Environmental, Social and Governance

Introduction

Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) issues form an important facet of the running of any organisation in our society. At Gravitate HR, we believe that our actions and decisions in how we operate our business can have a positive impact on all of these headings. This policy aims to bring all of these areas together and set out our aims as a responsible employer. This policy provides a clear demonstration of our commitments to each other as employees of the organisation, our clients and other stakeholders plus the wider communities whom our work touches.

Policy, Practices and Initiatives

We are aware that the running of our organisation will, in many ways, affect our place of work, the community and the wider environment in which we operate. We believe that the way we run our organisation can and should make a positive difference in these areas and we aim to ensure that continued efforts are made to achieve that. We endeavour to listen to the views of our team and the wider business community, continuously review and improve where possible and to use innovation to further support our ESG efforts.

Our ESG practices and initiatives are identifiable in the following areas:

Environmental

It is our aim to limit the impact that our business operations have on the environment by taking conscious decisions to reduce waste and emissions where possible. This includes:

  • As a service-based organisation, we do not make any tangible products. Other than those required to operate IT hardware, we do not use any sources of fuel or energy to support our clients and deliver the vast majority of our work.
  • We encourage a blend of remote and face-to-face meetings to balance the need to ensure clients and team members are seeing each other in person to collaborate, develop and build relationships, whilst limiting travel.
  • We utilise remote meeting technology to further limit avoidable travel involved with face-to-face meeting.
  • Where travel is required, where possible we will use public transport to reduce the number of single car trips and reduce the carbon footprint associated with travel where possible.
  • We are almost exclusively paperless and minimise printing unless absolutely necessary.
  • Our Director/Founder is a voluntary Trustee of a charity which seeks to protect green spaces in urban areas in perpetuity and works in collaboration with local authorities and other bodies to identify and protect green spaces for the greater good of the surrounding communities.

Social

As a business which supports other organisations with their human resource practices and initiatives, we are committed to ensuring our own practices are representative of an employer of choice offering fair work and one which is conscious of its social responsibility.

  • Our Team regularly meet remotely and occasionally in person together to discuss our workloads, development opportunities/desires, business performance and to request feedback from employees on things they would like to see changed or implemented within the organisation. This includes a quarterly business update where the Board transparently update employees on relevant areas and invite comment and feedback and engagement with these.
  • We pay our employee’s professional membership subscriptions and encourage them to engage with our institute of personnel development to seek out development opportunities.
  • We encourage on the job development as well as “extra-curricular” development opportunities and recent examples of training course attended by staff include Mental Health First Aid and Mediation Training. We encourage development through education and qualifications and provide interest free loans if required to help employees fund College and University courses.
  • We offer all employees set and guaranteed hours.
  • All of our staff are paid above the voluntary living wage.
  • We provide equality, diversity and inclusion training to clients and regularly have internal sessions to share knowledge of this and actively promote equality, diversity and inclusion across our Team.
  • We are a flexible employer both informally and through the formal channels. We have flexible start/end times for staff provided core hours are operated. We are open to discussions relating to permanent flexible working arrangements and have examples of these implemented within the staff team.
  • We promote a healthy work life balance and ensure that annual holiday allowances are used fully each year, recognising the benefit of time away from work.
  • We donate to different charitable causes each year and several employees are voluntary trustees on the Boards of different charities to help guide and advise those charities.

Governance

The relevant organisational policies which help set out our commitment to good Governance within our business include:

  • Anti-bribery/corruption
  • Whistleblowing and,
  • Anti-slavery/child/forced labour

These policies are shared with staff to ensure they are aware of the risks and where vulnerability can be prevalent in their interactions with clients and suppliers.

We work with our clients to implement such policies within their own organisations and to spread awareness and knowledge of good HR practice which lends itself to good Governance.

We have an internal Board of three Directors who are responsible for the Governance of our organisation and for ensuring we meet our obligations and legal responsibilities in this regard.

We also have an external non-executive Director who supports the organisation and attends board meetings to ensure we have external scrutiny and objectivity applied into any decision-making and strategies which we consider and implement.

The Board structure is defined and Directors have a clear remit for the areas which they are responsible for monitoring and reporting on. These include financial security, new business pipeline and team satisfaction/wellbeing.

We have long standing relationships with relevant professional advisors, such as Employment Lawyers, to make sure that we are fully compliant, operate on good practice guidelines and codes of conduct.

ESG + (Innovation)

We seek to use innovation to compliment each ESG component where possible.

We have a series of web/app based solutions for running our business which significantly reduce the requirement to generate paper for matters such as holiday, absence and personnel record keeping and eliminate printing requirements for our invoicing and purchase ledger activities.

From a Social perspective, we encourage innovation and creativity through giving our team flexible approaches to working, allowing staff to utilise home working and in-person collaboration, increasing their engagement with our business and clients.

From a Governance perspective any technological based decisions and solutions are considered with ESG in mind and not as an afterthought and is demonstrated through the technology we have in place.

As a service-based organisation who already limit our impact on the environment, we have not set ourselves any formal metric-based targets to achieve. Rather, we ensure that ESG is a conscious aspect of how we run our business, how we interact with our team and how we service our clients and we will ensure this remains at the forefront of our operations and strategic decision-making.