Swedish sense

On Friday I was kindly invited to attend an awareness-raising event for Social Enterprise at Ikea. I was there with Dave from TRUP, Anthony from BigBarn and a few others to get the message out about recycling, reuse and buying your produce locally.

Whilst there I spoke with Maree who has been at Lakeside IKEA since before it was built (she worked in the site-office when the shop was being constructed) and she was telling me about the new scheme that they have running. Basically, if you've been working for Ikea for more than 12 months, you can apply to take a 6-month backpacking trip to either South Africa or Vietnam and still receive full-pay. Whilst there you've to help out with a community support project but what a fantastic opportunity to see a different life?

We then talked about the World Cup and the effect that it will have on staff-sickness days - yet again Ikea are taking a far more pro-active approach on this and telling their employees to take a holiday day or some unpaid leave and the store will be operated by a skelenton staff. It makes perfect sense and really allows them to plan their resources most effectively.

Clearly at Ikea, it's not just the hotdogs and kitchens which are good