Three-quarters of the production sites owned by the sugar and food ingredients group Danisco now comply with the company’s CSR policy, according to an internal assessment.
Responses from site and sales managers to ‘social policy scorecards’ show that 75 per cent of Danisco’s production sites, covering 80 per cent of employees, ‘live up to all the requirements’ of the policy, which was issued in December 2001.
However, Danisco says the exercise has revealed a need for more training of employees on the sites to increase awareness of the policy and explain its implementation. Divisional staff from large sites will be drafted in to instruct staff at smaller sites and some sales offices.
Among other things, Danisco’s CSR policy commits the company’s business units to eliminate child labour, negotiate collectively with trade unions, comply ‘with internationally acknowledged human rights’, and pay wages that ‘meet or exceed legal or industry minimum standards’.
Danisco, a Danish company operating in 40 countries, found sites in Europe and the United States fared better than those elsewhere.
The company, which has little direct contact with consumers, will use the scorecards, in conjunction with a ‘social questionnaire’ written by the human resources department, to create indicators for evaluating the ethical performance both of individual sites and of the company as a whole.
Each year it will analyse the frequency of sick leave, the number of employees by gender, staff turnover and relative wage levels to build up a picture of how the policy is working.
Danisco will report on the indicators for the first time this year, but has so far found that the incidence of sick leave ranges from less than one per cent to more than ten per cent and is now trying to work out the reason.
It has also found that turnover of employees for 2002-03 was almost ten per cent, a figure it would ‘like to see lowered’.
Danisco published general guidelines for employees last year to make it easier to implement its social policies.