Our Business

Our Equality and Diversity

We have two big impacts in our business on diversity and inclusion.

How we support our clients.
Who we chose to work with.

Client support

Clients come to us to improve their sustainability, which includes all aspects of Environmental, Social and Governance impacts. A large part of the social piece is around diversity and inclusion. After working with us, they typically understand a lot more about diversity and inclusion, how to measure it and how to improve even further. We support them in many ways to improve their diversity and inclusion from building relevant partnerships, undergo unconscious bias training and how to further support the hidden disability agenda.

We have worked with over 200 businesses, with each and every one of these, we discuss their own Diversity and Inclusion. We are proud that within these 200 businesses, this represents an employee group of over 10,000 employees. Typically, topics which we discuss include but are not limited to:

EDI measurement – through recruitment and employment to leavers
Building relevant partnerships
Training including unconscious bias
How to further support people with hidden disabilities
Compliance to DDA
Advertising and recruitment reviews for bias

Who we chose to work with

Our team and all Associates are very familiar with the sustainability agenda and deliver the workshops and training which includes the EDI topics.

We work with a specialist consultant, where appropriate, for our clients or internal benefit, who works across many sectors helping companies reduce risk exposure by becoming more inclusive and accessible to meet the requirements of the Equality Act.

For any business or organisation, we purchase goods and services from, we ensure that they have an EDI policy, awareness and a commitment to deliver high standards.

Within our business

As a business, we have a 50:50 female: male leadership structure. During the Kickstart scheme we employed two young people from diverse backgrounds with hidden challenges. We supported them to get into employment after the role with us ended.

In addition:

We have published EDI policy on our website
We are a registered Disability Confident employer, until 2025
We have completed training on Unconscious Bias and have active CPD certificates which are available on request.

How we stay updated

A key element of our work with clients, is transferring knowledge to their teams. Supporting the UN Sustainable Development Goad target 4.7 is a founding principle of our business. We, therefore, commit time and resources to our own business sustainable development as well.

We measure our hours of professional training as a business KPI and seek relevant courses across the whole agenda on a regular basis, as well as EDI courses.

We also participate in training and events offered as members of several professional bodies and networks including:

Institute of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability
Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment
Hertfordshire Chamber of Commerce
Chamber of Conscious
Global Chamber

Our Environmental Impact

Our Environment impact as a business

As an SME, with no physical products and a virtual operating model, our footprint is relatively small. We do need to practice what we preach so our carbon footprint is measured, and we strive to improve it.

2022 saw an increase driven predominantly by an increase in employees with associated electricity and space heating. The heating is a long-term challenge that will require a shift away from Natural Gas. We support our team with Efficiency advice and sharing in order to minimise this.

An additional challenge for us as a business, is our commuting carbon impact, as more clients opt for face to face rather than virtual delivery.

To minimise this, we:

Use public transport wherever possible
Car share

Approach for this project

We would adopt the same principles for the Buckinghamshire project and work virtual where it makes sense and use public transport on occasions where we needed to meet face to face.

Currently we have no physical offices or infrastructure, and at the time of publication of this report 100% of employees are on renewable electricity tariffs.

Carbon footprint

In 2022 we offset our Scope 1 and 2 footprints through tree planting in Africa. This year we opted to expand the reach by choosing Better Globe. This not only offsets our carbon via tree planting, but they facilitate donation packages to counter poverty and corruption in Africa.

Our aspiration is to create positive biodiversity and community impacts through our offsetting.

Our scope 3 footprint is also small, predominantly sitting in cloud services procured and any paper we use. Applying conversion factors based on spend alone doesn’t sit right with us so we continue to investigate the best way to measure this going forward.

Scope	Activity Type	2021 tCO2e	2022 tCO2e
Total		1.86	2.82
Scope 1	Stationary combustion	1.77	2.66
	Scope 1 – Total	1.77	2.66
Scope 2	Purchased electricity – location based	0.06	0.09
	Purchased electricity – market based	0.00	0.03
	Scope 2 – Location based + heat and steam	0.06	0.09
	Scope 2 – market based + heat and steam	0.00	0.03
Scope 3	Business travel	0.09	0.14

Waste

Again, a low number, currently just post-it notes and paper! In procuring them, we source recycled varieties and send them back into the recycling loop when we’re done with them. In future reports we will add a metric if this becomes a more significant impact.

If we do use Ink, our cartridges are recycled.

IT

We have a desire to extend the life of our IT equipment and opt to repair and maintain this for as long as we can. If we do need to change; we donate our equipment to Charities who support Digital Inclusion.

We are also conscious of the environmental impact of our IT Services. We are 100% cloud based and ensure that we pay attention to the impact of our website and the emails we send and store. We use Ecosia as our preferred search engine.