Corporate Responsibility is embedded within the “DNA” of Unipart where the benefits of long-term stakeholder relationships based on mutual benefits are recognised.
Since the early 1980s, the Group has included Corporate Responsibility within its continuous improvement philosophy.
Unipart has always recognised the value of its people and this was confirmed when we created the Group value set in 1987. Integral to this was an engaged and diverse workforce where all have the opportunity to contribute and reach their potential.
Diversity opens up a wealth of possibilities and helps to encourage creativity, innovation and new ways of thinking; enabling Unipart to improve productivity and grow our business.
Our Employee Wellbeing Strategy focuses on encouraging and supporting our employees to take personal responsibility for their own resilience and wellbeing, whilst putting in place programmes and events that might support our people in making healthier lifestyle choices and through our Employee Assistance Programme, Unipart Cares, providing professional advice and support when our people need it.
To aid understanding and promote positive mental health at work Unipart has provided mental health and stress training for HR community and has developed mental health awareness training for our line managers to enable them to better support their people.
Engaging our employees is an essential part of Unipart’s day-to-day activity embedded in our value set and is intrinsically linked with The Unipart Way. Unipart employees are extremely generous in both time and money and enjoy participation in community projects; and we recognise the positive impact that such activities have on employee engagement and social imperatives.
To align such initiatives to business benefits we have developed a clear community strategy which has been shared across our Group and set up appropriate structures at a local level to ensure a balance between the Group strategy and local needs.
Our overall approach aims to enhance the sense of ‘fun’ and satisfaction that our people derive from community activity whilst establishing formal partnerships in our communities and measuring both the required inputs (time, material and resource) and the positive impacts (for both the community and our Company).
Unipart has a long history of working to improve the prospects of young people and help them make the transition from education to successful working lives. During 2015 we brought together our programmes under the banner of Unipart Inspires and are proud that every single UK site (and many of our international sites) are delivering Unipart Inspires programmes.
These include providing work experience, employability training, practise assessments, activities to promote the study of STEM subjects, support, development and, in some cases, employment to young people from school age up to graduates and post graduates.
Our approach to continuous improvement and of putting ‘creativity before capital’ continues to deliver results. Our environmental performance as a Group has continued to improve. To escalate this performance improvement some significant investments have also been made where there are both financial and environmental benefits such as the Biomass boiler install on the Cowley site. This year three of our largest UK sites were awarded the British Safety Council Globe of Honour. These awards represent the pinnacle of achievement in the world of environmental management.