Unispace: Streamlining sustainability regulation compliance with Sedex Consulting
Supporting this global business to understand, prioritise and efficiently meet corporate sustainability regulations.
Unispace is a workplace design, strategy and construction leader operating across 26 countries, creating experiential spaces for a rapidly changing world.
Coming into the scope of ESG laws
Unispace has grown quickly, setting up in 20+ countries in 12 years. When these separate regional organisations were consolidated, the global Unispace business suddenly came under the scope of multiple ESG, supply chain due diligence and other sustainability-related laws in several operating markets.
Recognising this shift, and the changing landscape of corporate sustainability due diligence, Unispace turned to Sedex Consulting to help them understand these laws and meet the regulations applying to them. What began as an initial legislative scoping project has proved a strong foundation from which to build a global supply chain due diligence and responsible sourcing programme, while ensuring Unispace’s legal compliance.
Unispace reached the threshold for several ESG regulations globally within a short space of time. We’re committed to meeting our compliance obligations, including through creating safe, sustainable workplaces.
The Sedex team made something that was very complex really straightforward – and easy to communicate across the rest of the business, to help us get the necessary internal support.
Securing stakeholder buy-in with clear priorities
Sedex’s Consulting team first delivered a sustainability-related legislation diagnostic for Unispace, outlining the company’s current and future obligations across different countries and laws. Their work highlighted 17 priority laws requiring immediate compliance – such as the UK and Australian Modern Slavery Acts, and California’s Transparency in Supply Chains Act.
This work simplified the complex legislative landscape, providing Unispace with reliable, expert guidance and saving them weeks of research and analysis on each potentially applicable law. The clear priorities, validated by Sedex’s experts on sustainability regulation, supported Unispace’s procurement team to secure internal stakeholder buy-in and the funding they needed for the activities to comply with those laws.
Sedex then supported Unispace with meeting the requirements of the priority laws, including producing mandatory transparency statements and reports.
Efficient compliance through holistic planning
By looking across the relevant sustainability laws for Unispace, Sedex Consulting guided a holistic approach to meet the most immediate requirements efficiently, identifying similar outputs or related tasks across laws to avoid duplicated effort.
For example, the UK Modern Slavery Act, the Australian Modern Slavery Act and the California Transparency Act all require companies to report on their policies and processes to prevent modern slavery in their operations and supply chains. The holistic approach proposed by Sedex streamlined this activity, reflecting a consistent approach and the same information where relevant in Unispace’s statements for each.
Within six months, Unispace had complied with all “Priority 1” laws across all applicable countries.
Delivering a comprehensive responsible sourcing programme
Following the diagnostic work, Sedex Consulting is supporting Unispace to develop their responsible sourcing and supply chain due diligence programme, working with the company to embed this across the business.
The programme will evolve Unispace’s policies and processes to support continuous improvement on supply chain sustainability, while enabling the company to meet multiple legal requirements in a streamlined way. Activities across this programme, such as supply chain mapping, supply chain ESG risk management and annual reporting are key enablers for complying with related regulations.
What Sedex did for us was a fantastic piece of work – it’s a couple of years old now and we’re still referring back to it! We use it to prioritise our resources for meeting sustainability-related legislation, and it really allows us to see the wood from the trees. We look forward to evolving our supply chain due diligence programme with the Sedex Consulting team.
