Corporate Responsibility

Creating value and sustainability

We recognise the significant value that our non-financial performance can contribute to creating long-term value and a sustainable business. We believe that managing our business in a responsible manner is the right thing to do by all our stakeholders and makes good business sense. Being a responsible business enhances and protects our reputation, helps us to attract and retain high quality employees, manage risk, identify new opportunities in emerging markets and build deeper and stronger stakeholder relations. A diagram illustrating our approach to Corporate Responsibility (CR) can be seen here (pdf, opens in new window). Our approach focuses on:

Getting the fundamentals right with our customers – by delivering fair value and quality advice;

Being a good employer – through investing in the skills and capabilities of our employees; 

And addressing our broader responsibility to society – by supporting communities, managing our environmental impact and having a positive impact through our supply chain.

The key elements of our CR strategy are to improve business performance, build an open and honest culture and engage actively with stakeholders. We aim to achieve this by focusing on six key areas:

• governance and accountability;
• creating a great place to work;
• working with our supply chain;
• managing our environmental impacts – both direct and indirect;
• caring for our customers and providing them with products and services to meet their evolving needs and expectations;
• investing in the local communities in which we operate.

Our CR strategy builds on the solid foundation provided by our Enterprise Behaviours, Code of Conduct and Compliance Standards.

To deliver on our strategy we need to understand the direct and indirect impacts, both positive and negative, that are created by our operations, products and services. We also need to be able to identify business opportunities to meet the needs of our employees, customers and other stakeholders in the future.

With this in mind we are working to integrate environmental and social considerations into day-to-day business decision-making and operational practices. This will help build a customer-focused and ethical business where we openly engage in meaningful dialogue with our stakeholders and lead to better decisions and improved business performance.

We believe this will add value to our business by reducing risk, improving our operational efficiency, productivity, products and customer service, as well as creating a great place to work.

This section outlines the main areas of our work in CR, encompassing;

• Our People
• Our Approach to the Environment
• Our Customers
• Our Suppliers

And also provides access to our recent CR Reports.

We also support a variety of charitable and community initiatives. For details on these please see our Community section.