Sustainability and ESG

Park Place Technologies’ Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) success is measured by what we do and how we do it.

ESG results are increasingly a measure of a company’s performance. Environmental stewardship is a puzzle piece necessary to navigate climate impacts and is now being legislated. Social engagement is key to hiring, developing and retaining the people who set us above our industry peers. Proper governance is synonymous with quality leadership and risk reduction, which makes Park Place a high performer, a stable platform for our employees, and a trusted partner to our customers.

Our Business—Customer Sustainability

From our founding in 1991, Park Place has worked to help our customers extend the life of data center computer equipment. Since that date, the scope and scale of data centers has exploded, with Park Place growing in step with our customers, continuing to provide data center hardware maintenance services and expanded support with network and hardware monitoring and triage services. Our impact has been extending the life of computer equipment on average three years across now more than 1.1 million hardware assets.

In 2020, Park Place acquired the Curvature hardware resale business. Curvature brings our customers a resource for added and replacement equipment from the secondary preowned market. In 2021, individual equipment sales by Curvature exceeded 450,000 units, with each individual unit sale saving manufacturing and equipment disposal impacts, estimated at 950,000 pounds, on our environment.

Park Place continues to innovate, developing complimentary solutions to accompany our hardware maintenance and preowned hardware sales. ParkView Hardware Monitoring, underpinned by our First-Time Fix™ Guarantee, pinpoints break-fix needs and allows us to resolve customer issues in one trip. Park Place’s data center efficiency solutions, including Entuity network monitoring, ParkView Discovery and managed services support, negate excess redundancies in equipment and premature refresh of IT systems, meaning that customer equipment is utilized to its maximum potential for its maximum life.

Every Park Place employee believes we are a company that has met its moment. We have the opportunity to make a positive difference with each service and equipment sale, enabling our customers and communities to conduct their business more sustainably.

Our Company—Corporate Responsibility

At Park Place, we believe we have a responsibility to serve as a role model for the conduct of business in a manner that serves all of our key stakeholders. Our employees expect nothing less. This means that we turn inward and make environmental stewardship a daily activity at Park Place, and that we create opportunities for individuals to build careers and support themselves and their families in a respectful environment. It means that we conduct business in a manner with legal compliance, public policies and the ethics and values of the populations with whom we work as the standard. It also means that we preemptively negate risks, such as data breach and cybersecurity risks.

We have enlisted our Board of Directors, our senior leaders and our employees across the globe to engage in our ESG initiatives and the daily steps that create measurable improvements in our workplace and employee experience, our communities, and our environment. These efforts share common themes. They are deliberate, forward looking and impactful. We hold ourselves accountable for progress and work to measure the impact of each effort. We look to make positive impacts and to create a contagion of corporate responsibility by leading by example.

Social Initiatives

Park Place has long worked to establish a global baseline of fair compensation, generous benefits, equal opportunity, and an inclusive environment. We periodically complete third-party compensation and global benefits reviews and conduct annual employee evaluations and yearly engagement surveys. We are an intentional equal opportunity employer, sponsor business resource groups, a DEI program, “Dimensions,” and have multiple employee communication opportunities, including a daily intranet site, leadership “town halls”, and podcasts. These are in addition to our online employee learning platform, which hosts over 450 active courses, many part of specially designed developmental curricula. We also have made company success synonymous with employee success through our annual profit-sharing program, in place for more than a decade.

Park Place has a history of community outreach. At the global level, we have partnered with I Wish, an Ireland-based organization committed to showcasing the power of STEM to female secondary students. Most recently, we co-hosted more than 22,000 girls from 26 countries at the I Wish annual event. Community by community, we help Girl Scouts earn cybersecurity badges in Ohio; support campers in Massachusetts with scholarships to Worcester Polytechnic Institute; lend our hands to England’s Future Frontiers, and locally in our headquarters community with Breakthrough Schools and other school programs, to foster educational equality through mentoring and support; promote annual philanthropic giving to numerous community and child-focused programs; and donate laptops to schools and charitable organizations, providing coding opportunities to students.

Our company culture is one of relentless innovation, so the natural next question is, “What more can we do?” Our teams are embarking on additional initiatives that we believe will be game changers for Park Place and the opportunities for individuals who join our organization. These include:

CAREER COHORTS – our employees have the talent, motivation and motor to serve as leaders at Park Place, so we have built a multi-faceted program to provide hands-on, in depth, cross-functional teaching and support with the clearly defined objective of advancing each program participant two or more steps on their Park Place career path and into key leadership roles.

VETERAN HIRING INITIATIVE – we are taking steps to become a destination employer for Veterans. We have opportunities across the company with the primary qualification for the position being the energy and commitment to learn and succeed. Our recruiting actively targets the Veteran community. We have created a business resource group specifically for our Veterans, one of the most active employee affinity teams at Park Place.

NEURODIVERSE/AUTISM INTENTIONAL HIRING INITIATIVE – still in the exploratory stage, this Park Place initiative seeks to become the first in our industry to focus on the unique talents of the neurodiverse population and create a work environment in which the company engages top talent employees by providing the opportunity for work and careers to persons who, absent an intentional program with the right supports, may be overlooked.

Environmental Initiatives

Park Place’s environmental stewardship within our organization is captured by the common phrase, “a million little things.” This speaks to what the company and our individual employees do daily and our plans for next year — and beyond.

Park Place’s Professional Services ITAD team dismantles all customer IT systems with documented disposal in accordance with Waste from Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) standards. Curvature Hardware maintains its R2 (Responsible Recycling) Certification, which is the standard for best practices for electronics recycling.

A walk through any of our offices reveals individual and common-space recycling bins, energy-efficient lighting, and motion-activated switches. Our service locations are the hub of our electronics recycling programs and scrap management. In our parking lots, 41% of our employees have access to electric vehicle charging stations, the majority funded by Park Place, with plans to expand in 2023.

Plans are underway to add solar panels to provide power to one or more of our primary locations in 2023. In addition to this alternative energy source, Park Place tracks global energy consumption and has set a 10% target for energy use reduction for 2023.

To build on the above, Park Place is exploring carbon net-neutral programs and certifications, with the expectation that our efforts to date, combined with the commitment of our leadership and each of our employees, will allow us to hit this target within the next 3-to-5 years.

Governance Initiatives

At Park Place, governance is seen as how our Board of Directors and senior leaders guide the organization to meet priorities, manage risk, preserve reputation and honor company ethics and values. The governance arm of our ESG program oversees value-based, measurable, tracked and reported performance standards that marry business conduct and the collective interests of the company’s stakeholders.

Our governance mandate includes legal compliance, examples being our data privacy compliance program; antibribery/anticorruption policies; training and monitoring; and our export and import compliance controls. It also includes Park Place risk-management programs, such our Business Continuity Plan, Employee Hotline, employee cybersecurity training, published policy library, and supplier vetting protocols and code of conduct. Park Place has taken the added steps of aligning with top-tier industry standards and has earned ISO 9001 EMEA Quality Management System, Global ISO 27001 Information System Management and Managed Services SOC2 Data Security Certifications.

Our Board of Directors, executives and senior leaders hold themselves accountable for the business success of the organization, with a further commitment to transparently and honestly communicate company performance to employees and empower employees to contribute to the success of the organization. In addition to profit-sharing, Park Place has an expansive equity participation program. Quarterly executive-led company-wide townhalls supplement our daily intranet, “WIRED”. An annual employee engagement survey includes management follow-up and reporting to the highest levels in the organization.

Conclusion

Park Place’s ESG initiative is a continuous improvement mandate. We take pride in the work we have accomplished to date and the company we are, and we look to amaze our stakeholders and continue to set an example for our corporate peers in the next year and beyond.