Cable & Wireless’s roots lie under the sea, in Britain’s empire-spanning Victorian telegraph cable network. Let’s not forget that the creation of this vast network had a social, political and commercial significance equal to that of the railways – Cable & Wireless has always been associated with fundamental changes to the way people live and communicate. It became a serious rival to BT through Mercury, and was in at the mobile explosion with its One-2-One mobile telephony venture. But in 1999 it announced that it would focus for future growth on business customers, and internet protocol and data services – the telecommunications sector’s fastest-growing areas of business.
In English, this means running one of the huge global networks on which the Internet depend (an Internet ‘backbone operator’), as well as offering Internet access to companies, with various value-added services such as software, website-hosting, training and consulting, firewalls and other security features. Big websites which Cable & Wireless has hosted include the GAP’s site, for example, and the Coca-Cola Olympic site.
The company aims for a strong presence in the key business markets around the world – Europe, Japan, the US. By the end of 2001 it will be operating some half a million square feet of advanced web hosting facility in centres in the UK, California, Japan, Russia, Spain and Germany. It is also one of the largest Internet ‘backbone’ carriers in the world. Its annual revenue to 31 March 2001 was over £8 billion.
Business issues, the business case
What are the drivers for CSR in a company like this? Employee motivation is always going to be one aspect, and for an international company, government relations another. But as a technology company, it is comparatively ‘green’: its product is invisible, and as a business-to-business company it does not have a consumer brand to manage. However like any good risk manager, the company is scanning the horizons for issues which could put it in the spotlight, and how it can stay ‘ahead of the curve’.
One emerging issue is the ‘quality’ of traffic on the internet – the content of emails or sites the company hosts. Pornography, illegal gambling and poor data security could all give the Internet a bad name. Witness a small but persistent trickle of questions, and now legal cases, about who takes responsibility for it. Childnet, De@fchild and Befrienders International are three flagship community projects which form part of the company’s response (see below). Cable & Wireless is also one of the founding members of the Internet Watch Foundation and the Internet Content Rating Association, developing policy on responsible use of Internet technologies.
The telecommunications industry’s potential for contributing to a greener world remains unproven. Yes, the industry is itself relatively clean – but it does use high levels of energy and it generates waste, among other impacts. Cable & Wireless publishes a good report on its environmental aims, and performance in specific areas such as greening its supply chain.
More fundamentally, the argument goes that if people use videoconferencing, tele-banking, tele-learning and tele-shopping, they won’t use cars – so less congestion, less pollution, fewer greenhouse gases. The trouble is, most don’t use tele-everything – they want face-to-face contact, less e-mail. They fear being marginalised by working from home. Building on its community projects in this field, Cable & Wireless has recently announced it will take part in a new alliance to promote the positive impacts of telecommunications services. On June 5, World Environment Day, it joined with other major telecommunications operators such as AT&T, BT and Ericsson, to launch the Global E-Sustainability Initiative, or GeSI. Together they are committing to ‘greening’ their own businesses. They will also address the digital divide in its fullest sense – the gap between the IT haves and have-nots – and its implications for poor countries, communities, and also relatively poor sectors (the community investment team see a huge need for harnessing IT capabilities among the NGOs they work with).
Members of the community investment team talk naturally about all these issues as integral to CSR – rather than retreating to the ‘not my patch’ bunker.
Management structure
Community affairs is managed by the community investment team, comprising three members of staff, led by Mary Godwin. Mary divides her time between London and Cornwall, where she is curator of the Cable & Wireless Porthcurno and Collections Trust which includes the award-winning museum of submarine telegraphy and the company’s historical archive. Mary steps down in July, to be replaced by Liz Rouse, a consultant, formerly with BP.
The team reports to Susan Cottam, Corporate Communications Director. There is also a Community Investment Committee, a sub-committee of the Cable & Wireless main Executive Board, chaired by Hon Raymond Seitz, who is also a non-executive director of the board. From August, the addition of two new members, one from the public policy unit, based Japan, and one from marketing, will help bring projects even closer to the company’s business objectives. The Committee has the final say on how community investment funds will be allocated. There are also 18 full-time community staff worldwide.
The company’s global community spend for 2000/2001 was £6.3 million, which includes donations, plus what the team has been able to capture of staff time for volunteering and in-kind products and services. This is 0.2% of pre-tax profits.
Flagship projects
There has been the classic transition from reactive, piecemeal giving to a few major, international projects relevant to Cable & Wireless’ business and with opportunities for staff involvement. The criteria are that they:
• raise awareness of the importance of communications in social development, and
• encourage people to communicate by facilitating access to the benefits of information and communications technology. Key among these are:
• De@fchild International – part of the company’s strategy to open up the potential benefits of IT and the Internet to people with disabilities – this website promotes literacy and numeracy for deaf children around the world, and encourages them to communicate with one another. This is clearly a business issue: the ISP AOL was recently in a court case about inadequate provision for people with disabilities.
• Befrienders International, a global web site in multiple languages, puts suicidal people in touch with their local befriending centre. A new site for students and young people is now underway. Cable & Wireless staff can volunteer to help the Befrienders service from anywhere in the world, whatever the time-zone.
• BookAid International, distributing books and other learning materials in the poorest areas of the world, helped by employee ‘give a book’ days around the world. Amid big reorganisations, this has helped build team spirit internally.
• Cable & Wireless Childnet International Awards: in partnership with UK-based charity Childnet International, this seeks out and rewards communications projects that benefit children, and encourage the IT industry to undertake child-friendly initiatives. Business issue again.
Employee involvement
Employee involvement is strongly encouraged, and there is a ‘give as you earn’ scheme. Last year the company ran a millennium scheme, inviting employees to make suggestions about the projects they would like to see the company support. Nominators of the five top projects each won £4,000 for their charities. The winners included setting up an Internet connection in a small UK village post office for the whole community, and a technology training room for disadvantaged boys in Dominica. In addition, every one of the hundreds of employees from around the world who made a suggestion was granted £400 for the charity of their choice.
Globalisation
Each office around the world has a separate local budget, and undertakes projects under broad guidelines according to local needs. There is the usual issue for a global company of collecting data on what they are all doing, what and how they contribute, and what the impacts are.
The community investment team has designed an extensive online questionnaire which is completed by each business unit, everywhere in the world each year. Each business unit manager has to sign off their unit’s questionnaire. The questions cover a wide range of corporate social responsibility issues – employee satisfaction, for example. The process has top-level support, and there is a 100% response rate. It is also two-way – the team collects and sends out examples of good practice.
The team already recognises the need to move to a more rigorous format for measuring performance. But the framework they have established is comprehensive, and should serve them well in developing social reporting in the future.
Its secret weapon
Cable & Wireless is already an award-winner for its community website. But it is when you look at its employee intranet that you see its secret weapon. Compiled by the company’s legal department, the site boasts a huge collection of policies relevant to any aspect of CSR, be it corporate governance, corruption, disability, customer, employee or supplier relations, human rights, ethical codes, reporting, sustainable development or the environment. Not only are Cable & Wireless policies accessible by any employee anywhere in the world, but so too are external guidelines and best practice from other companies, codes or principles to which the company is a signatory, organisations which it has joined, and other useful links. The Conference Board, EIRIS, the ILO, ICAEW, CERES, Sullivan, the UN, ETI, Industrial Society – they’re all on there. It would be interesting to track how it is being used.
Reporting
CSR reporting is following a well-worn path at Cable & Wireless – community issues first made an appearance in the annual report, then in a joint environment and community report. Now the company is about to publish Cable & Wireless in the Community: an Expression of our Values – its first dedicated, global community report. Moreover the company has just held a series of senior level workshops to review the company’s approach on CSR, and to inaugurate a three-year plan to develop towards social reporting.
Cable & Wireless has quietly got on with the job. The business focus for community affairs is sorted, the mechanism for collecting broader corporate social responsibility data from business units is in place, and the intranet is extremely impressive. One benefit of full CSR reporting would be to share their experience with others.
Executive bioraphies
Mary Godwin (centre) joined Cable & Wireless in 1991. With an academic background in art history, she had been managing the collection at The Design Museum in Butlers Wharf. She set up a new Cable & Wireless archive and museums service – leading to her current post as curator. She has managed community investment part-time since 1996.
Swati Patel, (right) community investment executive, worked at Mercury Communications before joining the parent company Cable & Wireless in 1991. She studied corporate community relations at Boston College, USA.
Charlotte Wolff (left), community investment and environment executive, joined the company in 1999 from the Nordic Development Fund, having studied international economic geography in Helsinki and worked at the record company BMG in Germany.