Northerners are a notoriously frank lot, and Manchester-based CIS is no exception. After all, this is the company whose own senior marketing manager publicly describes the insurance industry as a ‘necessary evil’!
It shouldn’t have been any great surprise, therefore, to find Paul Burke, a Liverpudlian and CIS’s social accountability manager, peppering his description of the company’s previous approach to community involvement with terms such as “Byzantine” and “hotchpotch”. Nor should it have been a shock to discover that this matter-of-fact communicator was on his way to PR Week’s CSR conference to speak on . . . . well, matter-of-fact communication, one would surmise.
Yet it is this willingness to be open about what the company stands for, and how it matches up to its stated values, that is moving the responsibility agenda forward internally and externally. Recent research shows that press coverage worth £2m is directly attributable to CIS’s ethical positioning.
Reviewing CCI strategy
As Paul implies, CIS has come on a long way over the last few years in the way that it approaches social responsibility, and community involvement in particular. Taking its cue from its sister organisation, The Co-operative Bank, there was a growing internal awareness that CIS needed to communicate its values more clearly, and to explain how these values worked themselves out in a competitive environment. Solving these twin concerns was Paul’s principal brief when he joined CIS in 2000.
Taking a fresh look at the company’s existing charitable partnerships revealed that existing alignments with the company’s business as an insurer could already be identified. Though this probably had more to do with past intuition than strategic deliberation, it made the job of rationalising its CCI relationships easier. It also set a model that has characterised much of Paul’s work ever since; namely, bringing voice and clarity to that which already ran deep within the company.
What emerged from the review was a specific commitment to three focus areas, all with clear links to CIS’s mainstream business:
- strengthening communities, with a particular view to reducing crime levels;
- fostering the development of young people to ensure a sustainable future;
- support for medical research and other medical charities so as to prolong the quality and length of life.
CIS also brought in ProbusBNW, the consultancy firm, to help review how effectively the company was managing its relationships with key community partners. All highly valued the support of CIS, which intentionally selects smaller charities where its contribution can be most significantly felt.
The main problem, however, came back to the issue of communication and transparency. Many of the charity partners surveyed were unclear exactly what CIS expected from them, what kind of community support it was offering, or who within the company they ought to be speaking with. As a result, the company immediately assigned a named executive manager to represent each of its key charity associates, who would act as a point of contact as well as an advocate of the charity inside the organisation. In addition, CIS created a set of guidelines for all its charity partners with the aim of clarifying the objectives of its CCI programme and the details of its management processes. This Statement of Expectation also provides advice on communication and measurement.
Communicating the benefits
“Although we have worked hard to provide a business alignment to our community activities, the benefits for CIS are not premised on a direct relationship between expenditure and return in the sense of increased sales or revenue”, Paul explains. Rather, he talks in terms of employee satisfaction, leadership development, building brand equity, and identifying more with the local community and ethical consumers.
Even Paul will admit that this all sounds terribly on-message, and so he fleshes out his textbook answer with some concrete examples. Among these is CIS’s partnership with AddAction, a charity that provides services for people with addictions. CIS is currently sponsoring an AddAction development worker in the North West at cost of £140,000 over three years. “A huge amount of crime is related to drug use, and as an insurance company anything that can impact on claims is obviously a good thing.” This kind of straightforward logic seems difficult to argue with.
Demonstrating the links between CIS’s charitable partnerships and the business has been key to winning over sceptics within the company. “Using the LBG [London Benchmarking Group] methodology has helped deliver some of the hard numbers that senior management want to see,” Paul says. The measurement framework of inputs, outputs and long-term impacts are now applied to the evaluation of all the company’s community projects. “Although it was difficult initially to get people behind the process,” Paul admits, “when they did eventually buy in, we invested the time and resources into making sure that everything from the minutes spent volunteering to the pennies leveraged from other sources was accounted for.” Processes, Paul confesses, are one thing that a company dominated by actuaries really does well!
Management
With a team of three people, Paul’s success has relied as much on networking behind the scenes as on communicating from the platform. In a company as committee-based as CIS (there are separate committees for community involvement, environment, social value and human resources – all of which Paul feeds into in some capacity or other), this ability to pull together key people within the organisation has been pivotal to bringing cohesion to the social accountability programme as a whole.
“Good networking depends on my personal credibility. I needed to show that I’m not a trendy lefty bent on overturning 130 years of company history, nor that I’m a hired gun looking to usurp responsibilities which currently sit within HR, or the diversity and environment teams,” explains Paul. “Instead, I needed to show that I understood the business and could help managers meet their business targets. This meant looking at CCI in a very pragmatic way.”
Ten years with Royal Insurance in a variety of functions lends Paul some immediate credibility as an industry insider. Also important to oiling the wheels internally is the fact that senior management are represented on each of the social accountability committees. Chris Hirst, CIS’s executive director for investment, for example, heads the Community Involvement Committee, and is therefore able to see the links between CCI and the company’s socially responsible investment (SRI) practices. As a consequence, Paul’s job spec now includes responsibility for the formulation and communication of CIS’s SRI policy, and involves close collaboration with colleagues in the investment department.
Employee involvement
Communicating the company’s commitment to social accountability is not Paul’s major challenge. There’s the annual report, an internal staff magazine, an intranet notice board and other regular publicity. “Engaging staff is the hardest thing,” Paul admits, “The most effective way is for their immediate manager to spend time explaining why our programme is worthwhile.” However, a key challenge for CIS remains engaging those employees located outside its main Manchester base, where most of the company’s community activities are still concentrated.
One way the company is trying to tap into employees’ interest across the business as a whole comes through its local donations scheme, whereby each of its 121 regional offices around the country is given £500 to donate to the charity of its choice. Another method has been to tie in its volunteering programme with the company’s human resources’ agenda, concentrating particularly on team challenge days. In 2002, 38 departments in CIS’s head office undertook a team challenge with over 570 employees participating. During the year, CIS donated around £200,000 worth of employee time to a range of volunteering activities. Even retired employees are now encouraged to get in on the act through the retired senior volunteer programme, run together with Community Service Volunteers.
CIS also gave a boost to its payroll giving scheme in mid-2001 by offering to double any money given through the programme up to the end of the year. As a direct result, the number of staff signing up to the scheme trebled. According to the company’s latest figures, the amount contributed through payroll giving stands at just over £200,000, of which £77,000 was CIS’s extra contribution. The company also contributes a similar amount through its commitment to match employees fund raising efforts, having recently doubled the maximum grant available to £2,000. The company has seen its contributions figure quadruple since 1999.
Transparency
CIS’s emphasis on transparency can be seen in all its external communications. In December last year, for example, the company created a first for the insurance industry by publishing its entire voting record online. Furthermore, it discloses its charitable spend by type (cash, employees’ time, and in-kind) and by geographical split in its stand-alone Community Involvement Report 2001. The report also lists future objectives for its community partnerships that arose out of ProbusBNW’s independent evaluation.
CIS’s commitment to disclosure was a large part of why it won the ACCA award for best social report in 2002. Ask Paul what the secret is to reporting success and he points to a graph in the company’s most recent Social Accountability Report, which integrates details about CIS’s social and environmental performance alongside its financial results. The graph in question (page 45) is one of the many Key Performance Indicators that litter the report, dealing in this case with the racial and gender diversity of CIS’s workforce. One learns that only three of the companies 287 managers are non-white and only about one in six managers are women. “This level of transparency is based on what police forces now do after the Lawrence inquiry. Are we any less accountable than the police?” A moot point.
To ensure the public accountability of CIS’s reported performance, its public report is first audited internally, and then subjected to an external audit. This second process evaluates the report’s completeness, materiality, regularity and timeliness, and quality assurance, in accordance with the AA1000 standard. The audit findings are published, as are the results of a third-tier independent review.
Future
The company’s reporting process makes it clear to CIS’s customers, employees, investors, and whoever else cares to find out, just how far the company is living up to its stated values. Admittedly, the job of transparency is made easier if you have a good story to tell.
The growing proximity of CIS to The Co-operative Bank under the new banner of Co-operative Financial Services has important implications for employees and customers alike that require clear explanation, as do the core business challenges facing the financial sector as a whole. The engagement of field staff also remains a specific challenge for CIS’s social accountability programme.
CIS cannot sit on its reporting laurels either. “The coming challenge for CIS will be . . . . to address more clearly how it handles the trade-offs and dilemmas inherent in any meaningful approach that seeks to align business performance to sustainable development”, Simon Zadek writes in his independent review of the last CIS report.
Paul is confident that the next report, due out in May, will explain how the company is meeting this challenge. However, the very admission that there are inherent trade-offs to be made is a step few other companies are ready to make. This willingness to be open can’t always be comfortable, but it forces management towards continuous improvement. And, to be frank, isn’t that basically what most readers of the report want to know?
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Prior to joining CIS in August 2000, Paul worked initially in the City of London for a Canadian merchant bank. He then moved to Royal and Sun Alliance, working first in business development and subsequently in a variety of project management roles dealing with customer research, business process re-engineering and EFQM.
Latterly, Paul was employee relations manager for Royal & Sun Alliance’s largest business division where he played a significant role in the post-merger process, including the harmonisation of terms and conditions and culture change.
Paul is on the board of the Corporate Responsibility Group, which comprises over 50 of the UK’s leading corporate practitioners of CSR, and a member of the LBG steering group.
He read modern history at Oxford University, before studying for a Master of Philosophy degree in International Relations.
Paul is married with three daughters, and serves as an independent member of the Merseyside Police Authority.
paul.burke@cis.org.uk