We believe that Corporate Responsibility is about doing well by doing good. We understand that this is not simply altruism but commercially sensible and as such it is embedded into everything we do, every day.
Unipart Group is proud to have been recognised with a five star rating in the 2016 Business in the Community Corporate Responsibility Index – the UK’s leading benchmark for responsible businesses.
We also won the Environmental Leadership ‘Example of Excellence’ in the 2011 Business in the Community’s responsible business awards. In 2016 we were named the winner of the Bupa Wellbeing at work award in Business in the Community’s 2016 Responsible Business Awards. The following year, we won the ‘Fujitsu Award for Responsible Business in the Digital Age’.
This continued recognition for our company’s effort and performance in the area of Corporate Responsibility reaffirms our belief that the principles on which we founded our business – the Unipart Value Set – have endured in a constantly changing world and are as relevant today as they were when they were launched in 1987. An example of the importance of those values in creating policy is our anti-bribery and corruption policy, which can be downloaded here.
These values form the basis of our culture and are reflected in The Unipart Way, our philosophy of working which engages and empowers employees at every level of our organisation to identify and remove waste from our processes and continually improve our business.
In removing waste from every aspect of our business and our supply chains, we continue to conserve scarce environmental resources. We used creativity before capital to solve problems and address issues, finding solutions that are low cost in terms of energy resources as well as in terms of cash.
By engaging with our local communities we can help to improve the employability and life prospects of those living within the community and develop local economies as well as positively impacting the wellbeing of our employees and their families.
Diversity and Inclusion
Unipart values diversity and the benefits that diversity brings to our business and we recognise that, to remain competitive in a global economy, enterprises must be able to capitalise on the experiences, the creativity and the full potential of a diverse workforce.
However this is not without its challenges. Unipart Way skills are key to our business, both now and in the future, and expertise in the Unipart Way is built up over a number of years. As such is it important that we are able to retain employees and our labour turnover rates are low; at the most senior levels of the organisation, turnover is very low. As a result, certain groups are underrepresented at the most senior levels of our business.
We firmly believe in selecting the right candidate for each role and that colleagues who achieve career progression deserve to know that this has been achieved based purely on their hard work and effort. Consequently we accept that bringing about change in the diversity profile of our workforce is a long term objective but one to which we must give continual focus.
Through our resourcing activities we are seeking to ensure that those people joining our businesses reflect the diversity of the local community and are constantly seeking new ways to promote our exciting careers across all of our communities and making sure that everyone who applies for a role in Unipart experiences a recruitment process which is fair, open and free from bias.
It is core to our values that everyone within our diverse workforce can be great at what they do provided they have the opportunity of engaging in deliberate practice within a designed system. They need to be supported by fellow employees who are keen to impart their skills and knowledge so that everyone can grow together and we are looking to our Gate to Great programme and other key talent pipelines (such as our Graduate and Apprentice Schemes) to provide equal opportunity for every individual in Unipart to achieve more than they ever thought possible.