Churchill Group wins the Rising Star award from SFMI

We have been awarded the ‘Rising Star’ award by the Sustainable Facilities Management Index (SFMI). The Group won the award following our third assessment from the sustainability benchmarking initiative.

We were recognised with the Rising Star award for our multiple social value activities. For example, initiatives embedded into our client contracts create social value resources, including aspiration packs for school children. The SFMI judges praised our internal wellbeing programme WellMe, which provides five pillars of wellness recommendations and goals for our employees. We are also a disability confident employer and offer additional support for neurodiverse colleagues, as well as workers going through menopause. All these elements resonated with the SFMI.

The SFMI also praised us for becoming an employee-owned business in 2023, meaning that 53 per cent of the company’s shares are held by the Employee Ownership Trust for the benefit of our employees.

The SFMI is run by Acclaro Advisory and was specifically created for the UK facilities management sector. It assesses FM providers across 23 criteria relating to environmental, social, and governance initiatives.

In addition to winning the Rising Star award, we retained the silver award this year. The SFMI praised our strong people-focused ethos and recommended that these initiatives become further embedded across our supply chain and stakeholders.

Thomas Farrell, our environmental manager said: “The Rising Star award recognises how our sustainable initiatives and commitment to putting people first have developed in the past year. Nothing exemplifies this more than our transition to becoming an employee-owned business. The SFMI also provided some recommendations for improvement which we will be addressing in 2024 as we aim for the gold award next time.”