Social Value Commitments

Nexer Digital is committed to tackling inequality and creating more diverse and inclusive workforces, within our business, across the sector and in client organisations. We’re focused on creating sustainable growth, supporting a diverse, inclusive community, and being a catalyst for new opportunities which drive positive social impact. This commitment is a continuous evolution, and we'll make changes and updates to this document as we continue to develop our approach.   

Recruitment and job creation.

• We are a Disability Confident Employer and member of the Neurodiversity in Business community.
• We encourage applicants from under-represented groups through:
   
  1. Our support for agile bootcamps run by Diverse & Equal, bringing career switchers from under-represented backgrounds into our industry. We have fully funded, co-run and employed 8 people from a D&E design bootcamp in Q1 2023 
  2. Our partnerships with Love Circular and the Responsible Tech Collective. We’re founder members of the Responsible Tech Collective alongside organisations such as the Coop and the Department for Education 
  3. We run all our job adverts and role specifications through a gender decoder to ensure inclusivity  
• We continually review and respond to market conditions. We review pay annually aligned to our capability frameworks which are available to all, with salaries increasing every year for everyone
• We’ve supported two apprenticeship programmes: Manchester Digital’s Software Developer Apprenticeship and Manchester Metropolitan University’s Software Engineering Degree Apprenticeship, providing multi-year sponsored employment programmes. We’re currently sponsoring two apprentices, studying part-time and working for us, and we’re committed to further apprenticeships in future
• We’re a partner to HI Future, providing access to employment for people who’ve experienced homelessness

Community

• We helped to establish the UX Mentors programme for Northwest universities. We have delivered workshops at .NET North, Service Jam, Teach Too, Coder DoJos and through Women in Stem ambassador school visits 
• We support the anti-bullying and discrimination charity, Diversity Role Models (DRM), as their pro-bono digital partner. Our Managing Director is a DRM facilitator 
• In the education sector, we’ve worked with the qualifications body, NCFE, pro-bono, to shape and provide content for new digital T-Level qualifications, ensuring they’re appropriately structured and assessed 

Staff wellbeing

• We train our teams in Mental Health First Aid and line managers take active steps to recognise the signs of stress, burnout or mental health issues in their teams 
• We’ve developed capability frameworks as an open, structured way to guide progression 
• We have a disability steering group, who assess our tools and communication channels for accessibility and inclusion 
• We have well-embedded processes in place to ensure people can do their best work, including regular time off projects, reducing likelihood of burnout 
• We provide paid volunteer days for all team members so they can spend time away from work focusing on social impact projects or issues that they care about 

Fighting climate change

Nexer is committed to reducing the environmental impact of its business, and of the digital products and services we design and build with our customers. We have committed to reducing our carbon footprint by 50% by 2030, in line with the wider Nexer Group.  

In the last 12 months we have taken a number of important steps to reduce our impact on the environment: 

• Brought in an acknowledged expert in digital carbon reduction, Gerry McGovern, to advise us on how to build more sustainable products and services 
• Calculated the carbon output of our delivery squads and developed a model, which we share with our customers and include in our commercial proposals, for calculating and reducing the carbon footprint of the projects we deliver with them 

• Placed carbon reduction measures at the heart of our strategy, for example in informing our technology choices, building longevity principles into our designs, and committing to energy and waste reduction in our internal ways of working 

Much more detail of our carbon reduction policies and actions can be found in our Environmental and Sustainability Strategy.  

Equal opportunities

We have an established policy which sets out our commitments to equal opportunities and diversity and outlines the positive actions we take to promote these principles in all of our work and with all of our team members.  

• 60% of our workforce identify as women. 18% identify as being part of the LGBTQ+ community. Nexer Digital was founded and is managed by a gay woman 

• Our team includes people who are blind, deaf, neurodiverse and have physical and cognitive disabilities. We explicitly encourage applications for roles with Nexer from people from under-represented backgrounds. We monitor this through an anonymous census to capture information about protected characteristics 
• We take active steps to ensure our hiring strategy has equality and diversity at its heart, as set out in the section ‘Recruitment and job creation’