Wates Group's Social Value strategy incorporates three areas of focus: challenging inequality, inspiring and educating young people, and supporting and scaling the social enterprise sector. We spoke to Su Pickerill, their Head of Social Value, about what Social Value in action looks like at Wates, how to get started, and much more.
What does Social Value in Action look like at Wates Group?
So Social Value in action looks like making the difference that we need to make for the communities. We need to understand what our communities need, and we need to be able to meet that need.
We want to do that in a systemic way. So we don't want to just be tackling the symptoms, we want to really think in a system. How we can address things in a holistic manner and be impactful as an organisation, both to meet the needs of the community to address inequality, and to use the platform that we have as a business to create opportunities for people to thrive.
It's also really important as an employer to bring people into our business, attract people, and give a sense of purpose to our existing workforce. All of those things are really important to us as a family owned business.
Why did you choose Social Value Portal as your partner?
One of the key things for us is the TOM System™. It's really helpful to put that proxy value against what we're doing, and translate the qualitative elements. The case studies and everything are always super important, but actually to have a financial proxy value is really helpful to communicate in bids, at forecasting stage and to really look at the impact of what we're doing as well.
So the TOM System is the most important thing for us in terms of really understanding where we can have the most impact. That shouldn't exclusively drive behaviour, but it is really helpful to understand the impact that's being created and where we can make that difference.
The case studies and everything are always super important, but actually to have a financial proxy value is really helpful to communicate in bids, at forecasting stage and to really look at the impact of what we're doing as well.
Su Pickerill, Head of Social Value, Wates Group
How is Social Value influencing construction projects?
Community engagement in the construction industry has always been important. We know that we're quite disruptive when we come in: we're noisy, we're a bit messy, we're not everyone's favourite neighbour. So actually, it's really important that we give the communities back more than we're taking away in the immediate impact of the work we do.
We want to make sure that we are a really good neighbour. We want to make sure that the people who are living near our projects have an opportunity to access work, to upskill, to really turn their lives around. It's really important to us as a business to create opportunities for people who are furthest from the workforce.
So we're doing a lot of work with people in prison to challenge perceptions around employing people with criminal records - both directly and through our supply chain. We also want to create opportunities for care-experienced young people, so we're running programs with them.
We want to make sure that communities are better off because we've been working in their area. That's really important to our industry - I think it enables us to win work as well. Whether it's building homes or leisure centres or prisons or maintaining social homes, we want to understand the needs of the community that we're be working in, and make sure that what we do as a business makes a tangible and long lasting impact for them.
What's your advice for organisations just starting out in Social Value?
When companies are starting on their Social Value journey, it's really challenging, because it's such a broad agenda. It's really easy to try and boil the ocean. I would really encourage companies to think about: what are your key skills, what do you as an organisation do well, and focus there.
If you are a catering company, don't necessarily focus on things that are not related to catering. Start where you can, where you can make the biggest difference. Where is your expertise going to be the most helpful for people? Where are you employing people? What difference can your company make?
Really look at your core operations first and maybe pick a couple of things that you can change. Shift your procurement model, so that you're buying from a social enterprise, for example. Look at where you might be able to employ people into particular roles. Could you upskill those people? I think focus on your core activity first and then take it from there.
What's next for Wates Group and Social Value?
Social Value is a really exciting area to work in and it's an ever evolving thing to be involved with. So in terms of what's next, I really think it's important that we start thinking about prevention and not just intervention later on down the road.
How do we engage people before they've become furthest from the workforce? How can we make sure that we are changing the trajectory of people's lives? How can we make sure that we're having a positive environmental impact by thinking about things earlier in the design process, for example?
Also, how can we join the dots between the impact that we can have, how we're working, who we're working with, and to really have a more holistic and 'systems thinking' approach?
We want to engage earlier and really have an impact on big societal issues, joining up what we're doing in terms of environmental sustainability. Social Value is a key part of what we want to do going forward as a business.
Social Value in construction: Benchmarking performance
Did you know that construction has been identified as the leading industry for Social Value delivery?
Learn how organisations of all sizes are delivering Social Value across sectors and industries in our Social Value Data Insights Report.
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