CASE STUDIES
This section sets out six case studies from different companies in a range of size, location and sectors. The case studies explain why the organisations use the GoodCorporation assessment.
ARM designs microprocessing technology used in advanced digital products. Over the past few years, the company has grown from around 600 employees to an international business with more than 1,200 employees in over 20 locations worldwide. In 2004 it acquired Silicon Valley-based Artisan whose products complement ARM’s hi-tech intellectual property business.
Reason for using GoodCorporationGoodCorporation:
When ARM first became involved with GoodCorporation in 2001, “We didn’t have any policies,” recalls Bill Parsons, Vice President for Human Resources. “We were an unbureaucratic company, behaving ethically but with no evidence.” When it became a founding GoodCorporation member in 2001, ARM started to use its annual assessment to benchmark performance and to identify emerging issues and improvements. It also produced its first corporate responsibility report based in part on its assessment.
The GoodCorporation assessment helped to highlight specific HR issues. In the first assessment, GoodCorporation pointed out the absence of consultation procedures. Bill Parsons recalls his reaction: “At first we wondered why we needed a consultation process.
However, the company has grown since then and has gone through some tough times. We’ve actually found that having an employee forum over the past couple of years now has been very beneficial.”
Investor relations: ARM’s engagement with corporate responsibility is founded on a belief that ‘good business is good for business.’ In line with the GoodCorporation Standard, ARM treats investor relations as part of its commitment to corporate responsibility. A FTSE 250 company, it also trades on the NASDAQ in the United States; evidence from the GoodCorporation assessment will support some of ARM’s non-financial submissions to the SEC as required by the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.
Environment: Like many high tech or service-oriented companies, ARM considered itself to have relatively low environmental impacts and so had not really given much thought to establishing practices in this area. However, following its first GoodCorporation assessment which highlighted the absence of environmental policies, it drew up a detailed environmental footprint. This became the basis for subsequent innovations in building design, energy use, travel, paper use and waste management over the past few years.
Total S.A. is the world’s fourth largest oil group. Total’s operations with 120,000 employees worldwide are typical of the oil sector: geographically widespread, culturally varied, located in some politically difficult regions and environmentally sensitive areas. Its businesses are also diverse, including oil and gas, chemicals and power.
Reason for using GoodCorporation:
Total established a Code of Conduct in 2000 which is displayed prominently on its website and distributed to every employee. The challenge for Total as for any global oil company is to translate high-level principles, into specific instructions, which apply equally in Aberdeen and Tierra del Fuego. The group became convinced that it needed a more robust process to understand how far and how well these principles work on the ground. In 2002 it developed a new approach based on the GoodCorporation Standard and methodology. GoodCorporation currently conducts 10–12 assessments of its subsidiaries a year on a rolling basis.
GWR Group became a GoodCorporation member in 2003. In May 2005, it merged with Capital Radio to form GCap Media plc, the UK’s largest commercial radio company. Over the course of 20 years GWR has acquired over 30 local radio stations, and the national station Classic FM.
Before the merger, it had some 900 employees.
Reason for using GoodCorporation:
GWR defines corporate responsibility in terms of people’s trust in the quality of the content, effectiveness of the advertising and opportunities for employees offered by its radio stations. The challenge for GWR has been to ensure that each of its very different stations achieves corporate responsibility objectives set by the group. By adopting the GoodCorporation Standard GWR has been able to track, measure and compare relations with stakeholders across the group. The assessment underpins its corporate responsibility reporting, and the company devoted a section of its annual report to the results.
As Simon Cooper, GWR’s director for corporate communication puts it, “It’s a great way of
finding out whether the policies you think you have in place are actually working.”
Ladbrokes, founded in 1886, is the largest cash betting company in the world. It has over 2500 betting shops employing 14,000 people across Europe. It has operations worldwide and offers online betting and gaming in 13 languages.
Reason for using Reason for using GoodCorporation:
Ladbrokes is a founder member of GoodCorporation and uses the GoodCorporation standard and assessment as an external check on how its practices are working on the ground.
As Ros Barker, HR director puts it, “ at the end of the day, no matter how hard you try to self-audit, you need that external viewpoint.”
British Land is a major FTSE 100 property investment company specialising in retail and office space. The company believes that “corporate responsibility brings real benefits to the business. It builds relationships with stakeholders, improves the Company’s reputation with analysts, investors, lenders, employees, local communities and tenants, and helps to reduce risk."
Reason for using GoodCorporation:
British Land conducts extensive stakeholder research structured around its principles of corporate responsibility. To complement that research, GoodCorporation currently is carrying out assessments of the key stakeholder groups: shareholders; employees; suppliers and contractors; community and regulatory organizations; environment.
GoodCorporation is assessing practices covered by the GoodCorporation Standard as well as additional specific practices that British Land wants to ensure are in place. As Claudine Blamey , British Land’s CR manager states, “ GoodCorporation has provided us with a means of measuring and benchmarking our corporate responsibility performance based on stakeholder feedback that is accurate and commercially useful to the company.”
Acambis is a biotechnology company developing new vaccines against infectious diseases. It has about 280 employees; 25 in its Head Office in Cambridge, UK, some 200 in its manufacturing and research facilities in Cambridge and Canton, MA, USA and 13 at Berna Products Corporation, a sales, promotion and distribution company based in Miami, FL, which it acquired in 2003. The company is listed on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ.
Reason for using GoodCorporation:
Acambis recognises that there is interest in the ethical profile of companies in its sector. Since it did not have a framework for reporting on corporate responsibility, in mid-2004 it underwent its first GoodCorporation assessment “to benchmark current activities against best practice and to establish the areas where there is room for improvement.”
Lyndsay Wright, VP, Communications and Investor Relations summarised her view on the process: “The GoodCorporation Standard provides Acambis with a clear goal to work towards in terms of improving its interactions with key stakeholders. The framework allows for an unbiased and independent assessment of our CR activities, providing a valuable benchmark. We were delighted to be granted GoodCorporation membership status after our first audit and believe it demonstrates to our stakeholders how seriously we take corporate responsibility.”
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