Inspiring stories along our journey

Highlights and events from our developments and success in driving forward our commitments.

INTERNAL AWARENESS CAMPAIGNS

Building resilience in a hybrid world

Business Continuity Awareness Week (BCAW) is an annual event organised by the Business Continuity Institute (BCI) to raise awareness and promote best practices for Business Continuity planning. The theme in May 2022 was: “Building Resilience in the Hybrid World”, which was particularly important given the global pandemic. We supported this theme by re-familiarising our employees with the following:

How hybrid working has changed our Business Continuity Recovery Strategy

We answered ‘Frequently Asked Questions’ about where office workers and homeworkers should recover to if their normal place of work becomes unavailable, and how employees can help aid recovery by taking their laptops home and always remaining contactable.

How to consider safety, wellbeing and the environment when working from home

Safety

We provided key information on implementing electrical safety measures, avoiding slips and trips, creating an ergonomically optimised workspace and how to report medical emergencies when working from home.

Wellbeing

We emphasised the wellbeing benefits of Reed & Mackay’s annual ‘Putting a Spring in your Step” campaign, where we encourage employees to get away from their desks and go for a walk. We brought attention to our Mental Health First Aiders and our ‘Building a Better Mental Health’ online course on our internal learning platform. We provided tips on how to create an inviting workstation in a tight space.

Environment

We reminded employees how to reduce energy consumption when working from home and the benefits of these changes. This included how to avoid sending/receiving unnecessary emails; how to reduce kettle usage; wrapping up warm; work in natural light; turn off equipment at the day's end.

How to stay secure when working from home

We provided top tips on how to secure confidential information when working remotely and travelling to and from work. This included guidance around not sharing passwords, locking screens, avoiding personal computers for work purposes, applying security measures when using public Wi-Fi, avoid printing etc.

Quality Conscience: Doing the right thing

Reed & Mackay supported the theme for World Quality Week in November 2022, which was “Quality Conscience: Doing the right thing”. The importance of quality conscience lies in its ability to drive continuous improvement and promote sustainable practices. At Reed & Mackay, we chose to support this theme by reminding our employees that being a quality conscience company is at the heart of everything we do.

We brought attention to our Whistleblowing Policy and reporting process; our sustainability efforts and achievements in the last year; how to report potential acts of bribery; how to avoid potential conflicts of interest; where to find information about Reed & Mackay’s Mental Health First Aiders.

HELPING OUR CLIENTS WITH THEIR GOALS

Client Case Study: Bespoke solutions for a Sustainable Travel Programme

Reed the full case study here

Reed & Mackay client, digital infrastructure company Colt Technology Services, is dedicated to embedding sustainability and ESG as part of the company’s DNA.

Committed to developing science-based targets (SBT) against Scopes 1, 2 and 3, Colt recognised an opportunity to initiate change with the company’s business travel when building its SBT roadmap.

Colt’s initial objectives included achieving a behavioural change, encouraging colleagues to make the responsible travel choice. One way the company wanted to do this was by showing colleagues the direct impact they were having on the planet at the point of booking travel. Colt turned to its travel management company of eight years, Reed & Mackay, to work together on how Reed & Mackay’s online booking platform could simply and effectively highlight the carbon emissions generated for different types of travel.

“Reed & Mackay brought sustainable travel options to life on the booking tool; even on messages that pop up during booking, it steered clear of being overly scientific and instead gave people easy graphics and illustrations such as ‘by taking this type of journey you’ve saved enough power to charge x number of mobile phones or plant x number of trees’ – impacts that relate to the everyday,” Colt VP, ESG Kelsey Hopkinson explains.

Reed & Mackay also worked with Colt to develop its travel policy, ensuring there was clarity around where to consider alternative methods for meetings and drive sustainable choices. This included messaging on sustainability goals for the business such as updating messaging to encourage travellers to switch to rail, designing messaging regarding one- and two-day trips and rules and approval processes implemented.

Colt also worked closely with Reed & Mackay on the sustainable reporting element of its travel programme. “For us, it wasn’t about stopping people’s business travel altogether. It was about shifting to travelling with purpose, and those guidelines provided through Reed & Mackay’s recommendations in our travel policy were part of that change in behaviour.” Hopkinson adds that the reporting element has been hugely positive: all businesses need robust reporting and monitoring to drive change.

Sustainability Knowledge Sharing & Networking Event

Reed & Mackay launched educational briefings in September 2022, beginning with its work in the sustainability sphere and its global partnership with Neste, the world’s leading Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) producer. Reed & Mackay and Neste’s partnership was the first time a TMC had offered clients the option to buy SAF at scale.

Top clients from the legal, insurance and professional services sectors came together at the Neste partnership briefing, and discussed issues such as current frustrations and road blockers they were experiencing within their sustainability programmes.

Unanimously, the key challenges were cited as obtaining robust data for carbon reduction and offsetting reporting across all emission factors, as well as lack of awareness and dedicated staff resources to tackle and change organisational mindsets to travel.

Reed & Mackay and Neste then shared their experiences and knowledge with clients on capturing travel emissions data and setting targets; managing and reducing emissions through policy and awareness; and reducing emissions with sustainable aviation fuel and Neste’s MY SAF in particular. 

Encouragingly, more than half the attendees polled at the event (53%) worked for organisations that have already set a reduction target specifically for emissions from business travel. However, more than three quarters (79%) said their organisations’ current travel policy isn’t aligned to its Environmental/Social/Governance (ESG) or sustainability programme.

SUPPLIERS

Reed & Mackay is making more conscious purchase decisions throughout the client life-cycle and moving towards being more transparent and increasing our ability to report on the carbon costs at every touch point. We have recently onboarded a new supplier for our merchandise purchases, PinkSheep. PinkSheep has an industry-leading reporting programme called Ora.

This reporting scheme will allow us to see how sustainable each product is before it’s purchased. Reed & Mackay can also stay on track of its sustainability goals with live reporting.

We are looking forward to working with PinkSheep over the coming years, helping us make more informed choices about the items we are buying and supplying for corporate gifting and trade shows.

TARGETING GENDER EQUALITY

Reed & Mackay’s HR team joined a UN Global Compact programme, Target Gender Equality Accelerator. This initiative supports companies in accelerating progress towards gender equality in the workplace and beyond. It’s designed to help set and achieve ambitious gender-equality targets aligned with the Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 5. This aims to achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls and SDG 8.5, which aims to achieve equal pay for work of equal value by 2030.

Offering a range of resources and support, it features a unique coaching component, with guidance from experienced gender equality experts to help overcome challenges and stay on track towards achieving goals.

The TGE programme has provided us with deeper understanding of the fundamental importance of gender equality, as well as the benefits this brings to the business. Our workforce is currently 64.5% female and 40% of our Senior Management team are female, which provides us a great platform to move forward towards gender equality.

At the start of the programme we carried out a Women's Empowerment Principles Gender Gap Analysis to identify our strengths and the areas where we need to take further action. We look forward to using the tool again at the end of the programme to assess our progress and help us set measurable targets around gender equality.