A business case for being one of the community’s most responsible employers
With a commitment to be the most responsible employer it can be, Scrutton Bland strives to ensure it does the right thing by the communities in which it lives and works. Luke Morris explains how it is the values of our firm which underpin everything we do. M uch is made of company values. Often they are espoused, printed out, plastered around meeting rooms, but they are not really “lived”. They are inauthentic. Our values authentically reflect who we are and how we do business as a modern and forward- thinking firm built on the historic strength and foundation of a partnership. Intrinsic to this is supporting our own people, who we recognise as our greatest asset and an essential part of our success and continued growth. We are committed to providing a working environment where people can thrive and where individual career paths are supported. As a firm of professional advisers, we use our expertise to provide pro-bono advice to local charities, not-for-profit and educational organisations within the local community. In addition, the Scrutton Bland Knowledge Academy offers education and information to our existing clients and the wider business community.
We want to attract and retain talented people and do this by offering apprenticeships, school leaver programmes and summer internships, and actively encourage professional and personal development so that every one of us achieves our full potential. We also encourage creativity and open discussion to help us to continually develop as a business and ensure that our work is having a positive impact. As a business and a group of individuals who live and work locally, we enjoy supporting our communities through local charities, and regularly take part in fundraising and volunteering for local causes. We donate to a variety of charitable causes and engage in numerous fundraising and volunteering activities. We have established a salary-based charitable giving scheme, where staff can donate monthly directly from their salaries and the total amount is then match funded by our Partners.
Finally, we are strongly committed to developing an ethos of responsibility and care for the environment and promoting sustainability across our sites. We encourage recycling, reusing and reducing waste and have introduced a paperless process to help us achieve this. We actively endorse car sharing and offer a cycle to work scheme which helps employees with the cost of buying a bike and cycling equipment. We are continually striving to become more sustainable and finding new initiatives to reduce our impact on the environment. Our Community Social Responsibility vision is simple: to be our community’s most responsible employer by doing the right thing.
We are committed to providing: • Exceptional client service as set out in our published ‘Client Care Charter’. • Transparency, trust and integrity in everything we do: the founding principles of our partnership business, 100 years old next year, are unchanged and essentially derived from the 1890s Partnership Act. • Clear advice and effective solutions based on innovation and how we apply technology and our intellectual property. Our partnership provenance, and the importance of individual people to our business, be they our staff or our clients, means that we are a “community” rather than a “corporate”. That’s why we have eschewed the “Corporate” in CSR.
Luke Morris is Corporate Finance Partner at Scrutton Bland. Email luke.morris@ scruttonbland.co.uk or visit our website.
C O M M U N I T Y | S C R U T T O N B L A N D | 3 7
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker