Corporate Social Responsibility

 

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Guidance

Our CSR programme is underpinned with responsible business practices and policies.

Our stake holders are interested in our position on key issues such as our approach to the
environment, education, causes and community and commitment to diversity and equality
of opportunity. These and a range of other issues including developing a sustainable
sourcing policy are covered by our CSR programme.

Society

We focus on supporting our vision to be the Hair and Beauty provider of choice to the
profession and taking good care of our colleagues, customers and communities.

Our strategy

We are passionate about fostering knowledge and skills about hair and beauty amongst
our colleagues and customers. We do this through a systemised programme for colleagues
called Passport to Success, a weekly programme of training and development.

Best companies and Sunday Times Top 100 List, One to Watch

In 2011 Ellisons achieved the coveted ‘One to Watch’ status. This puts us amongst the best
companies in the country for employee engagement.

Being a best company goes beyond the bottom line. It’s about excelling in every area throughout
the workplace and an organisation’s commitment to its most important assets - its workforce.

Bringing out the best in people

Ellisons is committed to developing skills for all our colleagues.

In 2010/11

• Our telesales team each undertook 40 hours training during 2010
• Our senior managers achieved success in the Ellisons bespoke management training
  programme (3 modules across 6 days)
• Our senior managers completed a 1 day course on neuro linguistic programming and
  team building
• Our logistics team leaders and supervisors undertook supervisory training (6 days training)
• Our area sales managers all completed the key account management training
• A number of colleagues have been supported individually to achieve professional qualifications

Supporting education, skills and lifelong learning

Worldskills London 2011
We support our beauty therapy community nationally and internationally.

We are sponsoring the Worldskills London 2011 beauty therapy competition which includes supplying products for the competitors across the world in 21 countries and during the competition. We will also be running the Have a Go section to encourage people to join our industry.

www.worldskillsuk.org

Local education

We work closely with King Edwards 6th Form College Careers Academy. The National Careers Academy programme is a scheme that helps to prepare students for work and introduce them to the world of business through activities including: company visits, guru lectures, mentoring and internships.

As employer participants in the Careers Academy we mentor students and offer a paid internship each year. In addition we offer work experience places for young learners from local schools and give talks about careers in the hair and beauty industry.

Causes and the community
We are supporting Teenage Cancer Trust with our college customers, helping to raise awareness of cancer among an age group where cancers are often most virulent and rare and often not diagnosed.

www.teenagecancertrust.org

As well as participating in events for national charities such as Children in Need and the Macmillan Coffee Morning we also support local Midlands charities. We participate in fundraising events for Midlands based Mary Ann Evans Hospice, support Cash not Cards each Christmas, sell ‘Cuddlies’ and also run in house fundraising events such as sponsored fitness and weight loss programmes. We are corporate members of Warwickshire Wildlife Trust and encourage our colleagues to volunteer their help.

Business
We value the resources on which we depend to carry out our business. Therefore we work closely with our suppliers to source the products we sell in a responsible and as sustainable as possible way.

We ensure that all the products we sell comply with the relevant EU and national legislation. Factories supplying Far East sourced products are audited annually to ensure compliance with Ethical Trading Initiative (ETI) standards.

We are working to minimise packaging and waste in all our product development and recycle wherever possible. As part of the Shred It Scheme In 2010 we recycled office paper to the equivalent of 73 trees.

Environment

In all our activities we continuously work towards reducing our impact on the environment, meet all the regulatory and consent requirements relevant to our business and use raw material carefully considering relevant issues such as sustainability and local purchasing.

We reduce our energy consumption through measures such as increased energy efficiency and we create less waste through our application of waste reduction and recycling. We manage all our premises in an environmentally sensitive manner.

We take our responsibilities seriously to ensure that we keep our carbon footprint as small as possible across our four Midlands sites. We have energy efficient lighting and heating controls and a waste reduction policy.