The world’s second largest paper company is to begin work on developing social performance indicators after putting in place a set of corporate social responsibility principles.
Finland-based Stora Enso will start the work this year as part of its commitment to implement the principles, which set standards on issues such as equality, safety, working conditions and child labour.
‘It’s a question of moving from the principles to the practical realities,’ said Bjorn Hagglund, deputy chief executive. ‘Now that we’ve defined the areas that are most interesting to go further with, we need to come up with indicators on how we perform and then actually to measure our performance against those indicators.
‘When we get the results of that process we will have to see which areas need to be improved and to begin to update our quality management systems.’ A CSR report should also follow, he said.
Although the principles were devised by an in-house working group of senior executives and approved by the board of directors, Hagglund said the emphasis would be on implementing them through line managers rather than from a senior level. ‘The idea is to keep the whole initiative in touch with line management so that the principles are founded within the business rather than having wings of their own,’ he said.
Hagglund added that the intention was to ensure Stora Enso’s performance on social matters matched its work on environmental issues and sustainable forestry.
‘While we have a tradition of systematic dialogue with employees, suppliers, owners and customers, we are now looking into creating a more structured approach to the wider group of stakeholders,’ he said. ‘On social issues we are at the beginning of an important phase of development.’
Last year a study by the Swiss bank Sarasin found that the social performance of 12 of the world’s leading forestry and paper companies lagged far behind their environmental performance (EP2, issue 8).
Although Stora Enso was judged to be among the top four companies on combined social and environmental performance in that study, it scored less well on social performance.
The study warned that the acceptance of any forestry company ‘will no longer depend on its untarnished environmental record but increasingly also on its systematic consideration of the interests of all stakeholders’.
Stora Enso employs 45,000 people in more than 40 countries and had a turnover of £8billion ($11bn)in 2000. It produces about 15 million tonnes of paper and board each year and owns 2.6 million hectares of forest in Finland and Sweden.
It has based its corporate social responsibility principles on the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the core conventions of the International Labour Organization and the UN Global Compact.