Our sustainability framework

As a business, our very reason for existing is the success of people. Through our core business, we seek to enable sustainable and lifelong employability for individuals across the globe and empower organisations to optimise their workforces. We aspire to positively influence the world of work and lead by example in how we conduct our business and address society’s most pressing challenges. This helps deliver economic value for our shareholders and stakeholders, and positive impact for global and local economies. To achieve this ambitious aim, we need to consistently push ourselves to be and do better.

For us, our purpose translates into working towards four strategic sustainability goals that address the work-related needs of our core stakeholder groups: candidates and associates, clients, colleagues, investors, and institutions and society more broadly. Goals that we believe have never been more important than now. This enables us to contribute directly to the achievement of the UN Sustainable Development Agenda – a shared vision of a better, more equitable and sustainable future.

This is underpinned by three global public commitments, complemented by further internal quantitative and qualitative targets and objectives:

The bedrock to achieving this our vision is a deep understanding of the issues most material to our business and to our stakeholders. Building on related work in previous years, over the course of 2018, we conducted a comprehensive process to identify and prioritise these issues.

We started with an analysis of existing work, international standards, regulations and best practices. To validate and prioritise our findings, we then engaged extensively with internal and external stakeholders, including clients, associates, colleagues, investors, suppliers, and representatives from institutions and the public at large, be it through an online dialogue with experts, a public online survey, internal workshops or private meetings. We continuously refined the list of topics based on the following criteria:

1. The importance to our stakeholders;

2. The importance to our business, based on each topic’s strategic fit, the impact on our business and values, potential opportunities and risks, and the innovation potential; and

3. The impacts of our activities on sustainable development along our value chain.

The result: ten factors that have the greatest impact on our ability to create shared value. We divide them into two categories:

Sustainability priorities: areas that are core to our business, where we can play a key role in addressing them and having a positive impact

We continue to engage with a broad set of stakeholders to harness their insights, build trust, continuously validate our efforts and ensure we continue to be on the right track.

The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted in September 2015 by all member states of the United Nations. They set out a roadmap for working collectively to address the global challenges we face and achieve a better, more equitable and sustainable future for all.

Achieving the SDGs requires determined action by all sectors in society – including our business. At the Adecco Group, we are fully committed to playing our part. We strongly believe that with our scale and reach as a multinational company, we can help achieve several of the SDGs – and are committed to doing so. As thea world’s -leading HR talent solutions and advisory companyprovider, we have a tremendous opportunity – and responsibility – to harness our expertise and resources to contribute to the achievement of this important vision. While as a multinational corporation we have touchpoints with almost every SDG, we focus our strategic efforts most closely on those where we can make the biggest difference through our core business:, we can particularly help unlock future potential, facilitate access to work and enable better economic development, wellbeing, livelihoods and security.