corporate social responsibility · sthree corporate social responsibility report 2017 5 workplace...

CORPORATE SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY

REPORT 2017

SThree Foundation

Volunteering

Fundraising & corporate giving

Environment

SThree Corporate Social Responsibility Report 2017 2

STEM insight placements for students from diverse and underprivileged backgrounds.56

Raised through our first fundraising ball.

£36,000Instances of skills-based volunteering since 2011.

Beneficiaries positively impacted since 2011.

Global carbon footprint to reach a climate neutral status, in the Carbon Disclosure Project since 2016.

Raised for SOS Children’s Villages over a nine year partnership, with 35 projects in 13 countries, impacting 3,000 lives.

Global achievements

1,250+

5,780+ B score

£1million


Corporate Social Responsibility Framework

Across our core business we continue to create long-term value for individuals, organisations and the wider economy. Through effective use of our relationships and intellectual capital, our people help resource life-changing sectors and specialist STEM roles that enable industries and countries to thrive.

Community

Workplace

Environment

Our 2017 sustainability focus

Our strategy today is more people-focused than ever before. We are committed to developing future skills in our workplace, through our core services and in our community initiatives. We continue to deliver on long-term results linked to our strategy by addressing global poverty, social mobility and unemployment.

Completing a successful first year with our SThree Foundation was one of our key 2017 commitments. Through our network and with charity Generating Genius, the programme addresses societal challenges, such as the future talent pipeline needed to meet the skills gap as well as creating access from an diversity and inclusion perspective.

By partnering with SOS Children’s Villages, we have shown our active support for investment in deprived communities where we have a key interest. Through ‘From Babies with Love’, we have now sent 68 new baby gifts for employees across the globe, with 100% of profit supporting SOS Children’s Villages.

We continue to minimise our environmental impact through increased data management and the completed rollout of FSC standard paper, coupled with the introduction of secure print in the UK which has already started to reduce overall paper and toner use as well as waste.

In line with this, our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) vision remains focused on ‘Transforming lives through skills and work’. We aspire to build a responsible, sustainable and trustful business working in partnership with organisations and local communities. A key starting point is creating an inspiring and inclusive work environment where we invest in our people and their ability to build strong relationships with customers and create shared value for communities.

We have identified three CSR strands by which we deliver our vision and assess our progress as a corporate citizen.

SThree Foundationworking with employers to support bright young people from underprivileged and diverse backgrounds into STEM. We have three internal themes:

Inclusion and diversity Supporting an inclusive culture and raising awareness.

Employability and aspiration Using our core skills to support people from underprivileged backgrounds into work.

Employee engagement Introducing eNPS (employee Net Promoter Score) to ensure we listen to employees and support continuous improvement in the way we do things and wellbeing initiatives.

Enterprise Sharing our entrepreneurial mindset for success.

Talent and leadership Investing in our employees through training and development.

Strategic support for charities Using our business skills to help charities increase their impacts.

Energy and resource efficiency Monitoring and managing impacts.

Reducing waste Minimising consumption and recycling.


Barclays

Barts Health NHS Trust

Beck Greener

BNY Mellon

Broadbean

Cisco

DDD

Department for Transport

Institute of Child Health

LIDA part of Saatchi

Media IQ Digital

RBS

Ringway Jacobs

Salesforce

Saunderson House

Skanska

techUK

Tideway

Waltham Forrest

WSP

WYG

Xactly

Community

We aim to achieve positive long-term impacts for communities by focusing our skills, time and resources to address local needs where we operate and on programmes that align with our strategic interests. Our central theme remains ‘Employability and Aspiration’ to enable us to make the biggest contribution based on our business knowledge and networks.

The availability of skilled and motivated candidates to meet client needs is essential to our business growth as well as being crucial to economic prosperity. We understand that in order to achieve long-term profitability, we must support the wider system in which we operate.

Through our community activities, we build the confidence and skills of people from underprivileged backgrounds to help them move into meaningful careers, which brings a wide range of societal benefits including self-worth, productivity and economic growth.

Total estimated value of community programme.£ 430,000

2016: £385K

Hours of employee volunteering skills shared this year.

815

£1millionGenerated through fundraising and corporate giving over nine year partnership for SOS Children’s Villages

This year we have further aligned CSR commitments with our corporate strategy by incorporating our STEM expertise into the recently launched SThree Foundation.

During the year, in partnership with Generating Genius, we organised 56 STEM insight placements hosted by 23 businesses. We also ran seven events to support students and engage supporters. In addition, our SThree Foundation fundraising ball generated £36,000, which was shared between Generating Genius and the Aleto Foundation.

List of companies that hosted students through the SThree Foundation:

We take our role seriously as a specialist staffing company, knowing that community involvement positively impacts shared agendas, such as diversity and inclusion, and supports our people to develop their skills and business partnerships. Employees have given over 1,250 instances of skills-based volunteering which has positively impacted 5,780 beneficiaries, since 2011. This year 270 employees took part to benefit 900 people. Since 2013, we have hosted 57 supportive work experience placements for those who need support in starting their careers. We have also facilitated 11 apprenticeships in partnership with City Gateway for young people with limited qualifications.

This year we have reached our £1 million target for SOS Children’s Villages for our ninth anniversary. Our philanthropic contributions are £108k. In our nine-year partnership, we have funded 35 projects in 18 countries to directly benefit over 3000 people.

In the UK, we achieved the bronze award for our payroll giving through Charities Aid Foundation for reaching 1% participation.

Developing our talent and those in the community through skills-based support

SThree Foundation Volunteering and supportive opportunities

Fundraising and corporate giving

Key projects with SOS this year:

Key highlights

Family Strengthening Programme funding to benefit 600 children and their families with food, school fees, start-up loans, counselling and practical assistance in Chipata.

Education and language courses for refugee children in Greece.

Fifty hand-stitched footballs for the children living in Chipata Village, made by social enterprise Alive and Kicking in Zambia.

Solar panels to provide reliable and clean energy for all houses in Gulu Village, Uganda.

Education and resources for children in Manila.

Employees in Germany and France continued to fundraise for local SOS projects.


Workplace

Our people are our greatest asset. Our employer proposition is a career with purpose and no limits. We launched a fourth cohort into our mentoring programme, matching 110 mentees with mentors, to enhance individual development and personal growth.

Through our Maternity Buddy Scheme, we have maintained 79% of employees returning to work after maternity leave. If one of our employees is expecting a baby, our Buddy Programme provides support for the duration of the pregnancy, maternity leave and returning to work.

We have significantly invested in our new talent and performance management system, rolled out globally within the organisation. This allows us to have performance objectives and personal development plans in place for all our people, with a clear, transparent, fair and consistent approach to promotions.

Our internal inclusion networks have been pivotal in evolving our approach to diversity, and this year we have celebrated both Pride and Black History months, by showcasing employee stories internally and on social media.

We have been analysing our internal data in order to meet gender pay reporting regulations.

SThree’s success depends on having highly skilled and motivated employees. We aim at developing and promoting people within our organisation.

We provide on-the-job learning programmes as well as online and classroom-based courses to support our employees’ careers at all stages. Our career management platform continues to promote best management practice and helps our employees move into more senior positions.

This year we restated our organisational purpose: ‘Bringing skilled people together to build the future’ and, with it, support for our managers and leaders to bring to life the true meaning of our work with our candidates and clients. In many cases within our business, there is a direct link between activities at work and outcomes in the STEM sector. It is our appreciation of this that enhances our employer promise and fulfils the needs of those in our client base, candidate pools and networks.

In 2017 we introduced our quarterly Employee Net Promoter Score (‘eNPS’), replacing our annual engagement survey, as a more dynamic way to capture regular feedback from our people. Over 70% of employees responded about their experience of working at SThree, as well as how they view the services we offer our customers. eNPS will help us make the right changes based on employee feedback and track what is working using our eNPS benchmark. Ultimately, it puts our people at the centre of decisions that help to create a brilliant place to work.

We continue to focus on embedding our new performance management tool, me@work, which enables employees at all levels to have structured and meaningful conversations around their performance, personal development and career management. We continue building management capability to ensure employees have clear and focused objectives.

Fostering long-term careers to support Group growth

Talent and leadership Employee engagement


Category Male % Female %

Directors of SThree plc 6 75% 2 25%

Senior Managers (Directors/LLP Partners)

48 79% 13 21%

Employees 1,492 53% 1,328 47%

Workplace

Female representation in key roles28% 2016: 27%

Participants invited to take part in IdentiFy, our future leadearship programme female.30

2016: 2,5522,820 Direct employment

At SThree we strive to promote a positive and inclusive work environment where diverse opinions and perspectives are valued and a true meritocracy exists. When our internal diversity and inclusion programme was set up in 2011,our focus was to support the development and progression of women within the organisation. Since then, it has evolved to support inclusion and diversity in all forms.

We continue to drive progress and action against our aspirational gender targets. Globally we have a good representation of females in our Level 1 sales roles, currently at 45%, whilst increasing our Level 2 role representation from 26% to 40%, Level 3 from 19% to 26% and Level 4 from 4% to 10%, since targets were put in place in July 2012. Females account for 60% of our support services roles.

We have maintained a focused approach to the development of our female talent. This year we launched IdentiFy, a programme to prepare our future female leaders and ensure we achieve our aspiration to balance at Level 4. Thirty females were selected globally for the programme, which includes being allocated a senior sponsor, receiving personal development to guide them through their careers and an opportunity to collaborate on a corporate project.

The Group undertakes appropriate checks on suppliers, clients, candidates, etc. To ensure, as far as possible, that none are in contravention of any human rights issues. As such, there are no human rights issues impacting the Group’s business.

Fostering long-term careers to support Group growth

Inclusion and diversity

Human rights

Gender classification

At 30th November 2017:

Key highlights


Environment

Developing a sustainable business by minimising our environmental footprint

We recognise that our business activities have an impact on the environment and are committed to reducing emissions wherever possible.

We have continued to work with Carbon Smart to ensure compliance with the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reporting requirements of The Companies Act 2006 (Strategic and Directors’ Reports) Regulations 2013. As in 2016, our 2017 reporting covers scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions.

Using a financial control approach, our calculated GHG emissions1 arising from business activities in the financial year ended 30th November 2017 are as per the table on page 8.

Our location-based carbon footprint has increased by 4% compared to the prior year, primarily as a result of increased business travel – but has reduced by 3% on a per employee basis, indicating that whilst we are growing our business, we are improving the efficiency of our operations.

The 6% reduction in our absolute market-based emissions in 2015-16, and drop of 12% in these emissions per employee, reflects the carbon intensity of the electricity tariffs purchased by our global offices, as opposed to location based emissions which reflect the intensity of the average grid in each country, and is thus a more accurate representation of our Scope 2 emissions.

Having identified paper as a significant resource, we launched a Managed Print service across the UK and Europe during October to tackle unnecessary printing by reducing the number of printers in use, as well as reducing toner waste.

We are reporting on waste and recycling for the second year and have seen enhanced data coverage across our portfolio. Waste emissions have increased but can be attributed to more accurate reporting of site activities and an increase of 40% in the carbon conversion factor issued by the UK government.

For waste electrical equipment, we use an accredited supplier in line with the General Data Protection Regulation.

We achieved carbon neutral status by offsetting all of our 2016 global emissions with ClimateCare. We invested in the Panama wind project in India to support the region in securing access to renewable electricity and reducing reliance on fossil fuels.

This year we also held a number of employee engagement activities, including vegetarian lunch competitions to mark World Environment day and highlight the impact of food production as well as food miles.

Mandatory reporting Reducing waste

1 The methodology used to calculate the GHG emissions is in accordance with the requirements of the following standards: the World Resources Institute Greenhouse Gas Protocol

(revised version); ‘Environmental Reporting Guidelines: Including mandatory greenhouse gas emissions reporting guidance’ (Defra, October 2013) and ISO 14064 – part 1.Photo credit: ClimateCare.


EnvironmentDeveloping a sustainable business by minimising our environmental footprint

Emissions Source Baseline FY 2013 FY 2016 FY 2017 % change (vs PY) % change (baseline)

Scope 1Natural gas 195 154 120 -22% -39%

Leased transport 855 388 506 30% -41%

Scope 2Purchased electricity (market/location based)2

1,94832,384/ 1,862

1,642/ 1,567

-31% -16%

n/a -20%

Scope 3

Water 122 71 71 0% -42%

Business travel 1,400 1,673 2,007 0% -43%

Paper 37 44 53 20% 43%

Waste 20 24 111 19% 445%

Electricity T&D 156 138 80 356% -49%

Total tonnes of CO2e (market based) n/a 4,876 4,589 -6% n/a

Total tonnes of CO2e (location based) 4,733 4,354 4,514 +4% -5%

Number of employees 2,248 2,686 2,867 7% 28%

Tonnes of CO2e per employee 2.11 1.62 1.57 -3% -25%

This year we completed the multi-million pound investment in moving our online system to a new SaaS platform. The move to cloud services has enabled us to close one of our UK data centres resulting in a significant 31% drop in associated energy usage and carbon savings of 102 tCO2e.

Energy and resource efficiency

As part of our commitment to disclosing our environmental performance, we responded to CDP for the fourth consecutive year and maintained our ’B’ score from the previous year. This placed us above the industry and the overall average score of ‘C’. CDP’s feedback noted that our score is indicative of “more advanced environmental stewardship” and that we have taken steps to “reduce negative climate change impacts”.

Carbon Disclosure Project (‘CDP’)

2 This work is partially based on the country-specific CO2 emission factors developed by the International Energy Agency, © OECD/IEA 2017 but the resulting work has been prepared by Carbon Smart Limited and does not necessarily reflect the views of the International Energy Agency.

3 Scope 2 dual reporting (market and location based) was introduced in 2015/16 and so market based emissions are not reported in historic years.

Tonnes of CO2e


Awards

Memberships

FTSE4Good Heart of the City Contributor

Member for nine years.

100 BAME Board Talent

Gary Elden OBE

Listed in the Green Park top 100 BAME Board Talent Index for the second consecutive year.

National CSR Awards

Gary Elden OBE

shortlisted in top three for Outstanding Corporate Leadership in the National CSR Awards.

Lord Mayor’s Dragon Awards

Generating Genius

Finalist for Community Partner in the Lord Mayor’s Dragon Awards for our joint partnership.

We give advice and mentoring for companies new to CSR.

Awards and memberships

Targets and commitments for the year aheadWe have made good progress against last year’s commitments. The development of our SThree Foundation continues to be a big focus, to be strengthened with a university scholarship scheme to encourage more female students into IT and Engineering.

We also continue regional work for charitable giving, and plan to further refresh our CSR strategy and communications.

On diversity and inclusion, we have prepared gender pay information in line with required reporting timelines and will further strengthen our IdentiFy project whilst building on our eNPS score of 25.4.

On environmental matters, we will explore setting carbon reduction targets whilst continuing IT efficiencies and working with external parties to maximise our environmental performance within the agreed CDP framework.

Gemma BranneyHead of Corporate Social Responsibility

+44 (0)141 202 [email protected]

www.sthree.com/en/about-us/csr

Contact us for more information:

www.sthree.com

mailto:g.branney%40sthree.com?subject=

http://www.sthree.com/en/about-us/csr

corporate social responsibility · sthree corporate social responsibility report 2017 5 workplace...

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