We endeavour to make a positive social impact by being a good corporate citizen across our global operations. We make a significant contribution through the high-quality employment we provide. We engage proactively and fairly with all stakeholders, to understand and meet their needs. We seek to extend the direct positive impact of our business through our support for charitable causes aligned to our sustainability goals and colleagues’ interests.

Importantly, we also strive to help tackle inequality in society through the role we can play as an employer. We aim to be a fair employer and promote opportunity and equality for all. As part of this, we are particularly conscious of supporting progress for underrepresented groups. At the same time, we recognise the valuable contribution that diversity, in its broadest sense, can make to our overall business success and seek to nurture talent from a broad range of backgrounds.

Our commitments

We are working to support UN Sustainable Development Goals 5: Gender equality and 8: Decent work and economic growth as part of this pillar of our new sustainability framework. We have set the following strategic commitments to help drive progress:

• We develop and deliver initiatives to drive greater gender and ethnic diversity
• We contribute to a fairer society, including by ensuring 100% of our employees are covered by our Fair Pay Framework

Our progress

We target maintaining high levels of employee engagement and conduct employee ‘pulse’ surveys several times a year. In 2021, we saw an increase of 17% in the number of employees who participated in our surveys. This was mainly due to the introduction of ‘QR codes’, which enabled colleagues to complete the survey on their work or personal mobiles.

We were accredited as a Living Wage Employer in 2020 by the Living Wage Foundation. Our Fair Pay Framework includes a commitment to ensure that we pay more than the living wage published in a country. We also undertake an annual ethnicity pay analysis, using the same approach as for gender pay reporting, and published the results alongside our gender pay report here.

We donated £125,000 in total to Renewable World, Pump Aid and WeForest in 2021, increasing our donations to our global charity partners by 25% compared to the prior year. In addition, we have channelled almost £80,000 of funds from individuals, Rotork charity committees and the Company to our own charitable foundation, Rotork Benevolent Support, since establishing it in July 2020.