With the fast-moving and global nature of technological development comes responsibility and it is on this premise that BT – created to help people to communicate – bases its philosophy of corporate responsibility.
The company’s business review, Changing World: Sustained Values, cites population growth, climate change, economic development and social exclusion as the major issues that affect society today.
Adrian Hosford, BT’s director of corporate responsibility, says: “I think our biggest challenge is to look at ICT’s (information, communication and technology) contribution to the big global issues. So, how we can positively impact on climate change, how we can genuinely use ICT to create sustainable economic growth and how we can have a more inclusive society.”
Moreover, this sense of responsibility has been recognised externally: BT has been rated first in the telecommunication sector of the Dow Jones Global Sustainability Index since 2002 and it was also one of the first signatories of the UN Global Compact.
But how does an ICT business fulfil the ambition that “improved communications can help create a better, more sustainable world”?
BT believes that this can be achieved by focusing on three challenges:
- The need for sustainable economic
growth. - The need for wider inclusion of all sections of society.
- The need to tackle climate change.
Hosford explains that the company’s aim is to “help enable the UK to be a really good communications country”.
BT originated as a state-owned company and was privatised in 1984. It has 104,400 employees worldwide with 82,000 based in the UK. Profit before tax for 2006 was £2.2bn and the company had £19.5bn revenue in the same year. BT is also a forerunner in the field of CSR with its first environmental report published in 1992 – way ahead of most of corporate UK.
CSR governance
Management of the corporate responsibility issues is integrated into the company’s main governance processes, with the BT board discussing CR strategy and performance once a year and a number of committees overseeing the issues for the rest of the time.
- The operating committee is made up of BT’s chief executive, Ben Verwaayen, the chief executives for each line of business and the company secretary. The aim of the operating committee is to agree on group-wide CR policies.
- The corporate responsibility steering group, which is made up of senior CR champions from across the company, assesses the CR risks and policies.
- The third committee is the community support committee, which is a board committee that oversees community investment and is chaired by the company chairman, Sir Christopher Bland.
The 20-strong CR team is headed by Hosford and scattered across the UK. The team provides leadership and co-ordination of the CR policies but it is the individual business streams of BT that must carry out the policies in their specific area. “So, if you look at age and disability – there is a part of BT that focuses directly on that and we work with them to make sure that we are making the technology widely available and easy to use,” he adds. Overall, Hosford reports to the company secretary.
Some key issues
Through stakeholder engagement and consultation meetings, BT has identified the issues currently key to its business. These are new technology, digital inclusion, customers, ethics, employees, climate change and regulation. Hosford expanded on a few of these issues.
Technology
The information, communication and technology industry evolves fast and with this comes new challenges such as internet privacy and security. The ultimate question is whether privacy and security issues are the responsibility of the internet service provider, such as BT, or not. Hosford believes not.
“We play our part but we should not make decisions on which content to ban. We’re not moral judges but we do support the institutions [such as the UK’s internet industry regulator – the Internet Watch Foundation] and we do the physical blocking, when the lawful bodies have decided,” Hosford explains, adding that BT does not want to set itself up as a watchdog, so, instead provides the support and technology while putting safeguards on its products.
In particular, the company is concerned with child protection and has developed software called CleanFeed, which blocks child abuse sites blacklisted by the Internet Watch Foundation.
So, according to Hosford, BT believes that internet service providers should not be those responsible for the policing of the internet but should rather support the independent organisations that are set up to do so by providing software and support.
Digital inclusion
BT focuses on connectivity (making broadband available to all households in the UK), content (working with partners to develop online content that benefits communities, small businesses and individuals) and capability (helping individuals and groups develop skills and motivation to use technology) in order to encourage a more digitally inclusive society. The work is community-based (BT made an overall community contribution of £21.3m in 2006) and relies on a number of partnerships with community organisations such as Citizens Online and the Royal National Institute for Deaf People.
Partnership: EverybodyOnlineThe project is run by Citizens Online, the universal internet access charity, and is supported by BT. The initiative has been set up in disadvantaged areas to create a network of community-based, public internet access points and to teach people how to use computers and the internet. Once a local area has been identified, the project is run with the help of community-based partner organisations and volunteers. The aim of EverybodyOnline is to improve communication, literacy and employability and it is also developed in such a way that it becomes embedded in the community in the long-term, even after the initial project has run its course. Such areas demonstrate over 50% greater growth in online services than the UK average. www.everybodyonline.org.uk
Partnership: Typetalk
Digital inclusion also embodies helping people with disabilities. The company has developed software such as Typetalk, which helps people who are deaf or hearing impaired to make and receive calls to and from hearing people. The Royal National Institute for Deaf People runs the programme and it is funded by BT. www.typetalk.org
Customers
Naturally, customers are a significant stakeholder group for a business such as BT but it is young people in particular that BT’s corporate responsibility policies centre on. The Better World Campaign, launched in 2006, aims to encourage young people to bring about social change and also aims to develop young people’s communication skills. “You are never going to solve any problems unless people start to understand each other and start to talk about it,” says Hosford. So, it is important to develop good communication skills when still young – “the emphasis is on the human skills because unless you get the human skills right, no technology in the world will help”.
According to Hosford, these skills include being “able to hold effective conversations, have empathy and collaborate with others” and he adds that a lot of emphasis is put on schools with BT sponsoring actors to hold communication workshops in schools and providing materials for teachers to use.
Three million children are reached every year through partnerships such as the one BT has with communication charity, I CAN.
Partnership: I CAN
BT partnered with communication charity I CAN in May 2006 and focuses on helping pre-school children develop important communication skills, which will help them when they join a school. BT helps to create, and provide, free and practical resources to help early years professionals take action, and also supports regional training events as well as a national conference. The company also takes part in raising awareness and lobbying policy-makers to make children’s communication a priority. www.ican.org.uk
Employees
BT has employees in over 50 countries and many of these are volunteers on various community projects. However, the company also acknowledges that new products or services as well as changes to the business affect employees. The company has an internal diversity programme – 22.1% of employees are women; 9.2% of employees are from ethnic minorities; 2% are disabled – and BT also believes that providing a safe workplace is a fundamental responsibility. Lost time injury rate is one of the company’s KPI’s – in 2006 there was a 40% reduction in lost time injury rate and a 7% reduction in sickness absence rate.
Reporting
Reporting at the company has gone from strength to strength with the corporate responsibility report going online in 2001. The report now covers all aspects of corporate responsibility at BT – the environmental, economic and social impacts of the business – and is online only, although a review can be printed.
Hosford feels that an online report is “appropriate for a communications company” and that going online allows users to “dig deep” – that is, tailoring the information to a specific user. For example, a reader may be interested in seeing BT’s policies on ethics and can do so easily and quickly by using the flexible database and search tool. “People don’t want to read reports from front to back – they want to go after the things they are interested in,” says Hosford. He adds that he believes the “future of reporting is only to report on things that are really material to your business or to your stakeholders – there has to be a process of materiality”.
Materiality at BT
This process of materiality is essential for BT when it is deciding what the main impacts of its business are and how to address them. BT asks four questions to identify the issues most pertinent to its business:
- Is there an existing policy?
- What is the financial impact of this issue?
- Are the stakeholders interested in it?
- Is there a societal interest linked to the issue?
BT talked to customers, employees and suppliers and asked them what the most important social and environmental issues are that BT should be taking action on. The company also analysed parliamentary questions and investor questionnaires as well as carrying out a media review in seven countries.
Ultimately, the final decision lies with the corporate social responsibility leadership panel, which can override any decisions made. So, working conditions in the supply chain may not have come up as an important issue but this may be due to stakeholders being unaware of BT’s impacts in this area. The leadership panel then decides that this issue should indeed be included in the report. The leadership panel has overall control over what is reported – whether the decision is supported by the materiality process or not.
The leadership panel is an independent panel of external advisors, which include Jonathon Porritt of Forum for the Future and Mark Goyder of Tomorrow’s Company. It meets four times a year and advises on key areas of corporate responsibility strategy and performance at BT. The leadership panel also looks to the future and advises on issues that may be significant in the future, even though analysis may not yet back it up.
Measuring impact
BT has identified a number of key performance indicators in order to measure the impact and track the progress of its corporate responsibility policies and partnerships. The KPI’s are divided into seven categories – customers, employees, suppliers, community, environment, digital inclusion and integrity – and through this the company looks at what it has achieved in the last year and sets targets for the following year.
“We manage corporate responsibility in the same way as a business would manage any programme,” says Hosford, “So, there are targets, there are measures, there are reviews, and there’s learning – what we can learn from best practice and how we can get continuous improvement.” He adds: “You’ve got to do that, otherwise you don’t know where you are.”
The company uses the ISO 14001 Environmental Management Standard in order to measure its environmental impact and is also assured by Lloyds Register Quality Assurance against the AA1000 Assurance Standard. BT is a member of the London Benchmarking Group, which measures its corporate community investment.
International
Twenty per cent of BT’s employees are based outside the UK and the company provides services in 170 countries. There is a global corporate responsibility co-ordination team and there is also a corporate social responsibility co-ordinator in every country.
For example, BT is active in India because it sources much of its technology and call centres from the country. BT runs a project in India called Lifelines, which is a community programme in support of the one of the UN Millennium Goals on digital inclusion.
The initiative allows people in remote rural areas of India to use a village telephone to get answers to questions that are essential in improving their lives – for example, questions regarding agricultural or veterinary advice. The village telephone enables people to call a knowledge management centre, which can help them with their enquiries. A village telephone operator is trained to manage the telephone service, so Lifelines also operates as a source of income for the operator – similar to a microfinance project. BT supports the project with funding and providing technical and commercial expertise. The aim is to make the initiative self-sustainable after 3 years.
Rapid response
A further way in which BT can offer community support locally as well as internationally is through its standby emergency team that assists with UK-based as well as global disasters.
“Unless you are getting communication out, you can’t get aid in,” says Hosford. So, BT has a rapid response team of trained volunteers on continuous alert and works with the Red Cross to get areas hit by disaster connected up within days.
“The thing about communication,” he points out, “is that people don’t appreciate it except when a disaster happens and they can’t communicate. So, we want to demonstrate that in times of emergency, if you get communications working, you can help people to solve problems.”
Looking forward
So, even though BT is a British service provider, it also has a global presence and this is reflected in its approach to CR.
BT still believes that it is good to talk – its advertising slogan in the 1990s – and that, by aligning its business strategy with helping people communicate better, the ICT sector can address the international issues of the day.
It is up to Briefing’s readers – many who are BT customers – to decide if the industry is fulfilling this responsibility.
Biography
As director of BT’s corporate responsibility activities, Adrian is responsible for co-ordinating BT’s combined effort to have as positive an impact on society as possible. This includes BT’s community programmes, BT’s environmental programme and BT’s social responsibility performance. Under the theme of ‘helping everyone benefit from improved communications’ this programme supports BT’s business success and strengthens BT’s reputation and brand. Major programmes include education, digital inclusion and climate change.
Adrian’s background is in marketing where he was BT’s brand manager and ran BT’s customer communications including It’s Good To Talk. He joined BT from ICL as part of the new marketing team after privatisation. At ICL he was worldwide advertising and direct marketing manager. Adrian’s early career was in the advertising business working for DMB&B, McCann Erickson and Ketchum.