. But I remain as optimistic as ever. In times like this, I find it helpful to remember two things. 

First, it’s a fine line between panic and euphoria. As we discuss within our teams: Stay on the right side of that line. Breathe. Pause. Reflect. A solution to any crisis is almost always close at hand, and it’s almost never necessary to act without first thinking a problem through.

Second: There is not a crisis in human history that, however trying, did not come to an end. The last couple of years have tested all of us and pushed some of us to our limits. But the volatility and the challenges are finite. They, too, will and shall pass.

When they do, we’ll be here, as excited as ever about leading sustainable and intelligent innovations in labels and packaging solutions, and working hard to be a force for good. 

What was 2021 like for you? What’s your crystal ball for 2022? 

Whatever it might be, I wish you happy, restful holidays and a prosperous—and slightly more predictable— 2022.