I love a good New Year’s resolution. When the New Year begins, a few good resolutions help me feel like I am starting the year off strong. The New Year represents an opportunity for a fresh start and a new perspective. I think it’s also the perfect atmosphere for setting new personal challenges and goals. I always make more progress when I have goals in mind and I’m eager to start tackling them.

I think every person – and organization – needs goals. It’s that big picture thinking that gets us moving in the right direction. What do we want to achieve in the next year? Where do we want to be in five years? Or, ten years? What could we be doing better? What weaknesses do we want to overcome? What strengths can we use to make ourselves better?

We ask ourselves those questions at Jackson EMC. As an organization, it’s our version of a New Year’s resolution. We challenge ourselves by setting goals each year for moving the cooperative forward. It’s a collaborative process that allows us to take a measure of the progress we’ve made and look ahead at how we can make your cooperative better.

As your cooperative, we take an all-hands approach to laying out Jackson EMC’s strategic goals for the future. Our linemen, engineers, customer service representatives, marketing representatives, office staff and others all have a say in how they can move the cooperative forward. Each team analyzes their strengths and weaknesses, and their role in making Jackson EMC the best it can be for our members, our communities and our employees.

Our teams recently wrapped up this intensive process. And, I must say: If you love a good New Year’s resolution as much as I do, then you’ll love what these teams have done. I’m so impressed with the innovative and goal-oriented ideas each team contributed. They’ve really raised the bar! Over the next year, teams across the cooperative will implement their goals. You’ll see some of the previous efforts in this issue of JEMCO News with My Energy Use and the Home Energy Monitor.

As we move through 2018, another major initiative for Jackson EMC will be laying the groundwork for a one-stop way to pay your bill, get power outage information, receive estimated power restoration times, and much more. We’ll accomplish this through an exciting new technology partnership that will bring many enhancements to better serve you. This project will move our core information systems to a new platform enabling seamless integration and creating a web-based Smart Hub. Once launched, you’ll have the opportunity to receive certain communications from Jackson EMC via text messages or email, if you prefer. We’ll be sharing more information about those changes later in the new year.

As we wrap up 2017, we’re ready to hit the ground running with our new resolutions to exceed your expectations in 2018!

What ideas do you have for how we can improve? Send me a note to [email protected].