Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2014

CORPORATE RESPONSIBILITY REPORT 2014

Overview
In many ways, 2013 was a breakthrough year for
Society. During the space of 12 months we grew
our turnover by 60% and our headcount by 40%,
unlocking new sectors along the way, and making
some genuinely noteworthy appointments for our
clients. Such a frenetic pace of growth presents
significant challenges for any firm though. Many of
the goals we set ourselves a year ago have been
achieved, but others have had to be postponed or
adapted. Such is the reality of life as a small
business!
This document is Society’s second Corporate
Responsibility Report, and we intend to keep
producing updates of this nature on an annual
basis. For us, Corporate Responsibility is a
journey, not a destination. We will keep
challenging ourselves to improve and to develop.
And we will keep being honest about where we
have succeeded, and where we have fallen short.
Over the following pages, we have outlined how
we plan to continue approaching the themes of
Community, Workplace, Marketplace and
Environment. For each theme, we have
highlighted some of the recent achievements on
our journey, and spelled out some of the
commitments to which we aspire in the future.
We hope that this report proves interesting, and
we would welcome any comments or thoughts you
might have about the way in which we are
developing our business.
Simon Lucas
Managing Director
“Society will be the retained recruitment
partner of choice for responsible
businesses and purpose-driven
organisations.”
Our Mission Statement
“We will bring about positive change,
through helping to place exceptional
people into roles where they can make a
impact on the wider world.”
Our Vision
We believe that Society’s key social
impacts are:
• the quality of the appointments we
help our clients to make, and the
impact those individuals
subsequently have in-post;
• the integrity with which we help
candidates to define and to attain
their career objectives;
• the way in which we look after, and
develop our colleagues;
• the extent to which our business
consumes resources, and the size of
our carbon footprint;
• the impact and longevity of our work
in the community;
• the leadership we show within the
wider recruitment industry on issues
of responsibility, ethics and
sustainability.
We believe that Society’s key
stakeholders are:
• our clients;
• our candidates;
• our colleagues;
• our suppliers;
• our wider community;
• the recruitment industry at large.

Recent highlights:
• We have taken part in four
consecutive ‘Give & Gain Days’, and
we were one of the national sponsors
of the event in both 2013 and 2014.
• We have created a menu of one-day
activities that colleagues can select
from if they need inspiration for how
to spend their volunteering
entitlement.
• We have hosted a summer work
experience placement for the past
four years.
• We have implemented a system of
Payroll Giving with assistance from
the Charities Aid Foundation (CAF).
• We have created a menu of charity
gifts that we send to placed
candidates immediately following
their appointment, so that they can
choose a cause for us to support in
their name.
Future commitments:
• We will become champions for skillsbased
employee volunteering,
showing through our actions how
businesses can deliver meaningful
benefit to community groups by
undertaking activities that play to
their core competencies.
• We will continue to be prominent and
vocal supporters of Give & Gain Day,
expanding our own involvement
through seeking the participation of
clients and candidates.
• We will continue hosting summer
work experience placements, but
adapt our scheme so that we can link
it into Business in the Community’s
Ready to Work programme.
• We will increase the number of
colleagues taking advantage of
payroll giving.
• We will encourage charitable
fundraising efforts amongst
colleagues and, where appropriate,
commit the business to match-fund
what colleagues have raised.
• We will provide added support and
flexibility for colleagues looking to
take on charity Trustee or school
Governor commitments.
Community
The central focus of Society’s community activities
has always been employee volunteering. We
consider employee volunteering to be a great way of
delivering benefit to our community, whilst also
strengthening our business. Colleagues find our
team volunteering days to be an energising and
morale-boosting experience, and we have found that
these events have the added benefits of improving
teamwork and stimulating better cross-company
communication.
Since Society was first set up, we have guaranteed
every colleague three fully-paid volunteering days
per year. For the past four years we have also been
enthusiastic participants in Give & Gain Day. We
were one of the national sponsors for the event in
2013, and we decided to support it again in 2014.
Increasingly we are trying to steer our employee
volunteering choices towards skills-based activities
like providing advice on CV writing and delivering
mock interview workshops. Although we will continue
to do physical activities like gardening and painting
upon occasion, we feel that skills-based activities
offer us the opportunity to make a more profound
and measurable impact on people’s lives by utilising
our unique experience as headhunters in a
meaningful way.
We are also trying to give a clearer focus to our other
community ventures, including our summer work
experience scheme. This year we will be linking up
with Business in the Community’s ‘Ready for Work’
programme in order to offer our placement to
someone who has been recently homeless and is
now looking to get back into employment.

Workplace
As previously mentioned, 2013 saw a significant
increase in Society’s headcount. Initiatives under
the general theme of ‘Workforce’ have therefore
been a big focus for us over recent months.
In particular there are three areas in which we feel
we have made progress:
1. We have dramatically increased the time and
resources that we allocate to training and
development, including buying in outside
support and sending colleagues on external
courses. At the same time we have also
devolved responsibility in many areas, and
promoted a number of colleagues into team
management positions. We hope that these
changes will help us get the best out of both our
new and existing colleagues.
2. We have expanded the range of benefits that
we provide to employees to include a full Group
Personal Pension Plan and Death in Service
cover of up to 4x salary. We have also begun
offering Childcare Vouchers to colleagues who
are parents, and Season Ticket Loans to
colleagues who have been with the company
for more than three years.
3. We have done a lot of work on defining the sort
of culture that we want the business to possess.
This has led to the creation of our ‘Steering
Wheel’ – a tool that we hope will allow us to
stay true to our founding values and behaviours
as we continue to grow and diversify.
Having taken these steps, we will next look to
quantify their effect by conducting a thorough Staff
Survey later in 2014.
Recent highlights:
• We have created a company
‘Steering Wheel’ in order to provide
new colleagues with a clear
statement of the values and
behaviours we all need to abide by.
• We have reviewed our policies on
issues such as equality and
diversity, harassment and bullying,
health and safety, alcohol and drug
misuse, and whistle-blowing.
• We have implemented a
transparent progression structure,
giving colleagues greater clarity
about development routes, training
opportunities, and salary scales.
• We have made efforts to
encourage healthy eating through
making free fresh fruit available to
colleagues in the office.
• We have implemented a flexible
hours policy, giving colleagues
increased control over their
working day.
• We have created an online portal
called ‘Delphi’ to provide the spine
of our ongoing training and
development activities.
• We have chosen an office with
excellent accessibility for
wheelchair users.
• We have created an employee
benefits scheme consisting of
pension contributions and life
assurance for all colleagues, along
with Childcare Vouchers for
colleagues with children, and
season ticket loans for colleagues
with over three years’ service.
• We have marginally improved the
firm’s maternity/paternity leave
policies and introduced the
possibility of sabbatical breaks
after five years’ service.
Future commitments:
• We will continue to take steps to
increase the diversity of our
workforce, with a particular focus
on reaching out to potential
colleagues who might be over-30,
female, and/or of BME extraction.
• We will take steps to encourage
colleagues to invest more in their
pensions.

Recent highlights:
• We have rewritten our standard
Terms and Conditions of Business
in order to make them shorter and
more transparent.
• We have become signatories to the
Voluntary Code of Conduct for
Executive Search Firms.
• We have signed up to the
Department of Business,
Innovation and Skills’ Prompt
Payment Code.
• We have started to seek more
regular feedback from our clients in
the form of Net Promoter Scores
(NPSs) at the end of every
assignment.
• We have begun providing
dedicated training on ethics to all
new staff as part of their first week
induction programme.
Future commitments:
• We will develop an ethical
framework for determining which
businesses we will and won’t work
with.
• We will engage with Business in
the Community to write thought
pieces on the issues such as
employment discrimination,
diversity and equality and
opportunities, and career planning.
• We will systematically review our
choice of landlord, bank,
accountants, pension provider,
credit cards, telephone operators
(both fixed and mobile), stationery
suppliers, and IT support, in order
to ensure that they are (for
example) paying a Living Wage,
and to see whether more
responsible and sustainable
options are available.
• We will strive to find ever more
accurate ways of including a
consideration of ‘values’ as part of
how we assess candidates.
• We will investigate the feasibility of
setting up a ‘Society Foundation’ to
provide routes into employment in
the recruitment industry for young
people from difficult backgrounds.
Marketplace
As an executive search firm, our supply chain is
relatively simple. We have a handful of partners in
the areas of IT, telephony and finance, but there is
precious little complexity to these relationships. As
far as being a catalyst for change within our
marketplace, we are more focused on transforming
the behaviours of our sector and our clients.
One of the most difficult decisions we have had to
take in recent months was to discontinue our
longstanding Society Points scheme. Despite
consistent effort on our part, the uptake from our
private sector clients simply hasn’t been high enough
for us to justify this initiative on an ongoing basis. We
are now therefore exploring alternative ways in which
we can help to nudge our clients towards responsible
business practice.
In the meantime we remain committed to the
following tenets:
1. We will be selective about which clients we work
for and refuse to partner with unethical, reckless
or destructive organisations.
2. We will continue to build excellent long-term
relationships with our clients, earning their
ongoing loyalty through consistently going the
extra mile.
3. We will aim to be a thought leader within our
sector about issues of responsibility, ethics,
equality of opportunity, sustainability, and
integrity.

Environment
Society continues to operate out of serviced
offices. This places significant limitations on our
direct ability to reduce our environmental footprint.
Everything from heating and lighting through to
cleaning services is provided under a licence by
our third party landlord, MWB. When MWB was
acquired by Regus in February of this year, our
ability to influence how the building is run was
reduced even further.
Nevertheless, we are committed to finding creative
ways of improving our environmental credentials.
We have pinpointed four key environmental
impacts
1. Energy use in our office;
2. Transport emissions from colleagues
commuting to the office and travelling to/from
meetings;
3. Paper use, both in our office and by our
clients;
4. Our consumption of other materials, such as
stationery, computing and IT equipment,
furniture, and food and drink.
When looked at through this framework, our
current inability to (for example) select our energy
supplier is arguably less significant than our ability
to take actions that will reduce the amount of heat
and electricity that we waste in our own office.
Recent highlights:
• We have stopped sending hard copy
(printed) longlist or shortlist
paperwork to clients, furnishing them
instead with PDF documents,
complete with bookmarks for each
candidate. These can easily be
viewed on laptops or tablet devices.
• We have begun to supply client
documentation preloaded on Tesco
Hudl devices, thereby minimising the
client’s likelihood of printing our
paperwork off themselves.
• We have committed to printing all our
stationery and corporate literature on
at least 75% recycled paper stock by
ISO 9001 accredited printers.
• We have introduced a system for
monitoring printing and begun to
publish a monthly league table of the
most and least prolific printers in the
office.
• We have acquired a Terminal Server,
thereby allowing colleagues to work
more easily from home rather than
always having to commute into the
office.
• We have introduced a new travel
policy with an emphasis on further
reducing our use of taxis in favour of
public transport.
Future commitments:
• We will explore ways of encouraging
all colleagues to power off their
computers over night.
• We will increasingly seek to formalise
our policies and procedures on
waste, recycling, and energy usage.
• We will only purchase Fairtrade tea,
coffee and fruit for our offices, and
we will lobby our landlords to do the
same.
• We will lobby our landlords to make
improvements in a number of areas,
including the provision and signing of
recycling facilities, and the use of
more environmentally-friendly
cleaning products.
• We will include a consideration for
environmental sustainability in our
review of suppliers.
• We will investigate the feasibility of
implementing an EMS
(Environmental Management
System).

For more information about
our corporate responsibility
goals, please contact:
Society
83 Baker Street
London
W1U 6AG
mail@impact-society.com
+44 (0)207 935 4052