To our stakeholders:

Continuing into 2022, I can confirm that brainbits GmbH supports the ten principles of the United Nations Global Compact in the areas of human rights, labor, environment and anti-corruption.

In this annual Communication on Progress, we describe our actions to continually improve the integration of the Global Compact and its principles into our business strategy, culture and daily operations. We also commit to share this information with our stakeholders using our primary channels of communication.

Sincerely yours,
Sascha Emondts
CEO - brainbits GmbH

We fully support the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-human-rights). Our corporate values are based on the Declaration of Human Rights. We expect our business partners to recognize and adhere to the Declaration of Human Rights.

We know that human rights are not adequately observed in the IT hardware value chain. We depend on the use of IT hardware. As a small, regional company, we cannot directly influence this situation. We have therefore set ourselves the following goal for the coming year: We would like to find the best possible compensation for this injustice and we would like to implement this compensation in our business activities.

We deal with new customers in detail. If we find out that their activities could pose a human rights risk, we terminate the cooperation or do not start it in the first place.
New employees are made aware of our corporate values as part of the application process and asked to check their willingness to work for us against this background.

All of this is also implemented in our quality management system.

We support diversity and have implemented various measures in the past year. We have changed every text on our website so that they now address everyone. In our office, we have a restroom for all genders. We also want to strengthen our position in the area of inclusion of people with physical disabilities. To this end, we have published a job ad on the portal myability.de and are continuing our training on the topic.
We also have established a system for employees to support staff by donating overtime to them. After all, last year some of our employees were affected by the flood disaster in Germany or have helped out in the crisis area.
At Christmas, we declined to give gifts to our customers and instead donated to various aid organizations on their behalf.
In 2022, the Ukraine war has shaken us a lot and we are trying to support as a company. So, for example, we were able to send a large donation of powerbanks to Ukraine and turn overtime donations from our employees into cash donations.

All employees are called upon to ensure compliance with human rights at all times. In the event of a deviation, the management must be informed immediately. We live a culture in which human rights have an important value.

In our annual management review, compliance with human rights is included as a mandatory point.
Company-wide surveys have also confirmed that our efforts are well received and supported by our employees.

brainbits is a lean and agile company. The leadership culture is characterized by the philosophy of servant leadership. The right of co-determination of employees is an essential part of our understanding of cooperation on equal terms. This is also reflected in the company values that are known to all employees, applicants and our customers.

At the end of last year, we introduced OKR as a management system. The direct link between our own activities and the achievement of our corporate goals is intended to further strengthen the integration of all people who work for us.

We have implemented various agile methods such as Scrum and OKR in our everyday work. The continuous optimization of our value-adding processes goes hand in hand with monitoring and optimizing collaboration. This supports our efforts to make working conditions people-friendly.

We strive to continuously reduce our ecological footprint. Due to our field of work, this mainly includes the following areas: electricity, mobility, avoidance of waste.

As a service company, our business does not pose a direct, significant risk to the environment. Therefore we have not set up a special management system to reduce environmental hazards.

Electricity: We rely entirely on the use of renewable energies. We also pay attention to this with our business partners. Especially with commissioned data centers. We are also continuously working on reducing our electricity requirements.

Mobility: In 2021
We support a companywide no-flight policy. Our car-fleet is gradually being converted to electromobility. We fully compensate for unavoidable CO2 emissions via atmosfair (www.atmosfair.de)

Avoidance of waste: We are continuously working on reducing waste. Where we cannot avoid waste, we separate the types of recyclable material and send them for recycling.

We also support forest reforestation projects and our employees have created a community that is actively looking at how we can become even more environmentally conscious in our everyday office lives. For example, we offer biodegradable period products in the restrooms and try to avoid packaging waste when it comes to sweets.

We record our annual electricity consumption as well as our mobility kilometers and other CO2-relevant factors. In a year-on-year comparison, this helps us to continuously reduce the negative impact.

Our company guidelines prohibit any form of corruption. This is continuously monitored by our quality management system. Suspected corruption can be reported directly to the management. Anonymous ways are available for this.

All investments of a relevant magnitude must be checked by the management. One checkpoint here relates to the prevention of corruption.

Because the management has an insight into all business cases due to the size of the company, we have not set up a separate system for evaluating corruption cases.

There have been no cases of corruption since the company was founded in 1999.