What ‘social responsibility’ means to us

Although running a small business often leaves little room for anything beyond the day-to-day, we believe that ‘social responsibility’ should be as important to small businesses as it is to big.

An important goal for our business is that The Web Kitchen is a force for good in the world. We believe there are three main areas that we can affect to ensure that is the case:

• We can help the members of our team to lead happy, fulfilled lives by ensuring that their working life is as enjoyable and as rewarding as possible (after all we spend most of our waking hours at work).
• We can ensure that overall we make a positive impact on the planet by reducing any negative effects where possible alongside making a contribution to positive initiatives that benefit the planet.
• We can use our profits to help people that need support. By choosing the right area we can ensure that every pound donated makes a significant impact.

Here’s some more detail on how we are doing that:

Our commitment to our own people

We are committed to being the best employer possible and believe that team members can live the lives they aspire to without compromising on the performance of our business.

That’s why we review pay every 6 months, we pay out bonuses to reward instances where team members have gone above and beyond, and we offer benefits that team members have asked for (including a monthly massage or treatment).

Beyond this, we encourage team members to come to us with requests or suggestions that would make their lives more enjoyable. If there’s something we can do that is respectful of our responsibilities to other team members and the success of the company as a whole, we will do it.

That’s why our longstanding Technical Director David worked from Sri Lanka for 3 months earlier in the year;  and one of our developers, Rosie, was able to take 7 weeks out to travel around Latin America with her partner (a doctor with the rare opportunity of extended leave after a difficult period during COVID).

Our commitment to the planet

Firstly, we regularly discuss how we can reduce the carbon emissions that come from our activity. For example, we have realised that we can make a significant difference in reducing the amount of disk space used on our servers: servers running with assets that are rarely accessed is an unnecessary source of carbon emissions. We’re doing what we can to help our clients remove files that don’t need to be stored.

We also offset our emissions through Ecologi and have estimated our total emissions since our foundation in 2006 to ensure it’s all accounted for. So far 66,887 trees have been planted on our behalf and 351.2 tonnes of carbon has been sequestered.

We are now a beta member of Ecologi Zero which will help us make accurate estimates of our carbon emissions and highlight ways to reduce it.

Our commitment to those most in need

Finally, we are proud that our partnership with Mary’s Meals – which I wrote about in November 2020 – has enabled the charity to provide 539,785 school meals to children in deprived areas of Africa on our behalf. We contribute 2% of all project revenue to Mary’s Meals so this serves as extra motivation to keep winning new projects!

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