The ink is still wet on the restructuring plans as SEEBOARD, the south-east electricity company, is integrated into a new-look London Electricity Group (LE Group). A new corporate video is currently doing the rounds to explain it all to LE Group’s employees. It sees chief executive, Vincent de Rivaz, spelling out the future direction of the company. And what, do you suppose, comes top in his 12-point Questions and Answer video? Aggressive growth targets? Capturing market share? Maximising investment?
Nope. First on De Rivaz’s list, LE Group staff are met with a firm commitment to corporate responsibility, sustainability, customer service and motivated staff. Elsewhere de Rivaz is on record as saying that “corporate responsibility and sustainable development” are “the bedrock and foundation of the whole Group.” Some statement. But such is his conviction that responsible business lies at the heart of LE Group’s future success. Working in a competitive, customerfocused market like electricity and gas demands that today’s utilities demonstrate their commitment to the good of the public if they are to win the confidence (and custom!) of the public. Every company seeks senior level buy-in for CSR and community involvement, but few enjoy the level of executive endorsement that LE Group has over the last few years, first under Bruno Lescoeur and now under de Rivaz. One of the first things de Rivaz did when taking up his new post was to take part in a ‘Seeing Is Believing’ visit, organised by Business in the Community (BitC).
But CCI is by no means a one-man show at LE Group. Many of its regional managers have been signed up to similar community visits under BitC’s ’20-20′ programme. Community involvement has increased to include more than one in five employees since the introduction of the company’s new flagship volunteering programme, Helping Hands – a winner at this year’s Business Excellence awards.
The backdrop to these promising signs, however, is one of considerable business activity. With the opening of the energy sector to greater competition in recent years, LE Group has gone from a private company serving electricity principally to Londoners, to a whollyowned subsidiary of a French public energy conglomerate selling multiple power services to customers throughout the south of England – and beyond. London Electricity was bought from Entergy Corporation by Electricité de France in 1998. Since then, EdF has expanded London Electricity into LE Group with additional acquisitions, which has precipitated a new corporate structure. In its simplest terms, the group is now organised into three branches (networks, customers and energy), each of which is headed by a chief operating officer. Responsibility for core business functions in each of these branches is then split four ways (finance, strategy and development, technology and business performance, and human resources).
The restructuring can be read as a demonstration of the new management’s commitment to CCI, and Corporate Responsibility (CR) more generally. Whereas before, CR sat within the legal department and CCI made up one component of corporate affairs, the two have now been merged into the strategy and development function of the group. This positions CCI in the strategic heart of the business. What’s more, it aligns CCI more closely with other previously separate CR-related issues, such as fuel poverty and energy efficiency, which now all come under the strategy and development umbrella. Furthermore, the chief operating officer of each of the four business units has an explicit responsibility to champion corporate responsibility. In addition, five cross-departmental steering groups have also been set up to govern key issues for LE Group, each of which is chaired by the chief executive. One of these will concentrate exclusively on corporate responsibility. The core team in LE Group’s London headquarters is currently relatively small, however. Catherine Kinman and Isabel Brown make up the CCI team, while Steve Workman heads a central Corporate Responsibility team of three. Steve is primarily responsible for policy development, implementation and reporting. Catherine, meanwhile, oversees a network of business unit coordinators who apply the various strands of the community involvement programme on the ground. The coordinators come from a range of departments and count CCI as only part of their jobs. Invariably, however, they are already heavily involved in the company’s community programme. A key part of Catherine’s role – the ‘Sherlock Holmes function’, as she calls it – is to establish what community activity is actually going on through the group, then to provide the business units with the support that they require, and to establish a consistency of approach across all the units.
The incorporation of SEEBOARD means that LE Group’s CCI strategy is up again for review. Not only does its distribution remit now incorporate the whole of the South East, but its employee base is also set to increase from 6,000 to more than 11,000. Still, the likelihood is that any new strategy will not vary dramatically from LE Group’s core focus areas at present; namely, education, regeneration and diversity. The company has a growing portfolio of impressive programmes in the first of these two areas. These range from helping familiarise teachers with electricity in the National Curriculum and supporting conservation projects, through to assisting with school ground improvement schemes and a host of local regeneration initiatives. All are well documented on the Group’s website (http://www.le-group.co.uk/corporate responsibility).
Diversity is not your usual run-ofthe- mill CCI concern, but it makes sense for a company like LE Group whose core customers and employees come from one of the world’s most diverse metropolises. The relative novelty of diversity as a CCI topic, however, has provided LE Group with space to innovate. It is a challenge the company has successfully risen too. The idea to offer subsidised tickets and transport to over 1,000 young people from deprived communities during the London Jazz Festival, for example, has been singled out for awards both by Arts & Business and Hollis. LE Group was one of the first companies to use a popular arts sponsorship to break down cultural barriers, and has recently announced it will be extending its support for the London Jazz Festival until 2004.
Another interesting scheme falling under the diversity banner is LE Group’s internal cultural diversity workshops. Designed and piloted by SERIOUS, the international music producers behind the London Jazz Festival, the initiative feeds into the company’s customer services agenda as well as encouraging employees to challenge their own attitudes on ethnicity more generally. With 200 staff having already participated in the programme so far, Catherine is looking to incorporate the workshops into the Group’s standard training programmes. Again, the active involvement of key LE Group policy makers and influencers in the workshops promises to help in the programme’s roll-out.
LE Group launched its award-winning volunteering programme, Helping Hands, 18 months ago. What distinguishes the programme is the close link that the CCI team has built with Human Resources, in both the scheme’s development and delivery stages. As a consequence, it is viewed as an integral employee development mechanism, as well as an opportunity for staff to get involved in their communities. And so, staff now find their voluntary CCI experiences being factored into their performance appraisals through their personal development plan. In addition, Helping Hands is integrated into the company’s training programmes, for LE Group’s graduate intake, the up-and-coming managers in its management development foundation and its business mergers.
The early evidence is very positive. The company’s largest customer contact centre in Doxford, for example, which has a full-time CCI manager, has around 450 of its 1,000 staff participating in the programme. Staff retention in call centres is the bane of both HR and Finance department. Doxford’s impressively low 11% employee turnover rate, when set alongside a positive cultural change at the site since the introduction of the programme, provides a compelling – albeit anecdotal – business case for Helping Hands. Catherine recognises that a major challenge will be to gather more quantitative data in the future, and therefore firm up the link between volunteering and employee retention and morale. The groundwork for a solid business case seems ready to be made.
A public and verified reporting process is seen by LE Group as a key component in demonstrating its integrity as a values-based business. The company has already cut its teeth on the data collection question, publishing its first joint environmental and corporate responsibility report in late September. The report closely follows the framework provided by BiTC’s Business Impact Review Group, a consortium of 20 companies including BAA, HBOS and Sainsbury’s.
It fell to Steve, as corporate responsibility manager, to fill the Sherlock Holmes role on this occasion. “Most of the information is already somewhere in the company,” he commented, “it was just a case of finding it.” The process of digging around for the information and engaging different functions in the various business units had the effect of raising internal awareness of the corporate responsibility agenda, as well as highlighting where performance gaps existed.
In addition, 2001/2002 marked LE Group’s first group-wide attempt at measuring its community involvement programmes along the lines of the LBG (London Benchmarking Group). The LBG model helped LE Group find out more about what its CCI programmes were achieving. In addition, it assisted in bringing clarity to the vexed question of how much the company was actually investing in the community. Catherine admits to being “pleasantly surprised” when the numbers came out at 1.6% (or, over £1.7 million) of annual profits. The majority of LE Group’s community spend is cash (59%), with in-kind (18%), time (13%) and management costs (10%) forming the remainder.
With the first combined report now completed, LE Group is working to streamline the informationgathering process in the future. The challenges are by no means small. SEEBOARD is a relatively unknown entity and 2003 will see the integration of SEEBOARD into LE Group reporting systems. Steve admits that LE Group has some thinking still to do on developing more quantifiable social indicators, particularly in the areas of human rights and diversity. In addition, EdF has committed the group to using the Global Reporting Initiative framework in next year’s report. As if that’s not enough, Steve also has in mind a web-based tool that will enable interested parties to disaggregate the information in the report, which is currently available only in print.
As a company, LE Group has come a long way since its merger with EdF in 1998. Of that, there’s no doubt. The new structure provides the perfect opportunity for CR and CCI to embed itself even further into the culture of the company – something that will be of particular importance as the group doubles in size with the merger of SEEBOARD. As the embodiment of the company’s purpose and values, CCI will help provide the glue that is vital to successfully navigating internal management overhauls of this kind. As far as improving the management of CCI, “linking in” is the phrase that keeps coming up when LE Group talks about the future. Whether it be linking in with retail in a cause-related marketing initiative, linking in with HR to improve employee development or linking in with the energy efficiency and fuel poverty teams, the end goal is clear. Finding and forging these links will undoubtedly require some serious sleuth work on Catherine’s part, but with CCI central to the company’s new corporate structure, it’s a goal she is well placed to achieve. Demonstrating these links with hard-bitten, performancerelated evidence will be what makes LE Group stand out from the crowd. If all goes to plan, the positive impact that CCI has on employees will filter through to the company’s customers – the end objective of every business function in a publicfocused utility like LE Group.
29 year-old Catherine became Community Affairs Manager for LE Group in September 2001. Her main responsibilities include managing external partnerships, the sponsorships programme, the company charities and supporting the Group’s development of CR activity. Prior to LE Group Catherine worked in marketing and publicity in the publishing industry, for Virgin Books and previously Macmillan Publishers.
After graduating from Durham University in 1994 in English Language and Literature, Catherine spent a year working in Business Development for Glaxo South Africa on a nationwide market research project.
She counts among her interests travel and horse riding.
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