How we’re balancing our people, planet and profit goals

To get a true picture of where we’re at, we look beyond just money. Strong financial performance is essential. 

It keeps the business running, enables growth and supports our people. But it’s not the only measure of success. It’s our aim to give equal priority to our health and nature as well as just profit. That’s why we’ve introduced a Triple Balance Sheet – a way to track our financial health alongside how we care for our people and the planet. It’s a commitment to ethical business, a healthy culture and long-term viability. By sharing this with our clients and collaborators, we also share the benefits it brings. And by being transparent, we can all improve together. 

Enter: The Triple Balance Sheet. Along with our financial performance, we’ve introduced metrics and measurements of our health and happiness at work and our impact on the environment. Pulling these together in one balance sheet gives us a more holistic picture. We can be more accountable as a business, find new ways to improve and celebrate the good stuff too. Here’s how.  

Our priority has always been the wellbeing of our team. We’ve introduced initiatives to help maintain a team who can enjoy work while being their true, authentic selves.  

• Adopting the four-day week meant we switched time sheets to task sheets. This gives our team the autonomy to complete tasks in a time that works better for them, rather than working an allotted number of hours just for the sake of it.  

• At the same time, we launched our TG Alertness app. Everyone is encouraged to engage with this every day. It tracks levels of happiness, mood and reaction time, giving us a clearer idea of the fatigue levels and overall wellbeing of our team. 

• We set up safer ways of working to check if anyone’s working long hours, especially when they’re doing it alone on a project. 

• We’ve introduced better maternity and paternity support  

• We’ve added new levels of support too, like introducing a mindfulness coach to help our team and our Tyler Grange Partners (TGPs) pause, reflect and be more present in their day-to-day life.  

Any health data we record is collated by our Fatigue Team, headed up by Kevin Beck, our Resilience Consultant. It’s their job to monitor the Alertness app usage and suggest improvements that could benefit our team’s wellbeing based on the results. We’re able to track individuals to make sure nobody works too many hours, and that everyone is as safe, happy and healthy as possible.  

What if nature had a legal voice in our company decision-making at board level? Here’s where we can quantify the results for our triple balance sheet. 

• We measure ourselves against  B-Corp and UN sustainability standards. This not only includes measuring our environmental impact but also those of our suppliers and Tyler Grange Partners.  

• Our ‘B-Keeper’ is Kay Geoghegan,the Quality, Data & B Corp Lead in our team. Kay tracks everything from our energy and carbon emissions, the impact of our suppliers and our social engagement.  

• By using the OnHand app, we’re able to record our team’s volunteering time giving back to the community.  

• The projects we work on meet and exceed biodiversity net gain requirements.  

• Educating our team is important. For example, carbon literacy training is offered to everyone at Tyler Grange, making our impact reach further and last longer.  

Monitoring these numbers shows how we’re doing and what improvements can be made, like providing more environmental training for our supply chain. Internally we can reduce the reliance on things like next-day delivery services in our offices. We’re asking how to make our travel more efficient, using the team based nearest to a project, using more electric vehicles or public transport.  

It’s a common misconception that an environmentally responsible business is a less profitable one. We find that looking after people and nature opens more avenues to profit than it closes.  

A staggering example of this is one of the key metrics we measure – absence through sick leave. It costs the UK over £100 billion annually. We were amazed by this number. It inspired us to look at why our team might be absent and what we could do to help maintain a healthy team.  

A happy team sticks around for longer, and that means stronger relationships with you. As Jon points out, “Some of our clients have been with us for 15 years, and they’re still working with the same people on their projects as they did when they first worked with us. They don’t really work with ‘Tyler Grange’. They work with our people.” The strength of these relationships means that about 80% of our business is through repeat custom. Happy team = happy clients.  

“It doesn’t have to cost you more to look after your team and the environment.” 

– Jon  

One of the key driving factors of our Triple Balance Sheet is transparency. We’ve already been open about pay in our business, so sharing even more seems like the next logical step. By monitoring health, environment and finance on our Triple Balance Sheet, we get a more rounded picture of where we are as a business. It’s something we’re undertaking voluntarily, because we feel it’s important to celebrate the good stuff, but not to shy away and mask the not-so-good stuff.  

“Some months the team might not be happy, we might be working long hours, and we might have faced problems financially. It’s about honesty. The Triple Balance Sheet is something I would like to publish and make available internally and externally every month. It gives us a chance to learn things we wouldn’t spot otherwise.” 

– Jon  

The Triple Balance Sheet is helping us react to the things that need immediate attention. The data from our alertness app and our clinical psychologist team help us make fast, real-time changes for the benefit of everyone who works with us. Happier people and a lighter environmental footprint keep our work quality high and delays low.  

We’ve twice appeared on The Sunday Times Best Places to Work list and remain profitable, showing that responsibility and growth can coexist. 

It’s also guiding the future of our business. With a clearer, more holistic picture of our organisation, we can feed trends into our strategy for the next five years. We can learn from the data we collect, make guided predictions about the direction our industry is moving in and prepare our people for the future.  

If you want to know a bit more about what else Jon and the team have been up to, find out here!