28 March 2018 | Herpreet Kaur Grewal
The chief executive of recruitment and services business Cordant has called its transition to a social enterprise "challenging".
Cordant announced last year in September 2017, its intention to become a social enterprise and "reinvest profits into a variety of initiatives and programmes that are designed to enhance society".
In a statement released this week Chris Kenneally said this transition had been challenging over the past six months because "we have 11 different businesses and we are building a programme that will allow each employee, whether they are full-time or otherwise, to make a personal as well as company-wide contribution.
"Our group covers a wide range of industry sectors and types of employment - and that means the different businesses in our group are all at different stages of their evolution".
Kenneally said: "We set ourselves an ambitious target to make a meaningful difference across three distinct areas of life: education, the workplace and healthcare. We want to deliver genuine, measurable social impact and we want to deliver it over the long term, that is why our strategy is based on a five-year programme."
Over recent months, Cordant Group committed to an audit with a leading advisory law firm to understand where the organisation currently sits and to make recommendations for the future. The report identifies how the company can further improve the working environment for its staff, as well as focusing on benefiting communities in which the organisation operates.
Kenneally added: "We wanted to find robust and widely accepted standards to judge ourselves by. It is important for us to know that our work is not only benefiting the communities we touch, but that we can quantify it in a way that stands up to external scrutiny."