We achieve this by providing a range of sustainably-focused services and products that help our clients to meet their sustainability goals while advancing our own ambitions to make a positive impact on the planet.
However, our journey to create a formal program to assess and improve the impacts that IE creates as a business has just started. At the beginning of 2022, we launched the next phase of our sustainability program: Advancing ESG@IE.
Advancing ESG@IE
We're now more than 12 months into our ambitious journey to make a tangible and measurable difference year-on-year to our sustainability performance.
From procurement and supply chain sustainability, through carbon and energy reduction, waste avoidance and circular design, we’ve started to address every area of sustainability in our ESG (Environmental, Social And Governance) roadmap which is helping us to deliver a series of practical actions across IE that will benefit our customers and help us meet our goals.
Going into our second year of Advancing ESG@IE, we now have our baseline, independently verified, calculations for our carbon footprint which has allowed us to set more detailed objectives for our route to halve carbon emissions by 2030 and get to Net Zero by 2050.
We want sustainability to be integral to every part of our business and something that all our employees consider in their day-to-day actions. Our commitment and investment to our sustainability goals is clear and ongoing.
Since the end of FY23, we’re delighted to report that we’ve been awarded a gold medal from EcoVadis coming in the 97th percentile from over 62,000 rated companies. This has improved from the 59th percentile in 2022, showing the progress we have made in 12 months.
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IE is owned by Steelcase, a global, leading organisation that is recognised by its peers and third-party organisations for its commitments to people, the planet and its communities. You can find out more information about Steelcase's award-winning approach to ESG by reading its 2023 impact report or on the ESG section of its website. As a global furniture manufacturer, Steelcase's core operations have a different set of impacts to IE, so we launched 'Advancing ESG@IE' to identify and improve our own individual impacts on the planet.
Within our AdvancingESG@IE initiative, we have produced ambitious long-term (3-5 years) goals along with short-term objectives (12+ months). You can read the full details of how we performed against our FY23 goals and objectives in our ESG Impact Report FY23.
We’ve also included a summary of what we’ve been doing with our FY24 goals in the sections below.
Social
Our Social Goals
Our FY24 Objectives
We will achieve our goals by:
volunteering/charity hours.
At IE, we are committed to supporting our people, clients, stakeholders and the wider community to thrive.
Community Engagement
To continue our support for our local communities we have formalised our community engagement program. In 2022 we were involved in multiple fundraising events for cancer charities and have chosen to volunteer with The Trussell Trust, a charity supporting over 1,200 food banks across the UK.
Employee Welfare
We have put several systems in place to support our employees to be happy and healthy at work and home. These include an Employee Assistance Programme, Retail Discount Schemes and Employee Forum to give our people a voice within the business.
Training and Development
We are committed to delivering continual learning and development opportunities for our employees so they can grow and feel fulfilled at work. We also rolled out a 4-part ESG training programme to educate the team on the concepts of ESG and why the initiative is vital to the business.
Health and Safety
Adhering to Health and Safety legislation is an integral part of our business, and in FY23, we achieved zero Health and Safety non-compliance through our ISO audit.
Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
We have gathered data regarding diversity & inclusion at IE and will use this data to drive our ambition to ensure the company is representative of our community. We have also delivered equity, diversity & inclusion training to staff.