corporate responsibilities - uk

Driving community regeneration while developing our people

Elba and ISS

ISS has a long-held corporate responsibility strategy to deliver social value involving our people and communities.

ISS and East London Business Alliance (ELBA)

A partnership for jobs and skills

Our partnership with East London Business Alliance (ELBA) anchors our strategy to community regeneration in East London where the Docklands financial centre, home to ISS’ London office, is adjacent to less advantaged areas.

Career opportunities

A local talent pool

A large proportion of ISS key customers are headquartered in the UK’s capital allowing us to work with ELBA to support local employment and play a role in the regeneration of communities. 

ISS work with ELBA to support career development, recruitment, training and to develop our community engagement strategy. In addition, ISS employees volunteer their time to support work placements, participate in school career insight days, and employability workshops and professional development initiatives.

Projects range from the ISS ‘hire for attitude, train for aptitude’ model, through to ‘speed networking’ and interview skills sessions for students from local schools.

The next generation

Inspiring young women

In March 2020, ISS worked participated in the International Women’s Day activities at Sarah Bonnell school in Stratford, East London.

Female volunteers from ISS engaged with students to provide insights into various career paths journeys taken by women into their roles.

The ISS team created interactive sessions to inspire and support students to consider a career in workplace services.

DIGITAL SKILLS

Preparing a diverse workforce for a digital future

Our partnership with ELBA has also been supporting ISS colleagues to develop transferrable skills, especially in the digital economy, to support their careers and confidence. 

Teams within our financial services sector, particularly those in the post room environment, anticipate changes to their roles due to the technology enhancement of our services. To ensure that these teams could understand their skills to be transferable to other service delivery areas, ISS worked with ELBA to deliver ‘Future Fit’, a programme providing practical support on how to cope with the pace of change in technology.

Feedback showed that 88% of participants felt their confidence around technology had increased as a result of the programme. The feedback helped ELBA to develop the programme further for a wider audience. 
 

“

We are confident that we can maximise the opportunities that the project brings and that these opportunities will really have a positive impact on the lives and
careers of those who join the team.

Sarah Wilson, Project Manager for the ISS project with ELBA
UK_2019_ISS Training Academy (70)

broadening access

Developing communications skills to broaden access to roles

A further initiative ‘Enable’ works with colleagues to develop their communications skills to broaden their access to roles in other service delivery areas.

‘Enable’ is a 12-month programme focussed on how to: 

• Have positive conversations and use body language in the workplace
• Give positive and negative feedback to colleagues
• Discuss a problem at work
• Deal with basic customer complaints

Feedback so far indicates that participants feel more confident when communicating in the workplace and particularly dealing with challenging conversations. 

Supporting the financial health of our teams 

ISS are proud to be one of 12 companies working with ELBA on a newly developed programme in partnership with the UK Strategy for Financial Capability from the Money and Pensions Service – CashWise.

We understand that financial strain is a strong contributing factor to overall wellbeing. Therefore we are committed to supporting our employees to manage this. Through a series of workshops delivered in the workplace, CashWise aims to improve financial capability amongst low-income employees to help them to make more informed decisions about their financial challenges which leads to improved financial health.

The findings from the delivery of CashWise indicates that the introduction of workplace financial education improved the financial capability outcomes for new and existing employees. 50% of participants managed to save money more regularly with 6 in 10 reporting that had they not taken part in the programme, it would have been unlikely for them to achieve the improved financial confidence.

 

Securing broad, diverse talent 

One of ISS’ key CR ambitions is to recruit from a ‘broad talent pool’, ensuring that we have a diverse and inclusive workplace for all of our people.                                                          

For a new client, we recruited 80 of our new employees from an ELBA/ISS programme. The recruitment strategy was to “hire for attitude and train for aptitude’. This approach prioritised character traits over experience or academic credentials. 

Sarah Wilson, Project Manager for the ISS project with ELBA said:
“ELBA is really excited to work in partnership with Newham Council's job brokerage, ‘Workplace’, to source great talent from Newham to join the London team. We are confident that we can maximise the opportunities that the project brings and that these opportunities will really have a positive impact on the lives and careers of those who join the team.” 

In ELBA, ISS truly gained a partner to drive, challenge, support and facilitate our CR ambitions, creating long-lasting synergy amongst our customers and our people.  Our community partnership model is one we hope to replicate with the right partners in other regions.

 

PEOPLE MAKE PLACES

350,000+ people   |   30+ countries   |   40,000+ customers