Heineken is to pull together its internal ethical policies into one document that will be made available to the public.
The Netherlands-based brewer has asked its ethics officer Mark Rijn to gather guidelines and internal company advice on issues such as child labour, bribery, corruption, equal opportunities, the environment, pay and conditions and the marketing of alcohol.
These will be fashioned within a year into a booklet for members of the public who make enquiries about the company’s social and ethical policies.
Rijn claimed that ethical issues were already firmly embedded in the company’s corporate culture, but the new document would help focus the minds of Heineken staff.
‘We have a long-standing ethical stance that is in all our internal rules and guidelines, but they are scattered around and not in one single booklet,’ he said.
‘We have never seen the need to publicise them because they are part of our culture, but now we feel we can wrap them up into something that people from the outside can look at.’
Rijn said that increasing decentralization within the company had convinced senior managers of the need to have ethical guidelines in one place. Heineken operates in more than 150 countries and produces beer in more than 50 of them.
‘We have not made these guidelines externally visible in the past because we’ve never received questions about such matters, but now with globalization we feel it’s appropriate,’ he said.
Heineken produces an annual environment report covering Europe, but plans to produce a similar document every two years covering its operations elsewhere.