By E&C Consultants on 31/03/2023
Topics: Corporate social responsibility
[This blogs reproduces the press note created on the occasion of the Award ceremony]
Warsaw, 24 March 2023. E&C Consultants’ Polish branche has won the Family and Human Wellbeing Humanites Award 2022 granted by the Humanites Institute.
E&C is an international energy procurement consultancy, servicing large consumers of energy in more than 100 countries worldwide. E&C is present with a team of consultants, financial controllers and IT and data specialists in Poland since 2012, with a Hub for our flexible workers in Wroclaw. E&C’s Head Office is in Kortrijk in Belgium.
Humanites Institute was founded in 2010 in Poland, taking as its main mission to support development of an individual and value leaders, supporting this way the development of the society and social capital. They meet their goals by organizing conferences, workshops, leadership academies, and mentoring program for leaders in Poland.
The competition considered, among others, a culture of feedback and appreciation, support for employee personal development and opportunities to engage with both the society and the environment. Intrinsic to this process was the collection of input directly from our employees, a true bottom-up approach also encouraged at our company. After an exhaustive evaluation process, the jury selected E&C Consultants as winner in the small company category.
E&C Consultants received the award during a ceremony organized in the framework of the 10th Humanites Institute Conference, on the 23 March in Warsaw, Poland.
For E&C Consultants, it’s especially meaningful to receive this award based on a reputed institute’s assessment and employee’s feedback after what has been a very challenging period. The unprecedented increases in energy prices of 2021 - 2022 caused a huge surge in workload for E&C, whose job is to help some of the largest companies on this planet to protect themselves against the many billions of extra cost caused by such price increases. E&C is therefore very proud not only that it’s been very successful in this, but also that in such crisis moments it could stay true to its values and intense desire to give employees a purposeful job experience.
For Benedict de Meulemeester, co-founder and CEO at E&C Consultants, this recognition means a lot: “Ever since employee n°1 joined us in 2006, we’ve been consciously applying values such as flexibility, transparency, empowerment and caring. In these last five years, scaling up our company, these values have been translated into many concrete HR initiatives such as balance days, benchmarking salaries, a unique competences and roles personal development approach, and so on. On top of that, we’ve launched our CSR champions initiative which has seen many bottom-up initiatives that enhanced workplace well-being.”.
“Principles of Teal organization models are an important source of inspiration for me and the other leaders and coaches at E&C”, he added. “Our goal is to help our employees to make the best out of the many opportunities for professional development offered by a fast-growing company in an interesting, challenging market place. And most importantly, we want our employees to find a good balance between their life at E&C and personal well-being, including the important family life. As we are applying the same values, principles and practices in the many countries where we have E&Cers, we consider this award to be a recognition that stretches beyond the Polish borders. However, it’s especially rewarding to receive this award in Poland, where we once started from a traditional back-office philosophy to seeing today how people in all corners of the country find a purposeful job experience at E&C and contribute to corporate energy transitions. Our motto ‘Smarter energy for a better world’, starts with creating a better E&C, everyday again.”
According to the organizers, the Family & Human Wellbeing Humanities Award is a “unique distinction that rewards the multidimensional approach of business to social development.”
“Employers, by shaping their employment policies, have a significant impact on the broad social ecosystem, which translates not only into the performance of companies, their level of innovation, involvement, but also into the quality of health and life of people in general”, recently said Zofia Dzik, President of the Board of the Humanities Institute.
The institution explained the competition as a four-stage process that analysed applications from companies all over Poland, employing together around 44 000 people. Strategic approaches to employment policy and the development of employee wellbeing, solutions for flexible working arrangements, supporting the integration of family and working life, as well as support for employees without family commitments and those who care for the elderly were assessed. In the final stage, employees themselves were also asked how they rated their employer's actions and what they valued them for.
“On the basis of almost 2,000 employee questionnaires and the materials collected, we can say that a Family and Human Friendly Company is above all a coherent company – one in which both superiors and subordinates agree on the conditions that prevail in the company, and in which the management adapts wellbeing solutions to the real needs of employees”, said the institution via its formal channels.
