Supplier Engagement HE Tool

A basic approach to ensuring the Health and Safety of yourself and your staff is expected from all suppliers. Going beyond minimum compliance means fully understanding your risks and being pro-active. You can find support on the HSE website

Your business may be unable to support a full time apprenticeship programme but it could still offer work experience on shorter placements. Schemes are usually run locally so try your nearest College or University as a starting point.

Customers respect businesses who are willing to admit their mistakes; it demonstrates honesty and an eagerness to improve customer experience. They are also encouraged by positive feedback provided by others. Having a transparent approach to managing your feedback as part of your communications can therefore be a great way to enhance your reputation.

A meaningful process for dealing with customer feedback will be clear and transparent for your customers as well as your staff. It will be clear what actions and responses have been provided and there will be a culture of learning from negative feedback as well as sharing positive feedback broadly.

Inviting an expert speaker into your workplace can be an easy way to keep yourself up-to-date on what is important with regards to diversity. These can be linked to your industry and also support staff cohesion more generally.

Businesses should make an effort to seek out new innovations within their sector, especially in relation to resource or process efficiency. Are there new options that can future-proof your company from rising costs? Are your customers keen that you offer new and improved products and services. Keeping up-to-date can be crucial.

Your staff are often at the front-line when it comes to communicating with your customers. Make sure that communications messages are disseminated clearly and effectively so that messages are consistent no matter which messenger is used. Training for front-line staff is likely to be essential to ensure this happens consistently.

Find ways to ensure your customers can communicate with you and respond to the stories you are sharing with them. Social media can be a great way to establish dialigue with your clients but an old-fashioned feedback form can be just as effective. Think about what will work for you and your customers.

Being pro-active about positioning your business to respond to tenders with fast turnaround times can be especially important to smaller organisations. The good news is there is help you can access to make this happen for your business.

Helping your staff, customers or other stakeholders understand how you are trying to reduce waste will help them to help you. Encouraging re-use or sharing can create a culture of efficiency and reduce running costs. Consider who can help think about waste at the point of purchasing to reconsider use of disposables or to avoid over-ordering. Training staff on waste reduction is also a great way to get them involved.

Understanding your waste streams will help you work out how to reduce the amount you produce. This could mean buying different products, finding ways to re-use certain items or increasing recycling rates. Having a plan to reduce waste will help you monitor progress and you can share it with others.

Understanding the waste your activity produces and why it is produced is an important first step to reducing it. There are a range of tools that can help you with this process.

An efficient and responsible business will be striving to reduce dependence on polluting vehicles, exploring low carbon options and sourcing goods and services locally where possible. This will have environmental benefits, promotes health and wellbeing as well as impacting on your bottom line. Start by considering if the need for travel is business critical and then explore the most sustainable options that meet your needs. Useful starting points for your planning include Sustrans and the Energy Saving Trust.

Whether updating your fleet, encouraging lift sharing or remote working for your staff or incentivising certain kinds of travel there are ways to make travelling sustainably part of your culture. Highlighting public transport options for your visitors, having somewhere for staff to store bikes securely or considering a government-supported cycle-to-work scheme might all be ways you can support sustainable travel. Try to extend the range of sustainable travel options you promote over time and think about linking to regional plans where possible.

Sharing positive stories helps create a positive culture either among your staff or with your customers. You can use them to demonstrate how new behaviours are being encouraged and report on benefits. Even the smallest initiatives can be an excuse to tell a positive story about your business.

Determine what moves from A to B as part of your business operations and exactly how things are transported. This will help you develop a baseline for your sustainable travel plan or simply help you make the most obvious changes to your business practice. Even if road travel is critical to your business efficiencies are possible. Read about efficient-driving or explore energy efficient products.

At least one of your customers has encouraged you to use this tool to generate an Action Plan. The simplest way to keep them informed is to update it regularly with your progress. You can also use the 'EXPORT PLAN' button at the bottom of the page to send it directly to individuals, such as potential new customers. You could also add it to your website, if you have one, to make a more public statement.

A business can investigate its environmental performance offsite as well as on-site. Making step-wise efficiency improvements within your supply chain can help businesses to sell their products more competitively, increasing market share.

Your governance structure will depend not only on the size and scale of your business but also how it is structured. Governance can range from a small group of staff to external committees with dedicated staff. It is also acceptable to embed sustainability into existing governance structures. Consider diversity and inclusion as part of developing your governance structures to ensure a range of voices are heard and scrutiny comes from a range of perspectives.

A policy is a simply written statement outlining your organisation's commitment to managing environmental or sustainability impacts. It outlines the key areas of your business you hope to improve and so can include environmental, social and/or economic considerations and targets. You could use this Action Plan as the basis of your policy as it provides an overview of sustainability areas for you to focus on.

A simple blog post, a conversation with your customers or an update on your website is enough to share your progress, large or small. Think about developing a case study to showcase your work. Even the smallest initiative can be an excuse to tell a positive story about your business.