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CASE STUDIES
This section sets out 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.
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.
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 an accredited GoodCorporation 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.
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.
Ladbrokes was one of the first companies to achieve GoodCorporation accreditation 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.”
GoodCorporation worked with BAE to develop a methodology for internal audits which injects a review of Ethical Business Conduct by taking additional account of behavioural and cultural issues and integrating them into the group’s internal audit programme. GoodCorporation worked alongside BAE’s Internal Audit team to enlarge the scope of the audits to identify relevant stakeholders, ethical business conduct issues and to include stakeholder interviewing and feedback.
Once the audit methodology had been developed and agreed, GoodCorporation worked together with the BAE Internal Audit Department to embed the new audit methodology in a range of different group audits.
BAE is now working to implement this widened audit methodology across all of its internal audit activities.
“GoodCorporation has a thorough understanding of how to measure Ethical Business Conduct and to build this into the audit process. Analysing Ethical Business Conduct and Non-financial Risk is a challenge for many businesses and we are very pleased that we have been able to take such a leading position through our work with GoodCorporation.” Grenville Hodge, Group Audit Director, BAE Systems.
GoodCorporation completed its biggest-ever single company assessment, a full-scale audit, for Telefónica O2 Czech Republic. One of the largest companies in the Czech Republic, Telefónica O2 has almost 10,000 employees, 3 million fixed-line customers and 5 million mobile users.
The company was formed in 2005 when Telefónica acquired and merged Cesky Telekom and Eurotel Praha. GoodCorporation was asked to carry out this assessment to ensure the early establishment of best practice in this key emerging market.
Commenting on the job, Leo Martin, founding director of GoodCorporation said: “It can be a real challenge to apply Corporate Responsibility in emerging markets such as the Czech Republic, where the focus is very much on rapid economic growth. It was encouraging to work with Telefónica, which was seeking to establish responsible business behaviour in the early stages of its involvement in this major Eastern European country.”
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."
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.”
PartyGaming plc is a FTSE 250 company and a leader in the on-line gaming market. It has worked with GoodCorporation every year since 2005 to assess its business against the GoodCorporation Standard. The assessment includes a mystery customer review and on-line surveys of over 900 customers and marketing affiliates.
The assessment is presented each year to the Board’s Ethics Committee where the non-executive uses the analysis to understand how the company is performing on the ground. In the most recent assessment the GoodCorporation team conducted over 70 employee interviews face-to-face in Gibraltar, London, Israel, Bulgaria and India.
Peter Reynolds, the Head of Investor Relations, said, “The GoodCorporation assessment is an excellent way for us to measure how we are doing and for the board to ensure that it is discharging its duties in terms of the OFR.”
GoodCorporation has been working with major global mining group Xstrata to develop an on-line training programme that will help Xstrata’s 56,000 staff to adopt the company’s revised business principles.
To communicate the business principles to best effect, GoodCorporation designed an on-line questionnaire that could be completed by employees to ensure that they understood how the principles should operate on the ground. The training programme was based on a set of scenarios for employees to consider and provide the correct answer. Where necessary, explanatory text with both the correct and incorrect answers were provided in order to teach employees about the issue.
Michael Littlechild of GoodCorporation said; “We were delighted to develop this training programme for Xstrata. Communicating sound business practices to all staff is essential to running a responsible business. This on-line activity was the ideal way to reach over 50,000 staff in nearly 20 countries.”
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.
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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