Our Commitment to Upskill and Inspire

Key Upskill and Inspire Initiatives

Sustainability training is delivered in a range of environments including Corporate Induction, team away days, learning lunches and through specialist courses. We also run a series of employee engagement activities to inspire and reward our employees. 

Role Specific Training: As well as including sustainability in our corporate induction training, we also provide role specific training, including IEMA based training for our centre operational teams. 

Leadership in Sustainability: As part of our commitment to upskill and inspire our people in sustainability, our senior management team are heading to University. Ten of our current senior leaders have already completed training at Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership and we plan to send six more in 2017.  

This programme gives our senior managers exposure to key, up to date sustainability data and the latest thinking in a business focused, collaborative environment.  It enables them to reconcile key business challenges with the opportunities presented by sustainability focused projects. It is the innovative thinking inspired by this programme that has led to the development of initiatives such as the EcoPod with Costa and the carbon neutral retail park. 

Inspiring our Employees to Do More:  We encourage our employees to do more in the community with at least three days of paid volunteering per year.  Our annual Community Day, started in 2008, provides our teams with an opportunity once a year to do something completely different.  It is extremely popular and supports incredibly worthy projects each year. 

A range of additional volunteering activities are made available to staff through the Butterfly Bank engagement platform across the rest of the year and we get great staff take up of these initiatives.  In addition to this, we run action based challenges on The Butterfly Bank engagement platform to encourage and reward uptake of sustainable behaviours.  

The results of our Great Place to Work survey show how seriously our teams think the business takes its sustainability commitments with scores of close to 90% in this category.

Upskill and Inspire Progress

We will share news of our work via our Blog, and via our Initiatives page.