Jean-Pierre Overbeek

Describe boldness and innovation in the group and more particularly in your Smart Building and Multimedia activity.

At BIS|Econocom we strive in all our activities for an optimal balance between fulfilling our customer needs, the interests of our employees, our profitability and the social and environmental impact of our actions. This requires us to make the right, and sometimes daring, choices (which solutions to choose, which customers to serve, which suppliers to co-operate with etc.), and to constantly innovate our solutions and services. Every year, at least 10% of our turnover comes from innovation, every year our social return grows and every year our CO2 footprint drops. With our audiovisual and videoconferencing technology we are enabling our customers to reduce their travel and CO2 footprint and with our AV-as-a-Service methodology we are able to facilitate our customers to have a zero-waste footprint with AV products. We are a leader in our industry in that sense.

How would you define a responsible company and what do your clients expect in regard to commitment?

For me, a socially engaged and responsible organization is an organization with an open mind and outward-looking focus, in which employees at all organizational levels do what they say and say what they do; in an open, transparent, inclusive, and respectful way. In doing so, they act with integrity, comply with legislation, are focused on the other and take responsibility for what they do and for the social and environmental impact of their choices and actions.

What is the CSR impact of your activity and how do you measure it?

Every day we aim for maximum positive impact, which we measure step-by-step with the help of a certified partner. We achieve our positive impact by maximising our social return (e.g. by employing people with a great(er) distance to the labour market), by generously supporting several charities and by investing heavily in reducing our CO2 footprint and that of our customers. For example, we recently installed more than 250 solar panels at the roof of our logistics centre and agreed on a plan to become a CO2 neutral business from 2023, including all the necessary investments.