Employees

At Barbour we believe that every employee can make a positive difference to our approach to the environment and sustainability, by being encouraged to proactively think about how their individual role makes an environmental impact, and then work to manage and reduce those impacts.

Our commitment to environmental sustainability is in our core Vision, Mission and Values which is shared and discussed with every single new starter in their induction programme. Living up to our values is also in our annual performance review process so employees are asked to give examples of how their behaviours have lived up to our ‘sustainability’ value.

Also as part of that annual performance management process, every year employees go through an objective setting process which encourages continuous improvement in areas such as our environmental performance. Making improvements can vary widely depending on where our employees work. It could be a design team member re-thinking the fundamental design of a product to improve its sustainable sourcing. It could be a member of our marketing team reducing paper-based product range directories and moving to electronic formats. It could be our warehouse team putting forward ideas to reduce our use of packaging when despatching goods to our customers. All employees have the opportunity to raise ideas and see them implemented.

Outside of their day to day roles, employees are regularly involved in charity fundraising events, such as bake offs or dress up days and we celebrate those in our monthly newsletter. Every area of the business has recycling facilities for paper and plastics, and we encourage good housekeeping in simple things like switching all IT equipment off at night, having sensor based lighting in meeting rooms, and trying to encourage electronic communication and collaboration between teams rather than any dependency on paper.

Our employees have helped make us a sustainable business for over 125 years and their continuing commitment and innovation is key for us to maintain and develop our environmental performance going forward.

To read about the Barbour Pension Scheme click here.

Sustainability Champions Group

At Barbour we have a Sustainability Champions Group that operates globally and includes colleagues from across the business. Sustainability is one of our core Barbour values and a top line business objective. The Sustainability Champions Group works hard to drive positive change in the business, target areas are selected and Champions work with their own departments to produce results.