Sustainability Policy

In accordance with our vision, mission, and values, SMS Assist is committed to being an environmentally and socially responsible corporate citizen. We aim to follow and promote responsible and sustainable business practices, to reduce the environmental impacts of all our activities, and to help our providers do the same. Accordingly, we strongly support efforts to protect our natural resources and our communities. To accomplish this goal, we encourage our employees and providers to incorporate sustainable practices to the greatest extent possible. We aim to reduce our environmental footprint across our entire supply chain, making our business more resilient for the future. We also provide our team members with paid time off to foster connections with the community through volunteering.

WE TAKE ACTIONS TO PROTECT THE ENVIRONMENT.

SMS Assist strives to act in an environmentally conscientious and responsible manner.  Some examples of our sustainability practices include, but are not limited to:

• Conserving resources through efficiency. We seek to decouple growth from resource depletion through the use of our scalable technology. We use our proprietary technology to continuously improve efficiency in the workplace and supply chain to reduce waste, reduce energy consumption, and minimize the impact our work has on the environment. For example, our technology matches customers with providers in their proximity on a real-time basis, creating route efficiency to reduce fuel consumption. We believe that the growth of our business should not come at the expense of depleting the world’s limited resources
• Promoting and facilitating a paperless office environment. By using our proprietary technology, which allows employees, customers, and providers to retrieve, access, and transmit information electronically (e.g., invoices, work orders, and contracts) we reduce the need for paper documents on a broad scale. Internally, our Records Retention Policy favors electronic documents over paper.
• Finding new ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including efficient resource management and a use of carbon-reducing strategies. We believe climate change is a serious matter and continuously endeavor to operate as one team with regards to protecting the environment.
• Encouraging employees to always be mindful of the resources they use and providing actionable advice. By empowering employees to adopt waste-reduction strategies, such as reducing the use of paper and single-use plastic products, and decreasing power or water consumption, our individual actions can add up to make a significant impact. We are committed to complying with applicable laws, regulations, and industry standards concerning environmental policy.
• Requiring our providers to adhere to the environmental, safety, and health laws where they operate. We also encourage our providers to use environmentally sustainable materials and to implement and adhere to environmentally beneficial policies and practices that increase performance efficiency.  We believe that by using our technology, our providers can reduce their reliance on natural resources.

We are committed to continuously reviewing our strategies towards the environment and seek new ways to adopt improvements to our sustainability practices. SMS Assist strives to create an innovative workplace and we encourage our team members to look for new ways for SMS Assist to perform in a more sustainable matter and to help our customers and providers in their environmental efforts as well.

WE ARE COMMITTED TO SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY.

Community Outreach.  SMS Assist embraces the opportunity to positively impact the communities where our employees live and work.  Through our community volunteer program, SMS Serves, employees contribute their time, resources, and skills to give back to and positively impact their communities and nonprofit organizations. To promote our employees’ passion for service, every team member receives one paid day off per year to spend volunteering for the SMS Serves program(s) of their choice. In 2018, 352 employee volunteers donated 1,346 hours of their time at 14 SMS Serves events.

In 2019, our employee volunteers donated 1,472 hours through the SMS Serves program, including at 10 SMS Assist-hosted events with 8 different non-profit organizations. Additionally, 240 SMS Assist employees made over $3,000 in donations to charities using points earned through a third-party workforce recognition platform. SMS Assist made $50,000 in donations to local charities in the Chicagoland area.

We invite our employees to suggest organizations that are particularly significant to them as we seek to partner with at least one different organization each month of the year.

Corporate Ethics Policy.  We are also firmly committed to conducting business activities lawfully and with integrity.  We require all employees to comply with our Code of Conduct, which is designed to provide employees with guidelines for honest and ethical business conduct. We also expect our providers to abide by our Provider Code of Conduct.