Corporate Responsibility
TIP is dedicated to sustainability, community investment, & strong governance, enhancing telecom infrastructure for economic & social benefits.
TIP and Environmental, Social and Governance issues
TIP always strives to be:
- a good employer;
- a good, well governed, business; and
- a corporate citizen that makes a positive difference.
How our business makes a positive difference.
- TIP is a leading global digital infrastructure investment firm.
- We operate within the global lease aggregation market, targeting telecom sites predominantly across Europe and Latin America. This means, we are supporting infrastructure which delivers key economic and social benefits.
- TIP offers recipients of rent-for-mobile sites, or similar infrastructure, a large up-front cash payout. Landowners, who receive payments from us often use it to make a positive difference to their lives (because, for example, it allows them to pay for medical treatment and educational courses for them and their relatives).
- TIP’s business model is focused on the acquisition of triple net lease agreements from individual landlords. This means that our business has a very modest carbon footprint. Our tenants, who typically are well known communications providers or large wholesale infrastructure providers (or “Towercos”) are acutely aware of sustainability issues and usually seek to make their sites as energy efficient as possible.
- Some of the landowners, who receive a large upfront payment from us, are community sports clubs, who use the funds to improve the club’s facilities, or charities, who use the money to further the charitable aims of their organisation. You can find testimonials from some landowners about how receiving money from TIP has made a positive difference.
- Recruiting and training the best people in the lease aggregation space is at the heart of our business.
- All new joiners to TIP attend a 4-day quarterly training, delivered by our CEO Eric Overman and the Executive Team. This covers the details of how the business works, investment appraisal, the role of the Investment and Development Managers (“IDMs”) and acts as a means for new colleagues from different countries to meet and learn from each other. One of our quarterly training sessions, held in Warsaw, was filmed enabling us to create a modular training approach to support future hire inductions.
- Apart from central company training, our teams in the countries we operate in have regular team workshops, which focus on key areas of our business (real estate legal issues, negotiation techniques and marketing).
Our latest ESG rating.
In September 2023 we were delighted to hear that GRESB a body that independently assesses ESG ratings for real estate related businesses had given TIP an ESG rating of 78/100 for its inaugural ESG submission. This is considered to be a strong result.
But there’s a lot more we want to do.
Here are the additional steps we will take to ensure that environmental, social and corporate governance best practice is a key pillar of our business. These goals were endorsed by the TIP board.
A Good employer
A Good, well governed, Business
An ethical corporate citizen that makes a positive difference
We will use the HR system to carry out annual employee satisfaction surveys with Net Promoter Scoring. Later in 2024 we will also launch our first diversity survey.
We will also use the HR system to carry out 6 monthly performance reviews with each employee using an objective setting and rating system that we have recently rolled out.
We will continue to ensure that the rewards and benefits our people receive (including those relating to health care, life assurance and income replacement) are attractive and significantly exceed minimum mandated levels for the countries we operate in.
Using our online training and knowledge portal, we will roll out the TIP “Continuing Telecoms Education programme” which is designed to build on the initial induction training our IDMs receive and enhance their negotiation skills, and knowledge of investment appraisal. We will continue to ensure that our new recruits receive in person from our CEO and other senior leaders soon after they join TIP.
In H2 2024, we will launch our Corporate Social Responsibility group, whose membership will be drawn from across the countries we work in. The Group will suggest ESG related objectives and metrics for the business and give feedback to the HR director and Board on TIP ESG practices. The members of the Group will be responsible for ensuring that ESG initiatives (relating to diversity, wellness, volunteering and fund raising for charities) are implemented within the local teams that the Group members are drawn from.
Each of our teams will be asked to set wellbeing related goals for their country.
Using our new training platform all our new and existing employees will, annually, complete online on demand training courses in business ethics and conduct; whistleblowing; data protection and privacy; cybersecurity; and diversity equity and inclusion. These modules will be provided in a variety of languages.
Our Employee Code of Conduct sets out the standards that we expect all our employees to adhere to. It sits alongside the business ethics training (see above). Each year, each employee will be expected to formally acknowledge that they have read the Code, and that they will comply with it. We will review the text of the Code annually so as to ensure that it remains fit for purpose.
We know how important it is to our employees, tenants and the landowners we work with that the business is completely cyber secure. As well as employee training, we have extensive policies which cover data protection and cybersecurity and we will continue to monitor the business’s compliance with them, and to develop them further.
We have appointed a Data protection and Cybersecurity lead who will work with subject matter experts to ensure that our systems are robust and that we do more than simply comply with the relevant regulations.
We will instruct external experts to carry out penetration testing on our systems on at the very least an annual basis. We will ensure 24/7 incident monitoring of our systems, and that our IT partners are using effective anti-virus software across the business.
We will obtain ISO27001 certification for our business. ISO27001 is a key international standard for information security management system). By addressing technology people and processes ISO 27001 will help TIP to ensure its information security is as robust as possible.
We will introduce specific training for our managers so as to continue to ensure they keep employee data secure.
Whistleblowing We know how important it is for employees to feel entirely comfortable that that they can raise concerns about the business in a completely confidential way. We believe our whistle blowing reporting processes and policies and the training our employees receive about whistleblowing aligns with the needs of TIP, its contractors and employees, and complies with the relevant legislation in the countries we operate in. But we will continue to monitor our processes and policies to see if they can be improved further.
We will aim to be a net zero business no later than 2030 by adhering to the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi), which defines and promotes emissions reductions in line with climate science.
We will appoint a Net Zero lead for the business and will report on progress every year.
We will ensure that the office space we rent is highly energy efficient and incorporates recycling points.
We will work with the tenants of our sites to assist them in reducing carbon emissions on the cell sites they lease from us, by for example ensuring that they can rent additional space to site solar panels, turbines or batteries. We will explore ways in which the TIP business can generate additional revenue by assisting our tenants to achieve their net zero goals and their goal to be less reliant on back up diesel generators on site.
We will carry out environmental due diligence on each piece of real estate we invest.
After we consulted our employees, it was agreed that each country would have its own charity partner. The business will “match fund” the amounts the teams raise for these charities, up to a cap set for each country.
Each of the teams in the countries we work in have also selected a community project where the team members can carry out voluntary work. They will work for this project for at least one day every year. We aim to ensure TIP employees have spent a total of 300 hours doing voluntary work before May 2025.
In addition, our teams will be encouraged to build on the work we have already done in mentoring people from groups who are often underrepresented in business.