Responsibility at SYK

Responsible development of property assets

As a property owner, SYK’s responsibility is centered around developing properties in line with the principles of sustainable development. We are responsible for providing our customers with appropriate and healthy operating premises. Our aim is to ensure the long-term sustainability of our properties from the human, environmental and economic perspectives.
We want to develop our campuses into environments where everyone, regardless of their role or perspective, can find it motivating and meaningful to act responsibly and in line with sustainable development. We want our campuses to have a positive impact that supports responsible lifestyles.
Only buildings that are used can generate added value for society, which makes them worth the investments made in their construction and maintenance. Accordingly, developing the attractiveness of our campuses is also significant from the perspective of responsibility. We want our campuses to be attractive and highly integrated parts of vibrant university cities.
Making more efficient use of space is responsible from the perspective of the economy as well as the environment. At the same time, we recognise that learning is a social situation. We often convert underutilised premises into group work spaces to support collaborative learning.

Cooperation with partners

We are a small expert organisation whose operations are based on reliable partnerships. Our partner network consists of hundreds of partners, the most significant of which are universities, construction companies, property maintenance companies, consulting companies, funding providers, property leasing operators and other expert organisations. We aim to build sustainable and long-term relationships with our partners.

In our role as client, we require our partners to operate responsibly. Economic responsibility and environmental responsibility are emphasised in our assessment of partners. In practice, this can involve issues related to taxation and nature.

We develop our industry by making substantial investments in research, development and innovation activities that help take the property and construction industry forward. We also promote a culture of experimentation by allocating funds from our annual renovation budgets to demo projects implemented in partnership with universities each year.

Reporting on responsibility

We have strengthened the principles of sustainable development in our operations since 2011, practically throughout our company’s existence. We have developed our responsibility reporting since 2013. We report on responsibility in accordance with the GRI principles and we publish an integrated report in the GRI database.

The aim of our reporting is to promote the openness and transparency of our operations, to provide increased opportunities for comparisons within the industry and to improve the monitoring of key aspects. A further goal is to identify aspects of our operations that our stakeholders have a special interest in, through which we can strengthen our positive impacts on the surrounding society, economy and environment.

We also carry out comparisons with corresponding reports by other operators in the property sector and interact with them to jointly develop responsibility within the industry.

We also participate in the discussion on responsibility in our industry together with our stakeholders. We are also interested in new reporting models. We are a member of the FIBS corporate responsibility network and we take advantage of the lessons and ideas that originate from the network.