Building a sustainable business for all stakeholders

We’re committed to building a sustainable business based on the UN Sustainable Development Goals for all of our stakeholders. We focus on four core pillars in our sustainability strategy:

People and culture

We are proud of our people who are at the core of our services and who shape our values-based culture.

Health and safety

We are committed to providing a workplace where our people’s health and safety is of paramount importance.

Environment

We are committed to conducting our business in a way that protects the environment.

Community

We want to have a positive impact on the communities in which we operate.

On World Environment Day 2021, we launched our Sustainability Champions Network. These passionate volunteers meet monthly and work together to monitor our environmental performance and drive new ideas for change.

While we continue to grow, adapt and improve to meet the challenges and embrace the opportunities that our clients and other stakeholders face, our values remain at the core of how we do business.

As our ESG (environment, social and governance) program develops so too does our focus, away from a mostly compliance driven approach to one that is led by organizational strategy and stakeholder views.

In July 2021, we carried out our first multi-stakeholder materiality assessment, positively engaging with four of our key stakeholder groups:

• 3% of employees (randomly selected)
• Top 10 suppliers
• Top 10 clients
• Our senior executives (SET)

Through an online survey we asked the selected representatives to rank the importance of 25 ESG issues. Although the sample size was limited, the results gave us valuable feedback, including:

• Overall, it is the ‘Social’ issues that are most important to all of the stakeholders, showing a strong alignment with our current strategy. Not surprisingly, employee health and safety, data and cyber security, and human rights due diligence ranked the highest.
• While still scoring highly, ‘Environment’ was ranked below ‘Social’ and ‘Governance’. With environment, emissions, water and chemical use all featured as important to external stakeholders, while biodiversity and the reduction in the use of plastics and waste were deemed highly important.
• Of the ‘Governance’ issues, trust, integrity and issue resolution were ranked as having the greatest ‘importance’ and most strongly aligned between our stakeholder and company perspectives.

The results of the materiality analysis provided a useful insight into our program and has helped us to determine which areas of ESG to focus on, especially as we merge our ESG programme with Huntsworth.