Highlights

On Wednesday 24th March we were recognised at 2021’s InsideOut Awards, which celebrate employee mental health and wellbeing in the workplace.

We won the SME Wellbeing Strategy award for our wellbeing programme and for continuously making mental health part of our culture, breaking down any stigmas within our organisation.

We’re proud to have the kind of culture where people feel they can bring their whole selves to work, one which is fully supported by our leadership team and a wellbeing approach which really encourages colleagues to be healthy and happy at work.

The National Literacy trust set up the Connecting Stories creative writing competition,  with the intention to  to inspire a love of writing among children and young people, giving them the opportunity to tell their own story, in their own words, based on a theme specific to their local area.

Last week, 16 brilliant volunteers from Emerald provided invaluable support, reading over 480 creative writing entries, in doing so freed up 32 hours for the NLT team allowed them to keep providing the children and young people they work with sustained support throughout the Connecting Stories project, which nationally is expected to reach 374 schools and has resulted in 1200 stories.

A huge thank you to everyone who volunteered their time to give each child the careful consideration that their stories deserve.

This International Women’s Day we want to recognise the pressure and inequality felt by female early career researchers, which has been exacerbated by COVID 19 and resulted in a 35% decline of research output for this group.

We want to help achieve a fairer society and so we’re stepping up to help level up, by launching a support network for female early career researchers on our platform Emerald Engage.

Emerald Engage will provide a safe space where people can hear how others are coping, make global connections, share ideas and buddy up with more established researchers, who are able to give their time to share experiences, advice and practical tools.

During the pandemic there has been a heightened awareness of the ‘digital divide’ within our communities, which is stated as ‘the gap between people in society who have full access to digital technologies (such as the internet and computers) and those who do not.’

To support this ongoing challenge, we sold some of our technology equipment from across the Group and in return received £3, 500 back. This amount has been donated back into technology and we have split the amount to The Re Start Project and Digital Access West Yorkshire.

We’re proud to be supporting Show Racism the Red Card - the UK’s largest anti-racism educational charity as our chosen Charity of the Year.

We had an amazing and eye opening introduction to the charity with Deputy CEO, Paul Kearns and Shaka Hislop so look out for our volunteering, fundraising, and educating efforts throughout the year across the Group!

Following on from a very successful Emerald LIVE we have dedicated two weeks to our people culture in what we’ve called our People & Culture Toolkit.

The toolkit has been designed to offer opportunities to learn more about being the best version of ourselves, what we stand for as Emerald evolves, and how to work smarter in light of our new ways of working.

Emerald LIVE is our annual week-long strategic employee conference, bringing together a globally dispersed leadership team. This year looked a little bit different as it was our first fully virtual event, but it was still a brilliant and energetic week to kick start the year.

Emerald LIVE gives our employees the opportunity to engage and collaborate over a full week of sessions, workshops, learning, creative thinking, and some fun activities thrown in.

We’re pleased to report that our Gender Pay Gap narrowed in 2019 from 19% to 17%, but we recognise that there is further opportunity to do more. This report outlines our plans for how we will continue to support gender equality.

Download the Gender Pay Gap Report

On the 22^nd September 2019 we provided an opportunity for all our colleagues across the globe to show their commitment to making an impact in our local communities. Over 100 colleagues were involved and throughout 2020 opportunities are being created as all colleagues at Emerald are entitled to 2 volunteering days per year.

The Smallest Things premature baby charity awards Emerald Group ‘Employer with Heart’ status in recognition of their policy for supporting parents of premature babies.

Find out more

Effective from 13th March, Emerald Group has acquired Mind Tools, a leading digital learning and performance support company that helps users to build their management, leadership and personal effectiveness skills.

Find out more

Emerald Open Research – the first Open Research Publishing platform for impactful social sciences research – has launched with its first six gateways, which tackle critical world issues linked to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. Designed in partnership with F1000, Emerald also becomes the first publisher to adopt their pioneering Open Research Publishing model, enabling rapid publication followed by transparent expert peer review, helping to maximise impact and reproducibility of a much broader range of research outputs.

Emerald Publishing is delighted to sign up to DORA, the Declaration on Research Assessment, supporting its vision to advance practical and robust approaches to research assessment globally and across all scholarly disciplines.

This aligns with Emerald’s Impact Manifesto, launched by Vicky Williams, Emerald Publishing's CEO in March 2018. The manifesto called for change across the whole academic ecosystem, recognising that the traditional markers of influence such as citations were not sufficient to tell the full story of impact.

One in a Million School in Bradford is one of our partner charities for this year.

Pupils from the school joined us for a session with local author Daniel Ingram-Brown (Firebird Chronicles Trilogy). During their visit they took part in a creative writing session, in which they were given the chance to enter our writing competition, judged by Emerald owner, Keith Howard.

We also opened the competition up to Emerald staff, so we’ll be selecting two winners; one a pupil from the school and the other, an Emerald employee. Each will either receive a £20 Amazon voucher or a book of their choice!