Sustainability

Our Impact

Our clients trust us with some of their most complex and important work. They can also trust us to be doing the right thing. When it comes to contributing to a more inclusive and sustainable future, Zanders takes its responsibility.

In a world facing the devastating impacts of climate change and strong inequalities, our impact goes beyond safeguarding the financial future of our clients. It also includes upholding the highest professional standards and making a positive impact on people, communities, and the environment.

Across Zanders, you will find our people challenging themselves to embed responsibility, inclusiveness and sustainability into everything they do.

United Nations Global Compact

Creating a positive impact

As a proud participant in the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), Zanders is committed to advancing the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and to aligning our strategy and operations with the UNGC’s Ten Principles. This covers everything from human rights and labor to the environment and anti-corruption. To maximize our impact, we focus on the SDGs that are most closely aligned to our regular business activities: decent work and economic growth (#8), reduced inequalities (#10), and climate action (#13).

EcoVadis

Advancing our sustainability credentials

In 2023, we achieved a silver rating in our annual EcoVadis sustainability assessment. This ranks Zanders in the top 15% of our company’s peer group. The assessment focuses on 21 sustainability criteria, grouped into four themes: environment, labor and human rights, ethics, and sustainable procurement. Our next goal is to achieve a Gold medal, which is awarded to the top 5% of companies. We’re already implementing initiatives to achieve this.

Trees for All

Achieving climate neutrality

Tackling climate change is arguably the defining challenge of our generation. We’re rising to that challenge by setting a bold target to reduce Zanders’ greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 50% by 2030 (per FTE, relative to 2022). In the meantime, we are offsetting our GHG emissions with carbon offset credits from Trees for All. These credits support farmers in Bolivia to switch to sustainable agroforestry through the planting of indigenous trees, in combination with coffee, cocoa and other crops, to restore degraded soils. So, as well as offsetting our GHG emissions, this project also positively influences biodiversity and living conditions in that part of the world.

Diversity, equality and inclusion

Accelerating inclusive growth

Diversity, equality, and inclusion (DE&I) are embedded in our DNA. With employees from over 40 different nationalities, we continue to build an inclusive culture that encourages, supports, and celebrates all different voices. But we also recognize that there’s always room for improvement. We are currently developing a DE&I policy to underline our commitment to this topic. Other initiatives include the measurement and reporting of the gender pay gap, mitigating the ‘unconscious bias’, and creation of more employment opportunities for people with a distance from the labor market through Social Return on Investment (SROI).

ISO 27001

Protecting your data

Today’s sophisticated threat landscape, evolving tech ecosystem and increasingly hybrid workplace demand a more vigilant approach to cybersecurity and mitigating information security risks. The achievement of the ISO 27001 certification and the Dutch Government Information Security Baseline measures (BIO; level BBN2) together gives our clients assurance that we have the governance, systems, and infrastructure in place to protect sensitive data, to maintain the confidentiality of information, and to mitigate potential risks effectively.

Download our latest ESG Report

Learn more about our approach to sustainability – our practices, current initiatives, ambitions, and goals for the future.

Download here