We help our clients achieve sustainable advantage

Collaboration

At the heart of everything we do is collaboration. Blackwood is a partnership and a single team built on the philosophy of putting the team before yourself, sharing success and owning failure. Clients hiring Blackwood will benefit from the areas of special focus and expertise of the entire team, brought to bear as need, not silo, dictates.

Learning and innovation

We aim to learn and improve constantly - to seek new ideas and knowledge and to encourage a culture that stimulates creativity and innovation. With our team and with our clients we strive for transparent, timely and trenchant feedback. If we could do it better, we try to.

Passion and positivity

We throw ourselves into everything we undertake – for our clients, our candidates, our team and for others – with verve, tenacity and the desire to exceed expectations.

Bravery and patience

It is a long race. We try to balance action with thoughtfulness and to persist and adapt in the face of difficulty.

Environment

We aim to live lightly on the earth. We are committed to being carbon neutral and to championing the use of smart technology to reduce or eliminate the waste of finite resources. We reduce our carbon footprint wherever possible and offset the inevitable impact that our business and related travel creates.

Particular initiatives in this area include the move to work tablets instead of notepads and introduction of the client portal to enable a meaningful reduction in the use of paper. We double the impact of this and related initiatives by funding the planting of trees for every transfer from paper-intensive documentation to an electronic copy. We regularly review our travel arrangements for efficiency and invest in state-of-the-art video conferencing.

All our bottled water is supplied by Belu, a social enterprise who make their bottles with Ethical Glass and donate all their profits to WaterAid. We recycle diligently and have recently bought everyone KeepCups to reduce the use of non-recyclable coffee cups. We support a number of charities that fund global forestation and clean water projects as well as volunteering each year to clean beaches of rubbish and fund sea missions to protect marine life.

Diversity

Social background, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation or disability status should not determine opportunity or act as any impediment to achieving the full expression of one’s ability. Diversity of experience, of colour, creed, gender, outlook and skill are the ingredients of innovation. Differences in voice and view test long held assumptions, they limit the opportunity for groupthink and status quo and they provide the widest possible funnel for ideas, for growth and for progress. Multiple perspectives bring sharper focus.

Diversity and inclusion are priorities we share with our clients. We actively promote and support diversity and inclusion by:

• working with our clients to ensure diversity is a desired and understood imperative, and not just a tick box
• championing skills and potential over specific experiences that favour one group
• assessing attributes free from bias. This is pivotal to our advice and to how we run our firm – we train all our people, and many of our clients, to recognise and exclude the many forms of unconscious bias that can cloud judgement
• ensuring our candidate idea lists are as diverse as possible
• advising on inclusion so that talent is nurtured and supported, and diverse hires flourish

Blackwood is proud to support:

- the #10000BlackInterns programme

- the Social Mobility Foundation

- and the Diversity Project

Social change

“We make a living by what we get. We make a life by what we give.” Winston Churchill

We give everyone time off to volunteer for charities of their choice and indeed encourage this activity with extra matched holidays. As a team, we have run food banks, built kitchens, planted gardens and painted hostels and secure housing. We have taken over restaurants, walked, cycled and ran thousands of miles to raise money for the charities we support.

We celebrated reaching 50 people by raising £50,000 (which we doubled to £100,000). We will celebrate 20 years of Blackwood by donating £200,000 and planting 20,000 trees.

Social mobility

We are privileged to help people on the journey from the entry point to the top of their careers and to advise on the challenges, obstacles and opportunities along the way so that they may realise their best and most productive selves.

Opportunity is not always equal and, using the best of our practical and advisory expertise, we aim to support those who might otherwise struggle - either because of low income, lack of support or earlier poor decisions - to put their lives on the best track they can. As well as our own apprenticeships, we support a number of charities aimed at creating opportunities for education and employment to those so affected. We provide advice on CVs and interviewing as well as making valuable connections to companies who will provide internships or other opportunities.

Health and wellbeing

We believe that we should work to live and not live to work and that breadth of interest and pursuit informs breadth of advice.

The physical, social and mental wellbeing of our team is important to us. We provide everyone with Fitbits and financial support for gym membership or fitness programmes. We run in house yoga classes and book clubs, provide free fruit and track team mood. We provide financial incentives for people to expand their horizons: providing National Art passes and funding towards theatre tickets, travel, adventure and self-improvement.

We support a number of charities that support young people struggling with debilitating mental health problems or other social issues.