The story

One of the things we love about what we do is helping our clients to realise their ambitions. So when the team at Herbert Smith Freehills (HSF) told us about their desire to expand responsible business reporting in order to drive further engagement, we were thrilled to be able to support them.

The firm wasn’t new to this, having produced annual reports for each of the previous two years as part of its commitment to the UN Global Compact. Building on this, we were able to recommend an approach that would ultimately expand the reporting scope and generate content to attract a much broader internal and external audience.

During first phase we analysed HSF’s current approach against reporting best practice, targeting and agreeing specific areas for development. We then worked closely with the team to develop a structure and craft a narrative that did full justice to their far-reaching, global approach to responsible business and demonstrating its alignment with corporate objectives.

Through stakeholder interviews with senior partners, we uncovered and wrote new, engaging content – including headline features, performance highlights and case studies to showcase success – before providing our design recommendations for the final report to achieve a refreshed look and feel.

The story

Simply Sustainable is known for being a practical and inspiring consultancy so helping our clients to integrate sustainability into what they do and how they think is a great fit for us. That’s why, having developed EE’s new responsibility strategy, we were ideally placed to support its integration across the business as part of this long-term partnership.

We know that this requires a holistic approach, working at every level of the organisation. Here we started at the top, guiding leadership to advocate for sustainability and creating a strong governance and management structure which included feedback loops between the Board and core functions and established an external board of experts to advise and challenge the business.

Next, working across core functions in the business, we turned to identifying and developing the policies and processes needed to embed sustainability priorities into EE’s ways of working, before establishing the KPIs and systems that would drive accountability via monthly performance reporting.

EE’s workforce is diverse and varied so naturally, engagement and ownership of this agenda is a key priority. To address this, we worked with in-house teams to co-create and deliver a series of engagement events across the UK designed to ‘activate’ their interest in the social and environmental issues core to EE’s approach and their role in supporting company ambitions.

Elsewhere, we supported EE in partnership and programme development, reporting and benchmarking – a whole package tailored and delivered over time to bring sustainability to life in the business.