Thames Water: The international community investment manager
August 01, 2001
Where is Thames Water now?
“It’s true that we started life as London’s first water company back in 1613! But now we have operations from Chile to Australia, and Turkey to Beijing. When we merged with the German multi-utility RWE at the beginning of this year, we took on responsibility for RWE’s water interests too. Our mission is to be the ‘Water Partner to the World’. We are number three among the world’s international water suppliers, and work in over 20 countries, providing drinking water and wastewater services to over 40 million people. Two-thirds of our customers are outside the UK.
Water partner to the world?
Our team now has a remit to develop a global policy on community investment, building on what is already in place. We surveyed a good selection of our country managers last autumn: more than four out of five think community investment will be increasingly important to our business, and more than two-thirds want help from our team. The global policy will support local managers, and identify some over-arching themes – but will allow a flexible response to local needs and issues.
So a central budget?
Yes, and staff resources and expertise, though the budget will hopefully become devolved over time. Our central team will help staff in the different countries with a remit for CCI to apply the London Benchmarking Group approach to measure the benefits of our programmes worldwide – to company and community. Centrally we can also make an investment in understanding more about their local cultures.
Are you equipped for this?
This was exactly the issue we faced. How could we, based in Reading, have an informed conversation with a manager in Chile about their community’s needs? We’ve dealt with it by commissioning research – country briefings – into some of our key markets – top line social and economic issues, what other companies are doing, potential partners, and also who expects what from business and what their priorities are – government, and NGOs for example. This will help to capitalise on local staff knowledge.
What about all that research?
Actually, I asked the team at Community Affairs Briefing to do the research for me. You have the CCI news and research networks, and a good international spread – we’ve made excellent contacts – grass-roots CCI specialists with their own networks across all sectors.
What’s the response so far?
Very good. Local managers are short of time too. They value examples of best practice, and short-cuts to potentially productive partners. They can concentrate on clear needs and themes, and not get drawn into reacting piecemeal – lots of small initiatives are hard to measure. It also helps demonstrate the corporate centre’s commitment to them as local managers.
And you?
We can identify some interlinking threads for our global strategy and build a network of staff across the company who have a shared understanding and vision of how CCI can be applied both locally and globally.
So you can justify the spend?
The community will be the prime beneficiary. It’s an efficient way to avoid reinventing the wheel and make a bigger impact where it counts. It will demonstrate that community investment is integral to what the company is really about and that there are good reasons for engaging with our communities- we’ve got hard data to tie our local strategies much more closely into our business.
And the future?
More on the linkage between global and local strategies, getting realistic local budgets in place, and evaluating how effectively they are being spent. We have, for example, already managed to integrate quarterly reporting on each country’s community contributions into their regular business reports, and we have just completed a global audit of the value of their community investment using the LBG methodology – that already feels like a major achievement!
Mike Brophy joined Thames Water in 1991 to set up the education liaison team, after seven years as a science teacher in secondary schools. He is a member of the employers’ forum of the National Education Business Partnership Network, and leads Thames Water’s six-strong community investment team, based in Reading.
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