Our Ethos
We have a strong history of social responsibility and, although our main aim of course is to grow the business, we are not purely driven by financial goals. To make our philosophy directly relevant to the project in hand, we could well describe the Webstars Ltd outlook as ‘more than profit’, a phrase coined at the 2003 Social Enterprise Institute Conference at Heriot-Watt University. It perfectly fits the Webstars way of doing business.
We like to think that we give to the community as much, if not more, than we take.
Corporate Responsibility
We support one charity via donations each year, currently the Association for Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus (ASBAH).
We also provide large discounts, and frequently work at cost, for charities, often delivering services and products above and beyond the price paid. Organisations to have benefited from this approach include:
Families Need Fathers
Childline
Teenage Cancer Trust
National Association of Child Contact Centres
Poet In The City
Campaign for the Protection of Rural England
CleanUP UK
Social & Environmental Policy
We use carbon neutral data centres where possible, and where historic arrangements prevent us from moving servers we look to offset the carbon used.
We minimise the impact of our business on the environment by working on screen rather than printing documents wherever possible, and we have a policy of powering off all computers at the end of the working day. The same applies to office servers
and systems that do not need to be left on 24/7 (email and phone systems are the exception). We have just banned the use of plastic / disposable cups in our office and instead use glass and china mugs.
Mentoring
We have recently begun informally mentoring a college graduate who is about to start his own web design company. Our target is to formally mentor start-up-businesses within the local community over the next 24 months.
Staff Welfare
We operate a policy of encouraging a good work/life balance. This extends to flexi-time for staff who have children, or other personal responsibilities.
Mineral water, hot drinks and fruit are available to our staff at all times. They also benefit from free membership to a local gym. The health of our staff is obviously important to us. To all members of staff we offer an initial free acupuncture treatment and subsequent subsidised treatments.
As a further benefit, if one of our team is unwell and finds the wait to see their GP is excessive, we offer to pay for them to see a private local doctor.
We encourage entrepreneurism within the team, and several members of our staff work on their own projects in their free time, using company desk space. We provide the resources free of charge. We find this creates a loyal workforce that tends to stay with the company far longer than is average in this industry. A recent success story is a member of staff who went on to start his own premium jeans label. He was with Webstars for three years and began the venture during that time. He now exports his product world-wide. As well as office resources we provided business advice and copywriting services for his press releases.