We’ve achieved ‘Investor in People Gold’
We’re thrilled to let our colleagues and our business partners know that we’ve achieved the ‘We invest in people gold accreditation’. This is a great achievement and was only achieved with the contribution and dedication of all our colleagues.
We’ve so much to celebrate – here are just some of our achievements outlined from the recent assessment:
- We demonstrated clear organisational vision and purpose as well as pride in our brand and understanding our impact on society.
- The assessment showed we have inspirational and reassuring leadership with supportive line management who advocate trust and empowerment.
- It’s clear that our core values are robust, and as an organisation we have a strong performance review process and colleagues have access to a range of effective learning solutions.
- We evidence collaboration and embrace change and continuous improvement.
To put it into perspective - only 17% of organisations achieve gold accreditation and, in real terms, it means that every single person at GC is involved in supporting each other and is doing their very best to make work better.
From May through to July this year, the assessment process was an opportunity for us to listen to colleagues – and from listening, we’ve learnt so much. We’ve got recommendations and an action plan, as well as some additional business unit information, so we can keep having follow-up conversations, making changes, keep improving and moving forward and realise our ambition to achieve the ‘Platinum’ award upon our next full assessment. You can read the full assessment report here.
We’re a ‘Real Living Wage Employer’
We’ve been committed to paying real living wage for a number of years - we know how important this is to our colleagues, especially during this ongoing period of increased cost of living. We’re pleased to announce that we’ve been accredited as a Real Living Wage Employer and every colleague working for GC will earn a real living wage.
The Real Living Wage (RLW) is higher than the government’s National minimum and National Living Wage, and is an independently calculated hourly rate of pay that’s based on the actual cost of living. It’s calculated each year and is announced by the Living Wage Foundation as part of Living Wage Week. The current rate is £10.90 and in line with GC’s annual salary review, will take effect for colleagues from April 2023. The RLW rate of pay in London is £11.95, to reflect the higher costs of living in the capital.
We’re one of 11,000 organisations who’ve voluntarily chose to pay the Real Living Wage.
We’ve committed to the ‘Armed Forces covenant’ pledge
In July, the GC joined the Armed Forces Covenant. It’s a pledge which ensures no member of the Armed Forces community is unfairly treated, or left disadvantaged in their day-to-day lives.
As an organisation, we recognise the value serving personnel, reservists, veterans and their families bring to our business, and to the businesses and communities we serve across the UK. As part of our commitment, we have pledged to:
- Raise awareness among our colleagues and create focused training for colleagues who directly support veterans and those transitioning from the Armed Forces.
- Continue offering mental health support to colleagues.
- Build relationships with local communities.
- Review and improve policies relating to reservists, and extend our support to family and dependants of Armed Forces personnel.
- Attract veterans to work for the GC by looking at guaranteed interview schemes for ex-Armed Forces, advertising vacancies through the Resettlement Programme and promoting GC as an Armed Forces friendly organisation.
- Promote and offer our suite of cross-group products and services to those who are leaving the Armed Forces – including support with starting their own business, access to training and qualifications, employability support, and transition support (such as help with budgeting, cooking and finding accommodation).
The Military Veterans and Reservists group is now our 8th Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) network - giving colleagues across GC who’ve served in the Armed Forces, and their families, the opportunity to meet like-minded individuals and allies who have similar lived experiences. If you’d like to join, or enquire about joining the network, please email edi@growthco.uk or join the Military Veteran and Reservist network email MilitaryVeteranandReservistsNetwork@growthco.uk
We’ve also achieved the ‘bronze award’ in the Defence Employer Recognition Scheme, which further reinforces our commitment to supporting ex-Armed Forces personnel, while encouraging other businesses we work with to do the same. Going forward, we’ll be working towards achieving the ‘silver award’.
We’ve closed gender pay gap
We’re proud to announce that our July 2022 EDI Board Report confirmed that we’ve closed the gender pay gap in that reporting period.
We’re proud to lead by example when it comes to inclusivity. We understand the benefits of having a diverse workforce, and we’re committed to championing equality and diversity among our people, clients and communities in which we work. This includes addressing gender equality and supporting women in the workplace.
GC recognises that closing the Gender Pay Gap will continue to be a long-term challenge and one that’s affected by wider social and cultural factors. We’ve developed a number of actions to take so that we continue to do our part to remove barriers to pay inequality. We recognise that we’re on a journey, with more work to be done.
We’ve also reduced the pay gap for colleagues from ethnic communities year-on-year since we voluntarily decided to assess this along with gender pay reporting – and we’ll continue with our commitment to reduce this further.
We’ve achieved the ‘Social Enterprise Gold Mark’
At GC we’ve worked hard to cement our position as a leading social enterprise and back in 2021 we gained the ‘Social Enterprise Mark’, alongside a nomination at the UK Social Enterprise Awards.
Building on this, in June 2022 we were awarded the ‘Social Enterprise Gold Mark’. This was a fantastic achievement and one which reinforces our reputation and credibility as an organisation which demonstrates best practices across several key business areas that are central to social enterprise excellence. This includes areas such as governance, stakeholder engagement, business ethics, financial transparency and social impact. Our assessment for the Gold Mark award involved submitting a range of evidence that outlined how we met set criteria, including independently-conducted interviews with some of our Board members and responses collated from colleague surveys.
Achieving the Social Enterprise Mark accreditation isn’t something that can be achieved over night. It took a robust team effort to bring together and share the evidence to achieve the required standard of social enterprise best practice. We underwent due diligence to prove our credentials, assessed against sector-agreed criteria and we’ve proved our commitment to using profits and income to create benefits for our society and the environment.
We’re accelerating our Neto Zero ambition
We’re proud that the Growth Company is an award-winning provider of environmental services designed to accelerate the net zero ambition. We convert environmental pressures into competitive advantages, to help businesses to achieve millions of pounds of savings, whilst driving business growth and innovation for firms that deliver sustainability products and services. Through our services and dedicated commitment to our partners’ ambitions we've saved two million tonnes of carbon and saved £500 million in energy, material and waste costs.
As an organisation, we’ve always been looking at ways to reduce our own environmental impact – and perhaps we haven’t shouted about this enough. We’ve been a carbon neutral company since 2019 across Scopes 1, 2 (see definitions below) and Business Travel and offsetting using the Gold Standard Scheme, but we wanted to go beyond this.
This is why we announced our Net Zero target - to be Net Zero by 2035 across Scopes 1, 2 and all categories of Scope 3 (see definition below), and reducing our carbon emissions to the point where we can’t anymore, and then off-setting the rest. In addition, we achieved the ISO 14001 Environmental Management System accreditation in 2021. We are also members of the Environmental Association for Universities and Colleges (EAUC) and are an accredited Institute of Environmental Management and Assessment (IEMA) training centre, with our ‘Journey to Net Zero’ programme an accredited IEMA course.
This is an ambitious target and puts us ahead of a lot of other businesses and ahead of the government’s targets for the UK to be Net Zero by 2050. This’ll mean we’ll be looking at reducing our emissions from both our internal activities and also those from our supply chain, as well as implementing new technology and procedures. We’re engaging with our suppliers to make sure we’re supporting those which are on the same journey as us.
Scope definitions:
- Scope 1 – gas and liquid fuel consumption, refrigerant gases and company vehicle fuel
- Scope 2 – purchased electricity
- Scope 3 – purchased goods and services, capital goods, up and downstream transportation and distribution, business travel and agile working, employee commuting, leased assets, waste, and investments