At the Frontier of Sustainability

28 December 2023

As Atlas Professionals, we aim to be at the frontier of the Energy, Marine & Renewables industries – and it is high time we position ourselves at the frontier of developments surrounding ESG policies as well. Here is Kate Knott, QHSE Manager of Atlas Professionals and an influential colleague who made our inaugural ESG Report a reality, on what we were working on, what awaits us in the future, and more.

Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) refers to a set of criteria that investors, businesses, and organisations use to evaluate the sustainability and ethical impact of an investment or business operation. 

• The "E" in ESG represents environmental factors, which assess how a company manages its impact on the planet,
• The "S" stands for social factors, which encompass a company's relationships with its stakeholders,
• The "G" signifies governance, focusing on the quality of a company's leadership, transparency, and ethical decision-making processes. 

As a result of developing legislation on sustainability reporting, and the desire to demonstrate and improve our sustainability profile, Atlas Professionals established an ESG Project team to investigate and develop our ESG strategy. However, given its broad description, it's understandable that ESG may hold different meanings for various organisations. Kate mentions that, for Atlas Professionals, a global recruitment company that operates across many jurisdictions and within many communities, the scope of the concept has been considered by ESG Project team with Stakeholders consulted on key topics in the form of a so-called Double Materiality Assessment to ensure desirable results can be reached.

Tangible Change

The ESG team decided that the publication of a Sustainability report would serve as an excellent tool to demonstrate the ESG activities of Atlas Professionals with the team also agreeing on a sustainability pathway. Atlas Professionals has already made progress on their pathway to sustainability by implementing tangible change while reducing our environmental impact in the following areas and more: 

Environment

• Capturing and measuring our Scope 1 & Scope 2 CO2 emissions.
• Reduction of paper use by introduction of paperless processes and committing to meeting the EU Municipal Recycling Targets of 60% by 2030 and setting targets for increased carbon reduction, including switching to Electric, Hybrid company lease vehicles by 2025.
• Changing our way of providing energy into our offices by opting for 100% use of renewable energy in operations where we have control over the consumption.
• Maintaining Atlas Professionals’ ISO 14001:2015 Environmental Management System certification. 
• Aiming to achieve Net Zero Carbon emissions from Atlas Professionals’ operations by 2030.
• Changing our scope of work by committing to an Energy Transition plan by aiming for a 50% turnover in Renewables industry by 2030.

Social

• Promoting our Zero Harm Safety initiative, maintaining a total recordable incident rate of 0.47 (Meeting the KPI of <1.0 for past 10+ years).
• Maintaining Atlas Professionals’ ISO 45001:2018 Occupational Health & Safety Certification.
• Implementing robust Employee & Talent Development Programs that involve training & development of staff, performance management, namely the successful Atlas Professionals Greenhand Programme and Atlas Professionals Leadership Development Program.
• Bolstering our Customer and Employee feedback and engagement.
• Committing to our Diversity & Inclusion policies, such as more transparent D&I rules, Equal Pay and committing to being an equal opportunities employer to improve our inclusive employer branding.

Governance

• Implementing updated compliance, anti-corruption, fraud risk analysis, sustainable procurement & supply chain controls. Further bolstering our corporate risk assessment & Management protocols as well as continuously improving our cyber-security.
• Laying out transparent and efficient Code of Conduct, Whistle Blower Policy, and Fraud Rules.
• Maintaining Atlas Professionals’ ISO 9001:2015 Quality management system certification.
• Continue to engage with local communities for industry related purposes, such as training courses or clean up days and ensuring no modern slavery of human rights violations in our supply chains or in any part of our business occurs.

Our ESG Report underlines our commitment to achieving these results and more and is the direct continuation of our previous sustainability efforts, such as achieving EcoVadis Silver qualification and securing a spot within the top performing companies across the globe.

EcoVadis is a crucial player in the global drive for sustainability and corporate responsibility. This innovative company specializes in assessing and rating businesses across various industries based on their environmental, social, and ethical practices - and that is exactly what happened with Atlas Professionals: “Assessing our sustainability standing with initiatives like EcoVadis allows us to understand how we performed, and what can we do to further improve our efforts. It is one thing to rely on plans and projections, but it is important to assess if they have yielded the results we wanted them to yield as well,” Kate mentions. 

Moving Forward

Of course, Atlas Professionals realises sustainability and inclusion are all processes that need constant attention, and the work is never truly done. When we ask Kate how Atlas Professionals aims to ensure the work continues, she lays out some of the specific plans the company will implement in the very near future: “As we put it in one of our values: we are responsible, and we want to see our ESG investments through. That is why, moving forward, Atlas Professionals aims to progress towards baseline targets and initiatives in order to respond to material negative impact, both inward & outward, while seeking updates to our assessment and monitoring mechanisms to ensure effective reporting. Of course,” Kate adds “we want to keep ensuring that future sustainability reporting can continue providing reliable, relevant and verifiable information to our stakeholders.