Compact companies fare better on key yardsticks

Companies that are signatories to the United Nations Global Compact have stronger policy frameworks on aspects of CSR than those that are not.

In the first statistical analysis of the Compact’s impact on corporate responsibility policy, Switzerland-based rating agency SiRi compared 1000 companies to see whether they have a statement on bribery and corruption, whether they publish accident rates, and if they have policies on discrimination, the use of security forces and freedom of association.

In all cases it found that a greater percentage of signatories had such policies in place than those that were not signatories. The most marked difference was on freedom of association, where 42 per cent of signatories had some kind of policy that satisfied SiRi, compared with only 16 per cent for other companies. On the use of security forces, SiRi said 42 per cent of signatories had some form of policy compared with 26 per cent of others, while 76 per cent had a statement on bribery and corruption compared with 70 per cent among others.

SiRi said there was a ‘clear bias’ in terms of signatories adopting policies and disclosing performance data in all the five areas it analysed.

A repository of reports filed by signatories is to be created during the next few months. The UN Compact Office will gather more than 2000 ‘communications on progress’ filed online to build ‘one of the largest repositories of corporate citizenship reports in the world’, available for ‘academic and professional research of company practices’.