Responsible organisation

We strive to be a responsible organisation, through the working environment we create for our team, the way we engage with our stakeholders, and our business practices.

How we operate as a business is as important to us as the science we pursue and the therapies we are developing for patients. We recognise our business practices have an impact on our entire value chain, from our employees to our partners to the environment.

We are a participant of the United Nations Global Compact (UNGC), a voluntary leadership platform for the development, implementation and disclosure of responsible business practices. The UNGC is the world’s largest corporate sustainability initiative. We report our progress to the UNGC on an annual basis.

We are building a vibrant culture that is aligned with our values of being bold, rigorous, inclusive and compassionate. We take a proactive approach to assessing our workplace environment. In our most recent culture survey, we had an excellent net promoter score of 39.1

We have been certified a Most Loved Workplace, ranking number 31 in the UK. The list recognises companies that put respect, caring, and appreciation for their employees at the centre of their business model.

There are five areas we focus on in our efforts to be a socially minded organisation:

  • Team wellbeing: As a mental health care company, we aspire to be a leader in building a workplace that reduces the stigma of mental illness and fosters wellbeing. To us, team wellbeing starts with our culture, ways of working, the benefits we provide, and the support each of our team members receives in defining and pursuing their career aspirations. We also offer a holistic, optional programme to support the physical and mental wellbeing of our team members.
  • Diversity, equity and inclusion: We are building a team that is diverse, and a culture that values everyone’s ideas and lived experience. It is important that our workforce is as diverse as the patients we aim to help with our therapies.
  • Business ethics: We set and follow high standards of conduct and accountability. We promote ethical behaviour through transparent policies and practices.
  • Supply chain management: We seek to work with suppliers whose values align with our own. We recognise that much of our impact sits in our supply chain, so it is important for us to collaborate with our suppliers to understand and address environmental and social impacts.
  • Environmental stewardship: We strive to minimise the negative impacts our business activities have on the environment.
76 %

of team members agreed with the statement “COMPASS prioritises my wellbeing.”

75 %

of team members agreed with the statement “I have a real sense of belonging working at COMPASS.”

Our actions

  • We encourage all team members to talk openly and honestly about their health, and not to feel like they must hide it or put on a brave face just because they are at work. We provide our team members with a variety of resources to foster their wellbeing:

    • One-to-one confidential wellbeing check-ins, onboarding and offboarding with our Wellbeing Lead
    • Employee assistance programme run by certified counsellors; 10+ therapy sessions for team members and their families per issue
    • Fireside chats to discuss current societal and national issues in a supportive and non-judgmental way
    • Option to use sick days for mental health
    • Meditation app, with weekly group meditation sessions
    • Weekly yoga sessions

    In 2021, we signed the Global Business Collaboration for Better Workplace Mental Health Leadership Pledge, promising to raise awareness of mental health challenges and support everyone who works at COMPASS. We are also a member of One Mind at Work and a signatory to their Charter. One Mind at Work is a global coalition of organisations committed to the development and implementation of a gold standard for workplace mental health and wellbeing.

  • Our polices empower our team to work in the ways that suit them best. We follow a hybrid working model, providing resources to support team members virtually and in person. All team members receive a work-from-home budget to purchase items to make working from home a more comfortable and ergonomic experience. We also encourage team members to disconnect during their time off. We have implemented company-wide closedowns twice a year to make it easier to do so.

  • Our team members are encouraged to collaborate, socialise, and learn from one another virtually and in our offices in London, New York, and San Francisco. We encourage and support our employees to drive initiatives they are passionate about; employees run a variety of committees, including wellbeing, social, and environmental.

  • Our remuneration package includes competitive salary, annual bonus, annual equity awards and ability to participate in our employee share purchase plan, company paid healthcare plans, generous paid time-off, life/disability and income protection insurance, and retirement saving plans including a company contribution.

39 %

women in executive management2

12 %

LBGTQ+ team members3

90 %

of team members agreed with the statement “We are inclusive at COMPASS.”

Our actions

  • In 2021, we established our first Global diversity, equity, and inclusion policy, which covers topics like our practices and policies on recruitment, compensation, and employee development and training. The policy seeks to ensure that our organisation is as diverse as the patients we aim to help with our therapies. We periodically conduct workplace harassment training and inclusion training to build awareness and capabilities in these areas.

    • We are connecting with experienced partners to support us to diversify our pool of candidates. We also use job boards dedicated to LGBTQ+, ethnic minorities, and neurodivergent job applicants.
    • We have undertaken a gap analysis to identify ways to attract, retain and support people with neurodivergent traits. We have improved the accessibility of our website for people with visual impairments. We also invite candidates to notify us if any disability accommodations are needed in the interview process.
    • We are a signatory to the UK Disability Confident Scheme, which aims to help organisations employ disabled people. Disability Confident is creating a movement of change, encouraging employers to think differently about disability and take action to improve how they recruit, retain, and develop disabled people. Representatives for disabled peoples and employers developed the scheme to make it rigorous but easily accessible.
    • We are members of the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion (ENEI). ENEI are our external advisors and help us to improve our DEIB policies and practices.
    • We have given team members the option to voluntarily provide their personal demographic information to enable us to measure our workforce diversity and set goals to improve diversity. See more data here.

Our actions

  • Our Code of Business Conduct and Ethics governs the business-related conduct of directors, officers, employees, and designated consultants. The Board of Directors review this policy annually. All employees are required to read and comply with the Code. The Code has three main purposes:

    • to drive ethical business performance and encourage a culture of integrity and accountability.
    • to provide support to employees around ethical decision making and doing the right thing.
    • to develop a Speak Up culture and encourage employees to raise their concerns about potential ethical issues.

  • Employees are encouraged to report any activity that may be in violation of the Code of Ethics to management. We also offer a confidential Speak Up Line for allegations of Code violations which gives an opportunity for anonymous reporting. We always aim to protect the reporter of an allegation against retaliation.

  • Data privacy is of the utmost importance to us. We collect clinical trial participant data in two ways: (1) through the patient-facing myPathfinder application, which provides guidance to patients throughout COMP360 psilocybin therapy; and (2) recording of patient sessions. Participants are informed of how their anonymised data will be used, and of their rights under applicable privacy laws. We do not store any personally identifiable information or data. We have deployed a completely blinded cloud-based infrastructure to store patient data. Analytics on patient data is done on anonymised data automatically.

    In terms of our cybersecurity, we continuously evaluate our Microsoft Azure infrastructure for security and potential attack vectors. We have a 97% Microsoft Security score, compared to 32% for similarly sized companies. We have independent periodic penetration testing to conduct additional security screening. We work to obtain warranties that our vendors are implementing appropriate data and cybersecurity controls to ensure our vendor systems are secure.

  • As part of our animal welfare work, we have joined the Concordat on Openness on Animal Research in the UK, which involves reporting annually how, why, and when animals have been involved in preclinical research for COMPASS. As members of Understanding Animal Research, we support education and refinement of the use of animals in research.

    To uphold our responsibility to produce high quality, ethically driven research, we ensure all studies commissioned by us, and conducted by our preclinical research partners, meet animal welfare protocols. We adhere to the principles of the ‘3Rs’ (Replacement, Reduction & Refinement) of animal models in preclinical research. Where suitable non-animal alternatives are unavailable, we conduct ethical appraisals and design studies in a way that minimises animal use and impact, while maintaining scientific rigour. We implement these animal welfare protocols consistently across all our preclinical research and discuss the importance of animal welfare with our research partners to ensure we align on these values. Read more about our animal welfare practices here.

Our actions

  • We are enhancing our third-party risk management approach. Our updated approach allows us to better understand where risks sit in our supply chain. Key supply-related risks have been identified and treatment plans are in place.

  • As part of our supplier due diligence process, we are evaluating the inclusion of ESG criteria, such as human rights, diversity, carbon emissions, and health and safety. This will help us evaluate the relative maturity of potential suppliers.

Our actions

  • Investigational COMP360 is manufactured and packaged in the UK. It is packaged in a lightweight plastic bottle, which minimises freight costs and energy. We are working to further reduce the environmental footprint of our packaging by studying the feasibility of transitioning to blister packs for commercial launch.

    We are in the process of calculating our carbon and water footprints. We will use this information to evaluate actions needed to reduce the impacts from our operations and supply chain.

  • Environmental stewardship is promoted throughout our organisation by an employee environmental committee. In 2022, the committee organised an auction to reuse office technology. A total of 16 laptops were sold, effectively prolonging the functional life of COMPASS technology that, although no longer fit for the intensity of COMPASS work, still works well for personal use.

  • We believe environmental issues need to be addressed at the industry-level. We are eager to learn from and support sector-wide collaborative actions to help build sustainable solutions, and develop the data, frameworks and standards required for policy change. The Sustainable Medicine Partnership is a not-for-profit, private-public, multi-stakeholder collaborative of 42 organisations aiming to make the use of medicines less wasteful. Click here to read about the four-year programme to build science-based, scalable solutions to reduce waste from medicines.

Footnotes

1 https://www.qualtrics.com/uk/experience-management/employee/employee-net-promoter-score/

2 Voluntary response rate of 89%. Positions with a reporting line at most two levels from the CEO. Bands I, J and ET.

3 Voluntary response rate of 60%.


Data points – Refer to data as of December 31, 2022. See more impact data here.

Our collective understanding of mental health is increasing all the time, with advances in neuroscience, psychotherapy, psychopharmacology and digital platforms.

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