Ongoing digitalisation

Like 2020, last year was a very good year for the domain name sector. The coronavirus crisis and its restrictions forced companies and citizens to be more active online than ever before. This resulted in 230,000 new registrations. 

The pandemic brought about an acceleration in the digitalisation of our society. We can now see that this transition was not temporary, but sustainable. The domain names that were registered during the crisis period were also largely renewed. This translated into an 88%  renewal ratio, making us the leader in the sector. With the new registrations and the high renewal rate, we passed the milestone of 1.7 million active .be domain names in 2021. 

The above results, combined with a cost-conscious approach, led to a profit of €440,000 last year. 

A number of pillars are centre stage in what our organisation does and form the basis on which we can achieve such great results. 

Sustainability

We have focused strongly on the sustainable character of all our activities for years. For us, sustainability obviously means ecology, but we also want to give something back to society, by promoting digital inclusion, for instance. 

A good case in point is our very active role in DigitalForYouth, a programme under which we have distributed 3,850 laptops to organisations that teach digital skills to young people in Belgium. 

Security

Our mission comprises providing a safe internet experience to  everyone in our country. That is why we attach great importance to our internal security and to cybersecurity in general. 
    
We firmly believe that a secure .be zone will lead to more consumer confidence in the long run and thus to a more digital and inclusive society. This will in turn ensure that we contribute to a society that uses the world's scarce resources more efficiently. 

Hybrid working

As a result of the pandemic, DNS Belgium offers a flexible working structure, where each employee can decide whether or not to work remotely or in the office. We conducted polls to find out about the advantages and disadvantages of hybrid working so as to ascertain how we can best support our staff in the face of any challenges.

Well-being at work

We are fully committed to employee satisfaction because we believe that satisfied employees are also efficient employees. Our productivity measurements show that there is a positive correlation between the two.

The results of our satisfaction survey are extremely positive. Briefly, we can say that our employees feel valued by DNS Belgium. They are given the resources and information they need to do a good job and they appreciate our ethical way of working. A psychosocial risk analysis that we carried out in 2021 in cooperation with our external prevention advisor IDEWE showed that there are no indications of an increased psychosocial workload among our staff. 

Because DNS Belgium wants to be not only a good but also an inspiring employer, we organised an inspiration session in 2021 about resilience. During this session, Elke Van Hoof of the House for Resilience answered all our questions about stress, burn-out, etc. In addition, we also organised a voluntary course on connecting communication in cooperation with Human Matters. The course comprised three inspiration sessions with concrete cases that help us give feedback in a clear and respectful way, without casting blame or being judgmental.

HR update

DNS Belgium boasted a workforce of 35 employees at the end of 2021:  21.4 of them worked full-time; 19.1 were men and 2.3 women. Of our 13.3 part-time employees, 6.4 were men and 6.9 women. 32 FTEs, of which 24.4 were men and 7.6 women (figures according to our social balance sheet 2021).

Flawless HR administration, the cafeteria plan and the mobility budget continued to feature as constants in our HR policy in 2021. The mobility budget was thoroughly updated at the end of 2021 as a result of amended legislation.

We had already started developing competence profiles under performance management in cooperation with Hudson at the end of 2020. 
We distinguish four competence profiles in our organisation: 

• Competence profile for EVERYONE
• Competency profile for team leads
• Competency profile for the expert in the team
• Competency profile for unique expert.

These were shaped further in 2021 thanks to the input of voluntary employees from each department. A competence profile can help to stimulate talent, development and feedback and thus contribute to a sustainable and inspiring workplace.