What is the UNGC Communication on Progress?
The United Nations Global Compact aims to mobilise a global movement of companies and stakeholders who are committed to sustainability. The UNGC requires participating companies to produce an annual Communication on Progress (COP) report which demonstrates their corporate sustainability through embedding the Global Compact’s Ten Principles into their business.
This year marks Anthesis’ fifth publication of the UNGC Communication on Progress report.
The 2022 report focuses on our progress as a business over the past 12 months, between March 2021 to March 2022.
Our commitment to the ten UNGC principles remains as strong as ever. Operating as one team of 800+ sustainability activators, we’re laser focused on driving impact and unlocking sustainable performance for our 2,600+ clients. Responding to strong market demand, we’ve achieved significant growth across all countries and market solutions, welcoming more than 200 new colleagues to Anthesis.
We continue to advance our global Corporate Responsibility Programme as we make progress against our three-year Objectives Plan and our commitments as a certified B Corp.
Read our Chief Executive’s Annual Statement to find out more of our company highlights over the past year, and explore the full report:
Corporate Responsibility
We continue to advance our global Corporate Responsibility Programme as we make progress against our three-year Objectives Plan (published in 2021). We have purposely aligned our Objectives Plan to the five B Corp Impact Areas to ensure we meet the high B Corp standards of social and environmental performance, transparency, and accountability.
Over the past year, we’ve made solid progress, of which some highlights include:
- A focus on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion to ensure we encourage and nurture a diverse and inclusive culture; we’ve established new employee networks, added more diversity to our leadership team and Board, and rolled out unbiased recruitment procedures, and internal training.
- A focus on supporting our employee’s physical and mental wellbeing, including promoting our Employee Assistance Programme and training up in-house Mental Health First Aiders
- Our colleagues selected SDG 13 Climate Action as our north star for charitable and community outreach initiatives and we’ve rolled out successful employee engagement initiatives including our Road to COP Challenge.
- We published our 2022 Sustainability Policy which outlines our commitments to running Anthesis in a responsible, transparent and sustainable way.
- We established a new Ethics Board to guide business decisions with regards to client work
- We rolled out Anthesis Academy, our global internal learning and development programme to equip our employees with management skills and sector knowledge directly applicable to our work and culture.
Certifications & Accolades
Our progress continues to be acknowledged through many global accolades, including Edie’s Consultancy of the Year Award 2022, The Sunday Times Fast Track 100 ‘Innovation Award’, The Sunday Times International Track 200, and Great Place to Work certification (in the USA).
In 2021, our in-house Carbon Literacy trainers delivered a successful roll out of Carbon Literacy training to over 15% of our UK workforce and we became a certified Carbon Literate Organisation (CLO) to ‘Silver Level’, accredited by the Carbon Literacy Project.
We are using our B Corp certification status to drive and strengthen our environmental performance, not just for our own operations but for our clients too. We’re also supporting other organisations with their B Corp certification and impact journeys, with several employees training to become ‘B Leaders’ to help companies navigate the accreditation process. Furthermore, Anthesis has been registered as a ‘B Corp Way’ Partner in order to be matched with companies across Europe looking to improve their impact.
Our ISO14001:2015 Environmental Management System continues to be one of our key tools to help guide, manage and ensure our continual improvement in our UK offices. Our Edinburgh office will be certified in May 2022.
