Oil and petroleum multinational ChevronTexaco is to issue its 53,000 staff with corporate responsibility guiding principles.
The principles, developed as part of a new corporate responsibility programme, are for the ‘operational guidance’ of staff.
They support a mission statement known as the ChevronTexaco Way, which commits the group to ‘conduct our business in a socially responsible and ethical manner, respect the law, support universal human rights, protect the environment and benefit the communities where we work’.
ChevronTexaco will test the principles in pilot projects run by its business units to ‘gain practical experience in taking a more systematic approach to corporate responsibility management’ – and to work out how to integrate social and environmental factors into management systems.
The company, which is not listed in either the Dow Jones Sustainability or FTSE4Good indices, expects the pilots to reveal ‘additional ways to measure and assess our corporate responsibility performance’.
The pilots will concentrate particularly on human rights and community engagement, which the group says are its main CSR priorities. ChevronTexaco will also pilot a human rights statement this year, and is assessing how to make its community engagement work, on which it spends $63million (£36m) a year, more effective.
The statement will provide guidance on issues such as employment standards, security, conflict zones, indigenous peoples and human rights assessments. It is expected to provide a framework for dialogue with external organizations and to be the starting point for measuring and reporting human rights performance.
ChevronTexaco will test the draft statement in various unnamed countries ‘where we face significant human rights challenges’. The group operates in 180 countries, including Angola and Nigeria. Once the statement has been published ChevronTexaco intends to produce further human rights guidance and training for staff.
The group has been carrying out a CSR review since Chevron merged with Texaco in 2001. It published its first CSR report late last year.