How we will measure our commitments In FY22, we are conducting a Responsible Business Tracker with the UK’s Business in the Community organisation. This will provide us with a detailed report of how we are performing and coupled with recent investment ratings feedback will support us to identify longer-term sustainability targets. In the interim, in FY22, building on our work to date we aim to: • Report against the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) • Establish our local office champion network and provide training and toolkits to support responsible business practices in line with health, safety, security and environment requirements • Create an Accessibility colleague resource group, to look at inclusion across everything we do – from websites, to our offices and working off-site – through multiple lenses, always seeking to improve how we operate • Measure our travel behaviour and understand the impact on the environment and how we can improve/offset, with an aim to reduce activity by 30% based on FY19 (our last full year of travel pre the pandemic) by: • Continuing to host routine meetings virtually where it makes sense to do so • Embracing flexibility, family friendly policies and remote working • Piloting a new pricing model in our UK Assurance business to help customers understand the environmental impact of on-site delivery versus remote delivery • Continue to increase the diversity of our workforce by establishing partnerships and ensuring our focus on creating an environment where everyone feels welcome: • In FY21, 29% of all hires (where gender was disclosed) were female, with an increase of 43.5% on actual female hires compared to FY20; in FY22 we commit to achieving the same or better through our targeted efforts and working with hiring managers to realise the value of difference • Establish partnerships in the UK and North America to support our early careers programme, with a focus on underrepresented groups • 100% of eligible colleagues undertake compliance training covering Code of Ethics, Inclusion and Diversity, Anti-Bribery and Corruption, Data Privacy and Data Protection and Information Security • Launch our Action Ally programme, led by the Gender colleague resource group, to educate and inspire 100% of our colleagues to be inclusive every day Reflections on the past year While technology was able to break (in part) the barrier of isolation caused by the global pandemic, there was also a risk of it becoming a barrier as fatigue and frustration started to creep in. We know from our engagement with other organisations we weren’t unique, and we took action to mitigate the risk to our Covid-19 survive and thrive strategy. We continued to focus on the health and wellbeing of colleagues – prioritising the training of a global network of 61 Mental Health First Aiders and training over 100 managers in mental health awareness and supporting wellbeing, building resilience through a series of engagements throughout the organisation. We also launched our NCC Conversations programme to support engagement around our four inclusion and diversity priorities (page 62) – gender, LGBTQIA+, race and ethnicity and neurodiversity. The conversations, hosted through panel sessions, articles, workshops and podcasts, have led to positive changes in how we operate as a firm.
NCC Conversations is such a great initiative and, although we are all remote working, it feels like this has somehow brought us closer together.
Holly Duncalf Project Manager
Our focus on inclusion and diversity is sustained through embedding insights for dialogue, and local target setting into our monthly executive business reviews and is a key priority in our growth strategy. We continued to reduce complexity in our business, reducing our legal entities, combining our Benelux and Danish entities to create one powerful European business and creating a global operating committee to unify how our professional and managed services operate in service of our customers. This not only increases our ability to attract a wider and more diverse talent pool but also reduces the risk of regional talent challenges affecting our ability to deliver for customers. In the ever-increasing connected society, cyber resilience is important and should be part of responsible business practice – from design to operations. As a major player in the cyber resilience market, we have a responsibility to apply our world-class research skills, market knowledge and threat intelligence to ensure we design products and services that support our customers to meet their whole cyber resilience posture requirements. This is the driver of the progress towards our vision to be the complete global provider of cyber resilience solutions within a growing global market and evidenced with the launch of new propositions to meet this requirement. Partnership for the goals We review partnerships on an annual basis with a view to ensure they continue to be of value. In the past year we became members of the UK’s Business in the Community programme, undertaking its Responsible Business Tracker assessment to support our future sustainability plans. In this new financial year, we have become members of the United Nations Global Compact, with full Board and CEO endorsement to embed its principles into our strategy, culture and ways of working. More broadly, our active network engagement and industry partnerships help us to further support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, build global cyber resilience and help make the whole world safer and more secure. Investing in a sustainable future Our commitment is to create an environment where all colleagues feel psychologically, emotionally and physically safe to be authentic and representative of the diversity of the world they live in, to share their personal experiences and to have equal opportunity to achieve. We want to drive the focus globally but empower local action ensuring that we reflect and embrace our differences. This commitment influences our partnerships, how we recruit and how we deliver value to our customers. We will continue to secure the future today and our sustainability agenda will play a strategic role to support conscious decision making as we begin to set targets that challenge us to continually improve in making the world safer and more secure for all.
NCC Group plc — Annual report and accounts for the year ended 31 May 2021
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