Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2014

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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).
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Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2014

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