By The Independent

Copyright independent

At Sidekick, between June 2023 and July 2024, we delivered over £10 million in social value across key contracts in the UK through targeted initiatives designed to promote local skills and employment.

Building a resilient and diverse workforce

Facilities management is often manual, demanding and at times unstable. Yet within this environment, we have built a workforce that is resilient, diverse, and highly committed; more than 1,300 strong across the UK, with 60% women and over 50 nationalities, each bringing unique perspectives and experiences. We treat every contract not simply as a service to deliver, but as an opportunity to create lasting human impact.

Today, over half of our Sidekicks are in full-time roles, with many more working toward that stability. Our goal is straightforward but ambitious: to open the door to full-time employment for as many of our operatives as possible; because secure jobs don’t just transform individual lives, they strengthen families, communities, and the economy.

Through investing in our people, we enjoy industry-leading retention — attrition rates of >3% among operational staff and >5% among supervisors and managers. Low attrition matters for more than business continuity. It signals that people have found a place where they can build a career, not just hold a job. That, in turn, creates stability for our customers, who value long-standing, experienced teams caring for their workplaces.

Embedding social value in every contract

Our customers increasingly want to know the broader impact of their contracts, and we respond by designing every contract around clear, evidence-based social value outcomes, tracked through the National TOMs framework with the Social Value Portal and we report back in clear, customer-facing terms. This transparency creates opportunities for dialogue, shared goal-setting, and continual improvement. It takes social value from an abstract ideal into a practical driver of decisions, investments, and innovation — year after year, and contract by contract.

Breaking barriers to full-time work

Engagement starts with listening and understanding; we interviewed supervisors and managers to understand the biggest hurdles to career progression for our teams. The feedback was clear: language was the number one barrier.

Many of our colleagues wanted more hours and full-time day roles but lacked the English language skills to seize those opportunities. Rather than accept this as a fixed reality, we looked for solutions.

Through Babbel, we now offer every Sidekick access to an award-winning self-study language learning solution offering courses from beginner all the way up to proficient. With business-focused and industry-specific content, it ensures our learners are acquiring language skills that are deployable in their day-to-day. This opens the door to more hours, more responsibility, and more secure roles.

The impact of this is measurable: when an individual moves into full-time employment, it creates around £50,000 of social value (based on a central London postcode in FY2024-25, SVP). That value is then captured and reported back to customers, showing them the real impact of the contract — not just in service outcomes, but in life outcomes for real people.

Why customer engagement matters

By showing the jobs created, the progression supported, the environmental impact reduced, and the communities strengthened, we make social value a shared achievement.

For customers, this engagement does more than satisfy reporting obligations. It strengthens their brand, helps them attract and retain talent, and connects them with the communities where they operate. For us, it creates accountability and drives continuous improvement. Every insight (like the importance of language learning) comes directly from this cycle of listening, measuring, and acting.

The bigger picture

A diverse, stable, and engaged workforce contributes to community cohesion, family security, and long-term prosperity. By choosing Sidekick, customers secure high-quality workplace services while helping unlock wider benefits for society. Through triple bottom line reporting, we show every contract’s value in financial, social, and environmental terms, driving growth, inclusion, and sustainability.

We are not just as a service provider, but an employer of choice, a platform for social mobility, and a partner in delivering measurable value. The purpose is simple: to prove that facilities management creates not only clean and safe workplaces, but also productive and socially valuable ones.

By sharing stories, data, and opportunities with customers, social value becomes real, meaningful, and scalable. That is the Sidekick difference: the small steps behind big leaps, not just for businesses, but for people and the communities they live in.

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