Workplace and community

Our aim is to be recognised by existing and future employees as a responsible employer that values its people and provides an environment in which they can develop their skills and make a contribution to the success of the business.

Our eLife programme supports this (and contributes to our carbon reduction programme) by providing a range of e-enabled tools to allow employees to develop their skills and knowledge, interact with colleagues and facilitate global collaboration. As a new innovation during the year, a number of live, “virtual” question and answer sessions have been held that have allowed colleagues from all parts of the world to hear from and question the senior leaders of the organisation without the time and carbon cost of international travel.

We also expanded our eLife to you, our investors, during the year as we published our first online annual report which received very positive feedback and won industry accolades. We thank everyone who visited our online annual report and encourage you to visit this year’s online annual report for an interactive report of our performance in the year, including videos from our executive team – www.premierfarnell.com/annualreport 2009.

We also wish to make a contribution to the communities in which we operate, building goodwill and a reputation as a good neighbour and employer. Our community investment strategy and charitable giving policy support this aim.

Highlights of our workplace and community programme include:

• 85% of employees completing our all-employee engagement survey in 2008 thought that Premier Farnell is socially and environmentally responsible, an improvement of 6% over the previous year’s score;
• Farnell in Leeds has formalised two service level partnership agreements with community organisations in Armley which will secure the relationships over the course of the next two years;
• Farnell helped to secure a £10,000 grant for its community partner Armley Helping Hands, by winning the Yorkshire Forward “Creating Better Futures” Award for its demonstration of a successful partnership between a community organisation and a private business;
• A community consultation day attended by around 50 representatives of local community groups, local government and other companies, where the Group’s approach was outlined and discussed;
• The Contact Centre at Rockside Road in Cleveland, Ohio received a “Corporate Sponsor of the Year” Award from the American Red Cross for exceptional contribution to their blood donation drive; and
• The identification of community engagement leaders in the US to drive the formalisation of the US businesses’ community engagement.

Our community investment strategy is based upon building sustainable partnerships with local community groups using our resources, particularly our time, to support their activities.

Employees are encouraged to volunteer in Company time. Funds are raised principally through employee fundraising activities and supplemented for specific projects with funds from the corporate charity budget. All employees are eligible to apply for funds and these can be a cash donation, matched funds or goods in kind. The budget of £20,000 has been fully utilised this year. In September, the Group matched the fundraising of employees globally, and donated $11,000 to support the victims of the Chengdu earthquake, which occurred near to one of the business’s facilities.

Our community partners and projects represent causes for which our employees have demonstrated (through discussion groups and surveys) their interest and support. Through dialogue with the community partners, activities are identified which can be supported by the employee volunteering programme. These include large projects, met by team challenges and ongoing, regular activities met by individual volunteers.

In the US, all of the Group’s businesses participate in the United Way, a community-based umbrella organisation supporting various human services organisations with which the businesses have had a relationship since the 1980’s.

In each of our US businesses we have employees who undertake leadership roles in United Way’s fundraising activities and every year they run a pledge and donations drive. A number of team and individual initiatives have this year benefited local community groups and charities including donations of clothing to a homeless shelter, the hugely popular annual American Cancer Society’s Daffodil days fundraiser, and the American Red Cross’ blood donor scheme, for which the Cleveland Rockside Road office received a “Corporate Sponsor of the Year” award.

Our largest site in Europe and Asia Pacific is in Leeds, UK. This is located in an inner city area which borders on the prosperous and fast developing city centre.

This year, Farnell in Leeds has completed the process of formalising partnership agreements with two organisations local to the Leeds business. Regular activities such as escorted shopping trips and tea dances for the elderly, supporting primary age children in reading programmes, mentoring of young people and team gardening challenges are still undertaken by committed groups of volunteers, underlined by the agreements we now have in place.

Across the Group, employees have identified the good causes they want to support by donating their time, money and commitment in a variety of ways: examples include the sponsorship of and participation in a three-day event for children in an Indian orphanage, a collection of Christmas presents for children spending the season in a local domestic violence refuge and supporting the American Red Cross’ “Ready When the Time Comes” scheme.

The Group recognises that these types of activity not only benefit the community groups and good causes involved, but also deliver business benefits in providing training and development opportunities for those employees who participate. Our online personal development planning system “Futures” enables employees to capture the volunteering activities they have undertaken, assess the development opportunities and benefits delivered and discuss these as part of their performance review process with their line manager.

The community investment programme was this year piloted as a module in the Group’s Leadership Development Programme. Members of the Operational Leaders training programme were involved in a community event as the second of their three training modules in order to experience delivering a project in an unfamiliar setting and also to drive the Company’s aims to embed our community engagement at all levels of leadership, both existing and developing.