Our company's comprehensive safety and security strategy is aligned with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Discover how we protect people, assets and data.
The UN Sustainable Development Goals are a roadmap for a better, more sustainable and more equal world. At mci group*, we want to make that world a reality.
Chief Executive Officer Sebastien Tondeur noted in mci group's Sustainability Report that our company has been a signatory of the Global Compact since 2007. “We are proud to have been the first agency from the meetings and associations industry to commit to the Global Compact. Since then, we have been working to integrate the ten guiding principles into our business,” he wrote.
“We challenge our partners and clients to support the Compact, too. The Compact’s ten principles and the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals have been a fundamental influence and guide in developing our sustainability strategy.”
MCI has identified seven key shared goals aligned to the Sustainable Development Goals. Protecting our people & assets is one of these.
(*MCI is an agency of mci group.)
Safety and security: strategic objectives
- Every year, 100% of projects are assessed through our Event Safety and Sustainability Tool (ESST).
- Every year, 100% of Duty of Care obligations (protecting our talents for risky travels) are completed.
- Maintaining our ISO 27001 (information security) and ISO 27701 (privacy information) certifications.
- Maintaining an 80/100 score in office safety for every audit we perform every 3 years
- 100% of Managing Directors are trained for operational crisis management every 3 years.
- Our group mental health strategy will be created and implemented for all the offices by the end of 2024.
Key highlights 2022
- No work-related injuries and/or fatalities and/or notifiable incidents with our employees in 2022.
- We created a health and safety game that teaches our teams to evaluate risks and take appropriate measures.
- A specific IT risk assessment has been added in 2022 to our annual risk management process.
- To ensure project managers follow our safety and security processes, we have implemented 25 checklists considering all aspects of an event.
Safety
At mci group, the safety of our talents, clients and attendees is the highest priority. Over the years, we have worked towards a rigorous and proactive approach to risk management, building a robust safety culture that involves all our stakeholders.
Our safety and security strategy
Our safety and security strategy covers risk analysis, business continuity and crisis management. Over time, we’ve gradually embedded this strategy in our processes, and refined it with increasingly efficient tools.
Our safety and security programme consists of 45 health and safety coordinators, and is managed by our group health, safety and sustainability director, Emmanuel André, a certified safety engineer.
Together, they ensure safe and secure operations for mci group talents and clients around the world.
Safe working environments
Our offices follow security procedures that ensure safe and secure operations for our talents around the world. These include control access systems to the company’s premises to avoid any intrusion, fire protection systems, first aid procedures and staff training.
We are pleased to report that there were no work-related injuries and/or fatalities and/or notifiable incidents with our employees in 2022.
Client project assessments
Our events are assessed for security, data protection and sustainability risk through our internal audit tool and security checklists.
Potential risks are managed locally or with our security experts’ help. Our internal assessment tool, ESST, assists us in this task.
To empower our teams to take their security into their own hands, we have also developed basic and advanced level training for our offices and staff.
To ensure this training is engaging and memorable, we even created a health and safety game that teaches our teams to evaluate risks and take appropriate measures.
Duty of care
We’re dedicated to going the distance when it comes to protecting our teams, which means keeping them safe whether they’re working at home, or abroad. That’s why we have subscribed to Safeture services, which provide automated security alerts and safety information on users’ smartphones while they are abroad. By hitting the SOS button, our talents can inform our group health, safety and sustainability director of an emergency so that assistance can be provided.
Additional procedures are in place for employees travelling to high-risk destinations, and appropriate measures are being taken to protect them from harm.
Data privacy and information
We understand that safeguarding vital information is key to a sustainable operation.
That’s why, as well as having implemented a number of effective policies and technical controls to safeguard all information we collect, we are dedicated to complying with strict data protection regulations.
So that our procedures remain airtight and up to date, our group data protection officer and chief information officer regularly review our policies and standards in response to changes in our business, technology, infrastructures and regulations.
Our processes and systems are aligned with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), ISO 27001 (Information security management systems) and ISO 27701 (Privacy Information Management System) certifications, ensuring that they’re airtight and held to a high standard. We also organise training sessions for our talents and local referents.
In the last few years, as we’ve moved towards more virtual and hybrid solutions for our clients, we’ve made sure to adapt processes and policies accordingly.
Cybersecurity
We’re incredibly proud to announce that in 2022 we earned the ISO27001 (Information security management systems) and ISO27701 (Privacy Information Management System) certifications.
These certifications and methodologies ensure that our data and talents are protected, and that our teams are equipped to complete the necessary actions to protect our data.
As part of our onboarding programme, we provide IT security training for new talents joining the group, making sure that we have a participation rate above 80%, and we run regular awareness campaigns on fraud and phishing alerts across all our agencies.
To ensure that teams can remain in the know, we also make all policies and best practices readily available at any time on our intranet. We even created an IT Charter that every talent must sign, so that we can maximise security and awareness as early as possible in the recruitment process.
Business continuity and crisis management
We’ve developed and implemented our own business continuity plans to ensure our leadership is always equipped to deal with a crisis. As part of this plan, we test and train our leadership teams and project managers with crisis management live exercises several times throughout the year.
This provides them with the tools needed to perform an advanced business continuity and crisis management plan in case of an emergency.
Nurturing wellbeing and mental health
We value our talents above all other assets, which makes their mental health, wellbeing and happiness a key concern for mci group.
Our 2022 talent engagement survey identified that 72% of our talents feel that, overall, they have a good work-life balance, and 85% say that their manager cares about their wellbeing. However, some reported struggling with managing their job responsibilities in a way that enables them to lead a healthy balanced life.
When analysing our survey results by demography and job roles, it became apparent that some teams (mainly operational and client-facing) were under increasing pressure. This is partly due to the fact that, between an increased volume of projects post-pandemic and the difficulty of hiring, some teams were understaffed.
To ensure that we’re positioned to support our employees through these pressures, we plan to conduct a more in-depth survey on our wellbeing and mental health practices to better understand our talent’s needs and where we need to improve our strategy.
Whilst we strive to improve the case-by-case care for employees who are struggling, we’re also committed to providing free, unlimited access to digital mental health resources for all our talents. In addition to hosting dedicated mental health resources on our intranet, this year, we conducted webinars in which we shared tips on healthy living, balanced lifestyles, staying active and coping with stress.
Our agencies also continued to implement various local initiatives to support our talents, such as Wellness week, telehealth or digital health services, mental health counselling or psychological support via external experts, which amounted to nearly 4,000 hours of training, coaching or support offered to our talents.
Flex workplace – new ways of working to do our best work
We believe in providing our teams with the freedom to move beyond boundaries and create, collaborate and enact change with fluency and ease. This means empowering talents to be able to work however they want, wherever they want, according to their needs, and the demands of their ongoing projects.
Whilst we stress the necessity to comply with local labour laws and job-specific requirements, we do not want to enforce any specific policies regarding flexible working. Instead, we offer local teams a set of guiding principles to help them thrive in the new world of work, which include:
Teamwork: Most of our work requires teamwork; therefore collegiality, equity and the wellbeing of each team member should be the first criteria to define a work style and maintain connections and team spirit.
A home away from home: We will maintain physical offices as work and community gathering places. These spaces will always be available without limitations to anyone who wishes to work from our “home”.
Supporting one another: All talents should commit to regular face time with their team to build connections and camaraderie, share knowledge, and contribute to building a high-performance culture.
Stories on protecting our people and assets
The Mind Over Miles (MOM) Challenge
This year we went bigger and better with our group health challenge. For one month, talents were encouraged to be more active using a step-tracking app, a goal designed to combat the challenges faced by an often-sedentary work style which has been exacerbated by distance working.
The objective of the challenge is to promote physical activity, team spirit and wellbeing in general, as well as to assist in the creation of connections among our talents through a fun and inspiring experience.
In 2022, we were pleased to see a total of 502 talents actively participating in our challenge.
Well-being Week in France
In November 2021, our colleagues at MCI France launched a “Well-being week” to take care, not only of their health, but also of the planet. The programme included:
- Meditation and Sophrology
- Massage
- Running
- Anti-stress food
And for the planet: a “Clean Walk” together with Hilton Paris employees to pick up trash throughout Paris!
Read more about our company's Sustainable Development Goals and our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, and to learning and development. You can download the full 2022 Sustainability Report here.
Emmanuel André - Group Health, Safety & Sustainability Director
