Unilever’s roots in the UK go back more than 100 years to the days when the founder of Lever Brothers, William Hesketh Lever, opened a factory on Merseyside to produce Sunlight soap. One of the formidable philanthropists of the Victorian era, he built Port Sunlight as a village for employees. The village itself is still under company management, appropriately enough by the UK community affairs manager.
The group is now an Anglo-Dutch organisation, formed in 1930 and quoted on the London and Amsterdam stock exchanges, with a multi-national joint senior management team. It employs some 290,000 staff world-wide, 23,000 in the UK, and operates in 80 countries.
Detergents, the British origins of the business, today represent about a quarter of the group sales, with brands including Lux, Jif, Surf and Persil. Half the business is packaged foods, having grown out of the original Dutch product, margarine, produced by Simon van den Berg and Anton Jurgens before the turn of the century. Unilever is world’s largest producer of margarines, ice cream and packaged teas. Brands include, Flora, Batchelors, Walls, Liptons and Brooke Bond. The remainder of the group is made up of personal products, such as toothpastes and cosmetics, and speciality chemicals, partly supplying the rest of the group.
UK programme
This profile concentrates on community affairs in the UK only where activity is concentrated in four main areas: education, representing perhaps 40% of the programme, economic regeneration and training, the environment and a catch-all, good neighbourliness.
Examples of major projects include:
education – this is very focused on schools links and the curriculum; Unilever has sponsored education materials including business simulations to help pupils prepare for industry and a teachers pack on computer control technology; some 200 staff are involved as school governors and seminars have been organised to support and train them;
economic regeneration and training – where much of the support is provided through TECs, two of which are chaired by Unilever executives;
environment – Unilever is a big supporter of the Mersey Basin clean-up campaign and sponsors the Young Environmentalist of the Year Awards.
National / local approach
Programme delivery is complicated by the 25 separate group companies / product divisions operating through 40 local sites across the UK. Each has its own reporting lines through to group centre – for example, Lever Brothers HQ is in Brussels, National Starch is in the US. This highly decentralised international structure has proved commercially successful but poses difficulties in the community field, when many of the audiences are national. National expectations have to be met by the small UK national management working through local operating companies over which it has little line management control.
That difficulty might be overcome if the group had a very tight policy for everyone to adhere to, but that would conflict with operational autonomy. So only broad guidelines are issued, with the stipulation that at least 1% of pre-tax profits (both cash and in-kind) should be devoted to community involvement. This is the glue that holds the programme together in the UK. The only stipulation is that each operating company must have a board director designated as responsible for community relations and a written policy.
Local coordination
At each site in the UK, the head of site or appointed deputy (mainly in personnel) is responsible for local relations. Each combines community responsibilities with mainstream business responsibilities. This creates a network of some 40 community affairs contacts. One of their number, Bob Harcourt, managing director of the Unilever services company in the Wirral, coordinates the network as UK Community Affairs Manager and represents Unilever when needed at national events. A newsletter, produced three or four times a year, offers the site contacts a mixture of group and national news on community involvement, so keeping each site in touch and saving them ‘reinventing the wheel’.
National donations
Operating companies only make donations that are small and local in nature. Instead UK national management has a budget for major donations, which, following a recent review, will become more focused over the next two or three years. These broadly fit the categories outlined above but also include national heritage and the arts, which are not included locally.
An example of the extent of local autonomy is the wariness displayed before adopting a UK group-wide charitable appeal for the Save the Children 75th anniversary. This was not because of any doubt about the worthy nature of the cause, but because it was the first top-down appeal, whereas more usually initiatives are bottom-up. In practice, the targeted £250,000 has been exceeded, but not without an effort.
Employee involvement
Inevitably employee volunteering can only proceed at a pace determined by the operational businesses, since that is where the people are. One technique being promoted to speed up involvement is the formation of local site committees. Initially these have power to allocate a proportion of local budgets, so donations are no longer just the personal fiefdom of the manager. But the evidence from already established site committees is that volunteering increases as people get personally committed to projects for which they have provided funding.
Communication
Taken as whole, the cash and in-kind contribution of Unilever in the UK amounts to over £5 million, making it the fourteenth largest contributor in the UK, according to latest Directory of Social Change figures. That is on a par with peer-group companies of similar market capitalisation. But unlike many of these, Unilever’s profile as an active corporate citizen tends to be lower. This is essentially because Unilever has not sought a strong national reputation, being content to get on with good relations locally and to make purely charitable donations nationally.
Challenges
Among other challenges for the future is that hardy perennial, how to monitor and evaluate more effectively. That is a challenge shared with many peer-group companies. Along with other British-based major European employers, Unilever also has a role to play in spreading corporate involvement practice among continental companies.
Special to Unilever is the need to turn the sum of its parts in the UK into something greater than whole. By size and scope, Unilever ought to be one of the giants of the UK community involvement scene. Partly by intention and partly because of its decentralised structure, this is not yet so. The challenge is to go further, and harness the benefits of decentralisation such as staff commitment to the national ‘punch’ of the group as a whole and so achieve a greater impact. The giant will then be awakening.
FactFile
Unilever UK
UK figures only for year ended 31 December 1993
Joint Chairmen: Morris Tabaksblat and Sir Michael Perry
Main business: foods, detergents, speciality chemicals and personal products; part of the world-wide Anglo-Dutch group
Turnover: £3 billion
Profit before tax: £200 million
Employees: 23,000
FT UK Top 500 ranking: 12 (1/1/95 for Unilever plc)
Charitable donations: £1.7 million
Total community contributions: £4.6 million
Total contribution as % of profits: 2.3%
Memberships: BITC, Per Cent Club
UK Community Affairs Manager: Bob Harcourt
Address: PO Box 115, Port Sunlight, Wirral, Merseyside L62 4ZL
Phone: 0151 643 6212 (fax: 0151 643 6298)
Corporate Citizenship Briefing, issue no: 20 – February, 1995