Inspiring stories along our journey

It’s not all facts and data, highlights, events and developments that have helped drive our success this year

SUSTAINABILITY APPOINTMENTS

To drive our commitment to sustainability, we have invested in two senior appointments in the last 12 months:

Chris Truss - Director of Sustainability

In tandem with his existing role as International Development Director and aligned to his undoubted passion for the subject, Chris assumed executive responsibilities for this area.

Chris combines his two passions, travel and the natural world, to deliver practical insight to leading businesses. Having worked in the travel industry for over 20 years and with a degree in Environmental Chemistry, he helps companies to align their travel programmes with their wider ESG strategy goals.

At Reed & Mackay, Chris is responsible for driving our internal environmental and sustainability strategy as well as leading client engagement in this key area.

During his career Chris has worked with a wide range of multinational clients including; Sony, Proctor & Gamble and Unilever. Whilst in his role at Reed & Mackay, he has helped some of our key legal clients to develop, model and deliver sustainable travel programmes including associated activity, reporting and strategy.

When not at work, Chris can usually be found on top of a hill, swimming in a river or riding his bike.

Myla studied ecology and conservation as a part of her Biological Sciences degree and continued her interest in nature and wildlife as she explored the globe over the following years.

Her passion for travel led to a career in the industry, which includes more than 8 years of corporate travel management experience, in both operations and account management.

In recent years, the increasing impact of climate change on ecosystems and communities worldwide, inspired Myla to return to post-graduate study at University College Cork (8th in The World University Impact Rankings).

Having graduated with a qualification in Sustainability in Enterprise, she joined Reed & Mackay in November 2021 in the newly created role of Sustainability Manager.

In her free time Myla loves hiking, biking and dancing to funk and soul bands at live gigs.

Myla McPhail - Sustainability Manager

MENTAL HEALTH

FIRST AIDERS

Mental health is of the utmost importance to Reed & Mackay, which is why we trained 6 employees to become Mental Health First Aiders in 2021. Our mental health first aiders are the point of contact for employees if they are experiencing emotional distress or mental health problems.

WORLD MENTAL HEALTH DAY

We recognised that, after the pandemic disruption of the last 24 months and the subsequent uplift in travel volumes in 2021, many additional strains had been placed upon colleagues mental and physical wellbeing.

To raise awareness internally and encourage our people to take personal actions and to look after each other, we published a set of guidelines and information to offer guidance and support in this vital area.

GREEN AWARENESS

CAMPAIGNS

Promoting environmental awareness across the business is an essential element of Reed & Mackay’s Environment Management System. Keeping environmental practices in the forefront of people’s minds is vital to ensuring we reduce and avoid CO2 emissions wherever possible.

Over the years, we have taken part in numerous green awareness activities, including charity volunteering days, collaborations with suppliers and competitions to encourage our employees to be greener in their everyday life as well as at work.

Over the last year, we have continued to take proactive action in this area, including - following the change to make Microsoft Teams, our company preferred communication channel, sending out regular, informative and pertinent awareness bulletins.

BE GREEN WHILE WORKING FROM HOME

In the last two years, working from home has become a necessity and it might even become the future of work for many businesses.

There’s no denying the circumstance that brought about this new way of working was neither wanted nor expected. Nonetheless, working from home does have its benefits – no more commuting!

Not only do we avoid rush-hour, delays and cancellations, research suggests that commuters with a 50-mile round trip could save 379.2 kg of CO2 emissions just by working remotely one day per week.

However, research also suggests that our overall carbon footprint can increase when we work from home, especially in the colder months, so we put together some advice for reducing environmental impact when working from home. The campaign received positive feedback from our people, who provided some of their own energy saving data and environmental tips when homeworking.

WORLD QUALITY WEEK

We are a proud supporter of World Quality Week, a campaign to recognise the contributions of quality professionals across the globe. Quality is at the core of our business activities and is embodied in our company vision: ‘To be the most valued, recommended and entrepreneurial travel, advisory and events business in the world’. In 2021, World Quality Week adopted a very relevant theme - ‘Sustainability: Improving our products, people and planet’.

To provide internal information on how we supported World Quality Week, a new and improved Quality Awareness page was introduced to demonstrate:

How we incorporate sustainability in our products
The importance of people and their wellbeing to quality and sustainability
How we play a part in taking care of our planet

CITIZENS OF THE GREAT BARRIER REEF

In addition to our global corporate travel businesses, we own and operate from our Sydney offices an Australian inbound tourism business, Alquemie, who specialise in creating bespoke and experiential luxury holidays.

Understandably the Great Barrier Reef is a popular inclusion in these itineraries, and we work closely with the likes of Lady Elliot Island and Lizard Island including the Research Station established there.

This involvement with the GBR, led Alquemie to being one of the Founding Circle Members of the Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef. Established by Earth Hour Founder Andy Ridley, Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef has a goal to protect and conserve the Great Barrier Reef through simple individual actions such as ditching single-use plastics, to citizen science and world-leading research.

Alquemie also works with The Australian Wildlife Conservancy (AWC). Whilst our commitment is not financial as it is with Citizens of the Great Barrier Reef, the international visitors we are able to selectively introduce to the AWC in turn provide funding to the project they engage with.

HELPING CLIENTS DRIVE THEIR SUSTAINABILITY COMMITMENTS

A sustainable business travel programme doesn’t just help to protect the planet, it tells the world what sort of a business you are. As such, clients are now seeking assistance from their suppliers to align their commitments and allow them to achieve sustainability goals.

Business travel is universally acknowledged as being one of the four largest company costs alongside, salaries, infrastructure and raw material purchase. That’s why we have an important role to play and why we provide our clients with point-of-sale carbon visibility, ‘switch to rail’ carbon savings, badging of eco-hotels, dynamic reduction dashboards and access to a comprehensive off-setting programme.

In 2021, we were approached by a longstanding legal client to take their corporate sustainability campaign a step further by spreading personal awareness to the traveller themselves.

Having already reduced their carbon emissions for each employee by 36%, the next phase of their sustainability strategy involved creating greater accountability at an individual level. They needed a powerful visual tool to make travellers aware of their individual impact and provide them with a solution to create positive change.

We recommended using a highly visual, personalised carbon emission dashboard for business travel activity, designed to enable employees to take personal accountability for their environmental footprint, changing behaviour to reduce emissions as well as delivering access to a simple mechanism to offset those that remained.

We knew from experience that simply providing visibility of personal emissions would have limited success. To really drive change, we needed to give a fuller picture. Therefore, we worked to bring critical context, aligning emissions with real activity. For instance, the number of smart phones that could have been powered, or homes that could have been run based on the traveller’s individual emission levels.

The reports went live within three months demonstrating both our flexibility and commitment to change - internally and on behalf of our clients. This additional reporting infrastructure is now available for all clients and offers each individual:

Clear visibility of their environmental impact from travel
Personal empowerment to easily offset their own travel
Practical alternatives for carbon emission reduction

"For the first time, our employees are empowered to reduce their carbon footprint thanks to visual dashboards that make data relatable" - Client