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Supermarket chain WM Morrison and product development contractor Pera Innovation have been named as UK winners of the inaugural European CSR Award recognising responsible and sustainable business practice. EDF Energy was recognised as Highly Commended. 

 

The British supermarket chain was particularly praised for its ‘Lets Grow’ campaign where it takes the tried and tested cause related marketing concept -based on collecting vouchers for schools - and linking it to encouraging children to understand and experience where food comes from. Judges were also impressed by the energy and enthusiasm behind the campaign and the way in which it is increasingly becoming more integrated into the core business.  

 

Winner in the SME section, Pera Innovation, created the Pera Constellation Model in 2008, to encourage enterprise and entrepreneurship in young people, with the aim ‘to give life-changing opportunities to individuals, especially those aged 14 – 30 and under-achieving for whatever reason’. The Judges’ commented: “Pera has developed an effective model that enables them to act as a hub for community development and investment in their area. This approach has enabled Pera to be the key partner in mobilising a whole community and focusing their CSR activities to the benefit of all.”

 

The Judges also gave a Highly Commended Large Company award to EDF Energy, for ‘The Pod’ – a combination of events, campaigns and a website that provides free teaching materials for schools, covering climate science and sustainability. The judges were impressed that EDF addressed a complex set of issues and were able to communicate the message simply. Since its launch in 2008, The Pod has reached 9.3m children through 46% of UK schools. Schools say they have saved 61 mega tonnes of CO2 through the project. 

 

Pictured left to right: Julia Aramendi, International Campaign Coordinator, BITC; Richard Howitt, Member of the European Parliament, Darren Towers, Head of Sustainability and Environmental Leadership, EDF Energy'; David Petersen, Account Manager, Wm Morrison Supermarkets plc; Maria-Jose Subiela, International Projects Director, BITC and Sue Adkins, International Director, BITC.

 

An old English paper mill, referenced as far back as the Domesday Book, is set to become one of the world’s most sustainable distilleries. The Bombay Sapphire site in Laverstoke, Hampshire, has just won the world’s first ‘outstanding’ design-stage Building Research Establishment’s Environmental Assessment Method (BREEAM) sustainability award. 

 

Will Brix, estate manager, Bombay Sapphire told Ethical Performance: “The new distillery is a huge opportunity to boost our sustainability and part of the brand’s ethos as the most imaginative gin in the world.” 

 

For 200 years, the site produced high quality paper for the bank notes of India and the British Empire. 

 

The most difficult part of the ethical refurb was the unknowns, explained Brix: “When you’re redeveloping a mill that’s been mentioned in the Domesday Book, you uncover quite a lot of things that aren’t noted on building plans.” And of course, dealing with unknowns makes it difficult to put plans into time frames. The facility will be opening later this year, but Brix can’t exactly say when, though it is hoped by the autumn.  

 

The use of a bio-fuelled steam-generating boiler and 6kW hydro-electric water wheel, which will power the adjacent Visitor Centre, are also highlights, says Brix.

 

The completed distillery will see a 60% reduction in carbon emissions and nearly an 85% improvement over what is required by building regulations. 

 

Bombay Sapphire – the number one selling premium gin worldwide - is currently distilled by a third party in Warrington. Once operational, the Laverstoke distillery will be the sole producer of Bombay Sapphire and is expected to produce 2m 9-litre cases a year to supply the global market. 

 

*Bombay Sapphire is part of the Barcardi Group which itself has recently published impressive figures. It says it has cut water usage by nearly 50 per cent and reduced energy use and greenhouse gas emissions by nearly 33 per cent over the past 6 years. 

“This has the potential to be the biggest global CSR programme ever,” Tomás Lopez Fernebrand, senior vp, general counsel & corporate secretary, Amadeus told Ethical Performance on the launch of a new partnership that will enable travel providers and sellers to raise funds for UNICEF, the United Nations Children’s Fund. The Spanish travel technology group has developed a donation engine that will give consumers the opportunity to make a micro donation when paying for travel online. 

 

During the first stage of the programme, which has been in development for just over a year, selected travel providers and sellers, such as airline websites and online travel agents, will integrate a ‘check box’ on their online booking pages. If a traveller chooses to make a donation, they will receive an email.

 

For participating travel brands, the product will exist as a neutral standalone system, cross-channel merchant engine. This consists of a donation interface to collect donation data that is linked to an Amadeus payment gateway. The donation payment is processed as a separate transaction from the travel purchase, simplifying things for the partner and for UNICEF.

 

Iberia, Finnair and Quantas are three top airlines which are currently looking to work with the system. 

 

“The engine will be ready in the summer and then followed by an implementation programme. We are hoping it will be operational by Q4,” said Fernebrand. He highlighted the potential scope of the initiative: “When you consider that there are 110 airlines, and we manage 50m bookings every year, if you aim for just 5/10 per cent in the first year, that’s 2.5m transactions… It could soon add up.”

 

Fernebrand believes firmly that technology can be used as a positive force for societal change. Amadeus is very active in CSR itself with 140 ongoing projects. Its three main areas are local community, skills transfer and applying technology for good. 

Japan’s Panasonic Corporation has instigated a project to donate a total of 100,000 solar lanterns to people in regions of the world without electricity, by 2018. 

 

As the first stage in this effort, Panasonic has donated 3,000 Compact Solar Lights (CSLs) to NGOs helping to solve social challenges in Myanmar, 5,000 CSLs to NGOs and social enterprises in India and 2,000 to refugees in Kenya.

 

Currently, there are about 1.32 billion people worldwide living without electricity, mainly in developing countries in Asia and Africa (source: International Energy Agency). The lack of electric light in these regions means challenges in the areas of healthcare, education and the economy.

 

In April 2011, Panasonic also donated 1,000 solar lanterns to Tanzania through a UN agency, followed by 2,000 lanterns to Cambodia through 15 NGOs in March 2012. 

 

Family entertainment giant and American institution, Disney is changing the way it records and publicises its CSR strategy in citizenship. 

 

The company’s new Citizen Performance Summary reflects a shift from “report” to an ongoing “reporting”. Disney says the move will increase the frequency and transparency of disclosures to stakeholders. Along with this performance summary, it will also publish stories, policies, and other performance-related information on its website throughout the year.

 

The summary focuses on performance against targets, stating whether targets have been met or not. Among this year’s many ‘target-met’ successes was the company’s commitment to making all Disney Baby apparel in its North America stores from 100% organic cotton. Among targets not met for 2012 was the goal to engage over 4m players through online games; Disney’s properties Pixie Hollow and Club Penguin only engaged 2.4m.

 

Robert Iger, ceo, Disney commented: “We’re proud of our progress and continue to work diligently toward our corporate citizenship goals. We recognize it is an ongoing effort that will never be fully completed. As we achieve our initial targets, we set new challenges for our company to ensure we are constantly striving to improve.”

 

Jay Rasulo, cfo, added: “Driving positive change on a global scale is rarely easy, and the path to success is seldom straightforward. There are times we are required to accept minor setbacks in order to achieve sustainable, long-term benefit, and we are willing to make those short-term sacrifices to create the conditions for the meaningful progress required to drive lasting, positive impact.”

 

Later this year, Disney will launch a citizenship platform called Be Inspired. The company says it hopes that the new platform will “provide greater clarity about our areas of focus and will further define where we can make a significant contribution to society”. 

 

Paul Ellis, chief executive of Ecology Building Society, believes that a long-term approach is essential for the future of the UK’s financial sector and that finance can be ‘sustainable, principled and profitable’ 

 

Who thinks long-term these days? Not the politicians, who need to curry favour within a five-year time frame. Not the high street, with its fast fashion and planned obsolescence. Certainly not the world of finance, with share prices shifting by the minute and transactions by the millisecond.

For many, long-term is a byword for a lack of ambition or slow growth. But thinking long-term doesn’t have to mean this. Ecology is living proof: in 2012 we reported record profits, strong asset growth and savings balances passing the £100m milestone for the first time. This wasn’t luck – we’ve seen consistent growth throughout the financial crisis and subsequent recession, at a time when the big banks have struggled. 

 

Our long-term approach is a consequence of our mission to build a more sustainable society. Focusing on our environmental and social impact means thinking about the impact of our business decisions over decades, not months, and considering the effects of our products throughout their life – and beyond.

 

We’ve been successful because of our principles, not in spite of them. We’re committed to treating all of our members equally, eschewing eye-catching introductory rates in favour of a minimum rate for all of our savers. Our mortgages offer long-term value, not short-term gain, and we price them according to climate risk, not just financial risk. 

 

We do these things because they’re the right thing to do: because we believe that everyone is of equal worth and because our environment has intrinsic value. But these principles also make financial sense. We build long-term relationships with our members, who trust us, and our borrowers find their energy efficient homes are more affordable to maintain. In the end, our prosperity depends on ensuring our planet can sustain those who live on it. 

 

The dichotomy between financial success and sustainability is entirely false if we look beyond a short time frame. What company can prosper if it doesn’t seek efficiency? In a world of dwindling resources, the smart company is the one that plans for a lean future. When we exceed the limits of our environment to the extent that the planet can no longer support us, who cares about the FTSE100? 

 

But we don’t have to look that far ahead. What business can survive for long if it consistently exploits its customers? It took just four years from the start of the financial crisis for the greed and malpractice of the big banks to turn into business failure. Last year the UK’s major banks would have seen a rise in profits of 45%, but this was wiped out by the cost of past mistakes. 

 

Financial institutions are, at their core, intermediators between individuals, organisations and communities. They facilitate the smooth running of our economies. When they become extractors, they suck the life out of that economy. And at that point, the business value of moral purpose becomes clear: financial institutions cannot survive without the society and the economy that they exist to serve.

 

So principles don’t pull against profit, unless you have severe myopia. Principles mean long-term relationships with your customers that bring benefits for you both. Principles mean growing in a sustainable way. Principles mean valuing profits for what they enable you to do not for what they enable you to pay.

The positive effects of employee volunteering on the community sector have long been recognised but there is less understanding of the benefits that volunteering can bring to a business and exactly how this happens. 

Liz Jones reports

 

Employee volunteering is a key part of CR strategy. And no wonder. Its impact today is wide ranging, touching on multiple crucial business issues including employee engagement, corporate reputation and community cohesion to name but three.  Its role has transformed accordingly. No longer are companies simply sending employees out into the community to dig over gardens and paint neighbourhood playgrounds. Volunteer programmes are more diverse, more sophisticated and more targeted than ever before. And this is where it’s heading, says Nick Wright, md of CR and Community Affairs, EMEA at Swiss bank UBS. 

 

“The argument is now won: that there are genuine benefits on both sides [to corporate volunteering], that argument is now accepted.  Volunteering is moving into the business mentoring space. It’s becoming more about knowledge transfer,” Wright believes.

 

At UBS, there are two themes to its community investment affairs: education and entrepreneurship. Its flagship programme is with the Bridge Academy, a state secondary school in Hackney, an area of London with challenging characteristics. At the school, 50% are eligible for free school meals. 

 

Retention & recruitment

Last year, 30% of staff took part in our volunteering programmes; half of whom volunteered at the Bridge. 

“At the Bridge we are engaged in a huge range of activities ranging from numeracy and literacy projects to work experience and drop down days where staff will run a workshop on maths, for example, with a trader. This year, in its Sixth Form, UBS staff are being career mentors – 85 staff  are involved in that alone.” 

 

Wright says he wants more staff to sign up.  “There is a correlation between performance and volunteering. The level of engagement was at 25% for a good few years. Now the needle has moved [to 30%] and we need to look at how we move the needle even further. Volunteering retains and recruits the staff we want.”

 

To promote volunteering, Wright uses every communications avenue he can: posters, presentations, email. The governance is at a local head of department/division level and they are key to driving it through. “We also have 55 Volunteer Champions – selected within the bank – who help the community affairs team to drive awareness and help structure what we do,” Wright explained. 

 

Another trend Wright sees is that “we’re increasingly developing volunteering within HR and integrating community affairs into this offering”.  The fact that some skills can be developed through a volunteering option is now being recognised and that’s growing.

 

Volunteering within UBS is also promoted through awards and also ‘shamelessly pinching ideas from elsewhere’, Wright says. “Like the ‘seeing is believing’ model from BITC. The chief exec will lead a morning to visit some of the partnerships and hear about their challenges and what volunteers are doing. It has proved remarkably successful.”

 

For UBS, the most significant benefit to corporate volunteering is the internal dimension, says Wright. “Given the challenge in the sector over the last few years, the morale and continuing professional development gained through the wider involvement in society has been very important and valuable to staff.  We know that recruits to the firm find it so too. The most visited part of our website (after the ‘Apply here’ section) is the CR and Community Investment part. It provides a window into the values of the firm.”

 

Employee recognition

Marie Sigsworth, Aviva’s Corporate Responsibility director agrees: “At Aviva recognition sits at the heart of our employee promise. We want every employee to be able to say, ‘At Aviva I am recognised for who I am and my contribution matters.’ We also know people want to work for an organisation that is contributing to wider society, an organisation they can be proud of.

 

This is why our flagship CR programme, Street to School is such a central part of our organisation. The programme champions the rights of street-connected children around the world because every child should have access to education as education is insurance for a better life. Street children are one of society’s most unrecognised groups, and we believe we have a responsibility to help the most excluded individuals in our communities, and few are more excluded than street-connected children.”

 

Since 2009 when Aviva made a 5-year commitment to championing street children’s rights, the international insurance group has clocked up 55,000 hours of volunteering with employees themselves having raised £3m. 

 

David Schofield, head of CR at Aviva says that initiatives like Street to School really bolster he group’s employee engagement scores: “We’ve seen a global uplift of 14 per cent in employee engagement since we started and we’re ranked highest among the financial institutions. It’s a really important part of our CR activity. Authenticity in our efforts in engagement is crucial. Employees do value what they do.”

 

British business charity Business in the Community’s (BITC) most recent Employee Volunteering Check-Up data found that while half of the companies who took the check-up either proactively encourage employees to volunteer and 40% of companies have senior/board level support to champion their programmes, many companies still find it hard to measure the impact of their programmes with 45% saying they currently have no mechanism to capture the outputs of employee volunteering activity. Other challenges BITC identifies are the facts that 38% do not understand why a business should support employees volunteering in work time; and 1 in 5 companies do not currently engage staff with employee volunteering which means that there is no encouragement or communication from the employer on potential opportunities to do so. 

 

Changing Tomorrow Day

Astellas Pharma Europe Ltd, the European Headquarters of Tokyo-based Astellas Pharma Inc, one of the world’s top 20 pharmaceutical companies, has recently celebrated its achievement of donating over 9,000 employee volunteering hours to their local communities, equivalent to 390 full working days of time, following the completion of its third year of the Changing Tomorrow Day (CTD) programme.

 

In 2012, 518 employees across 18 countries took part, volunteering 3422 hours, making a combined total across the three year programme of 9383 hours of working time with charities supporting children, young people and the vulnerable.

 

Changing Tomorrow Day was designed and launched by Astellas in 2010, as an annual initiative, with events taking place across Europe, Asia and America. Last year, for at least one working day between July and the end of the year 2012, hundreds of employees from Astellas supported various charities for children and vulnerable people in their local communities to help overcome barriers to education, play and healthy lifestyles.   

 

Joe Barker, senior manager for internal communications at Astellas Europe and its European Foundation, told Ethical Performance:  “While Changing Tomorrow Today is growing across all our offices internationally, we are mindful that there are cultural differences where volunteering is not, as yet, part of the norm. In the UK we take it for granted that everybody volunteers but in other parts of Europe, it is a first experience for many. Volunteering is perceived very much as an Anglo-American style programme. It isn’t part of Scandinavian culture, for example, because the state gives a lot of support to the care sector and any volunteering is usually done privately, as a good citizen, and not collectively in a group.”

 

In the UK, last year 60 employees took part in eight different initiatives. Working with local groups like White Lodge (a care home for young disabled people) located very close to Astella’s new European headquarters, employees helped out with art classes, cooking clubs and grounds maintenance. “We identify the charity groups to support carefully because some are reluctant to work with business,” says Barker. “They need to see that we provide something useful. Many can regard such involvement as a burden.”

 

“Because we are a pharma company and our core mission is to deliver innovative pharmaceutical products, we obviously bear health in mind in our projects,” explained Barker. “For example the cooking day at Buckland School in Staines is based around learning about nutrition and the importance of a healthy diet.”

 

Astellas also helps fund the school’s regular cooking club.

 

Executive participation

A key part of getting employees to sign up to volunteering is to ensure that senior managers participate, maintains Barker: “It takes the risk away of volunteering by telling staff that we really want them to do it.” 

 

In the UK, Ken Jones, president and ceo of Astellas Pharma Europe took part in CTD for the third year running, helping teach local children to cook at Buckland School.

 

Barker’s aim is to get a quarter of the workforce involved in volunteering next year. 

 

“Employee feedback shows that 65 per cent say that participating in CTD is a great way of building relationships with colleagues and making Astellas a better place to work,” he said. “ As a result of CTD, we have a very high employee engagement score. We see the corporate benefit as part of becoming an employer of choice with volunteering perceived as an employee benefit.” 

Haresh Bhojwani has been appointed to be the Deputy Director of the International Research Institute (IRI) for Climate and Society, part of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He will coordinate IRI’s connections with development and humanitarian organisations so that IRI’s research can target the needs of those vulnerable to climate impacts, especially through collaborations.

 

“Haresh has helped IRI transform itself and has fostered strong relationships with development organisations,” said Lisa Goddard, IRI director. 

 

“These relationships have positioned us to fulfil our mission to improve people’s lives and livelihoods in areas of the world plagued by recurring droughts, and floods and extreme weather.”

 

Photo: Brian Kahn/IRI

RobecoSAM, the asset manager focused exclusively on sustainability investing, has invited the 2,500 largest companies (in terms of free float market capitalization) from all industries to participate in its annual Corporate Sustainability Assessment (CSA) - the research backbone for the construction of all the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices (DJSI). In addition, 800 companies from the emerging markets are invited to participate and gain eligibility for inclusion in the recently launched DJSI Emerging Markets. 

 

After the assessment, companies are included in the DJSI World, the gold standard benchmark for corporate sustainability, if their sustainability performance ranks among the top 10% of their peers.

 

The CSA focuses on a company’s long-term value creation with over 100 questions on financially material economic, environmental, social and corporate governance practices. Over half of the questions are industry specific as RobecoSAM believes that industry-specific sustainability risks and opportunities play a key role in a firm’s long-term success. The other half includes questions on general sustainability issues such as corporate governance, product stewardship and talent retention.

 

Daniel Wild, Head of Research, RobecoSAM commented: “Going through this exercise helps companies to identify financially material sustainability issues that have an impact on their bottom lines. Sustainability issues dramatically change the competitive environment in which companies operate. Firms that take into consideration how sustainability affects their business will ultimately gain a competitive advantage.”

 

This year, RobecoSAM has aligned several of its Climate Strategy questions with corresponding questions asked by CDP, the provider of the Climate Disclosure and Climate Performance Leadership Indexes. This will reduce the workload for 90% of DJSI participating companies which also respond to the request for climate change information through CDP.

 

The 2013 CSA and DJSI family will also be aligned with the Global Industry Classification System (GICS), therefore meeting commonly accepted sector classification standards. The switch to GICS, which is a widely used standard in the financial industry, will allow the DJSI to become more attractive for investors as it meets the need for one complete and consistent set of global sector and industry definitions, maintains RobecoSAM.

 

Firms that participate in the CSA also receive a free Company Benchmarking Scorecard that compares their sustainability performance to that of their industry peers. Furthermore, sustainability leaders making it into the DJSI can enhance a company’s reputation and become potential investments for DJSI-based portfolios, believes RobecoSAM.