RECRUITMENT and retention of employees at one Edinburgh-based company has been helped by becoming Scottish Living Wage Accredited employers.

Customers have also responded positively to the move by Tempus IME, according to managing director Elliot George.

Tempus IME provides document and print management services to companies and its clients cover various markets and range from SMEs to one of the UK’s largest banks.

It works with the private and public sector and is increasingly working with more organisations in the charitable and third sector.

“We were keen to pay the living wage as we believe in benefitting the community we work in and see supporting the living wage as part of this,” said George.

“We’re all like-minded as a team in this respect and as a business support several local charities.

“In terms of a business benefit it has helped us with recruitment and retention of employees and gives the team a real sense of pride.

“We’ve also seen customers comment positively on the fact that we are a living wage employer and I think it resonates with organisations who have a strong sense of corporate social responsibility and want to work with like-minded organisations.”

One of the company’s employees to benefit from the living wage accreditation is business office administrator Shannon Nimmo, Tempus IME’s most recent recruit. “As a young person, to get the living wage is a great help to me and allowed me to do things like move into my own place,” she said. “Being a living wage employer was one of the things that attracted me to the role here.”

Tempus IME looks after everything from printing marketing material, to managing statement mailings and creating digital libraries for electronic document storage. Its mission is to save companies money and time in managing their company’s document assets.

“The idea for the company came about when we saw a gap in the market for a company that provided ‘on and offline’ document solutions,” explained George.

“We saw that there were many companies that provided print services and many that provided electronic document services but not so many that bridged both areas.”

The small but highly skilled team of seven people have come from a range of backgrounds involving publishing, print and IT.

However, they all have the same focus of providing a more efficient and higher quality solution for their clients, according to client sales director Richard Skedd.

“We’re always looking for ways to improve our customers experience,” he said.

“For example, one of our clients has a string of shops across Scotland. They approached us as they produce printed monthly catalogues for each of their different sites and were out benchmarking prices.

“We could have continued to do it in the same fashion they had been doing with their previous supplier and still saved them money but we discovered that one of their pains in this process was coordinating the information for each of the sites and managing the production process.

“We developed an online system which allowed each site to upload their own particular offers but keep within corporate branding guidelines.

“Not only did we save them money on the printing of these items but also greatly reduced the administrative time and effort involved at their end.”