Teleconferencing. The ability to have a meeting without travelling. Saves time, saves travel expense and saves the environment as it cuts back on fuel emissions. A very neat solution - and also a very neat way of summing up BT’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda. “BT’s teleconferencing products are aimed at stopping people flying, which obviously affects climate change,” explains Janet Blake, head of Global CSR at BT Global Services. “But we also see the rise of teleconferencing as a great business opportunity for us. As we help more customers with these products, our business can grow.”
This is the key to BT’s CSR policies – help save the world and make money at the same time - and is included in their CSR Leadership Panel’s remit in slightly more euphemistic terms, but boiling down to the same thing, that BT needs to: “develop innovative new products and services that will meet shareholder expectation and help explicitly to build a more sustainable and equitable world”. BT’s CSR Leadership Panel, chaired by Jonathan Porritt, founder and director of Forum for the Future, gives BT a global perspective on what to focus on in the future and every year makes a statement on BT’s performance. Other members include Elisabeth Laville, founder and director of Utopies and Nick Robins, Head of SRI Funds at Henderson Global Investors.
“CSR has long been part of BT’s core business,” says Janet. “In the 1930s we started developing equipment for hard-of-hearing customers and making sure everyone had access to our services. Obviously CSR has moved on from then, and rapidly grown in the last few years – but with all this growth, we still have to make a business case for any development. CSR is not an add-on for the business – it is embedded at the core of our business as we have to continue to grow in a sustainable way. We cannot grow and expand at the cost of the world.”
BT has grown to be one of the world’s leading communications companies, with their major activities including networked IT services and local, national and international telecommunications services. BT started serving global companies in 1984 and today has 10,000 multi-site organisations as customers worldwide, of which 3,400 are multinational companies. They operate across 170 countries around the globe, and have over 106,000 employees. Their size gives them a great influence, which is channelled by their CSR policy says Janet.
“A big corporation has two hats – your own responsibility to get your house in order, plus your position in the ecosystem of other companies. BT spends £6.8 billion around the world, with over 20,000 suppliers – which gives us a great influence with them, so we can insist that they too are ethical and green in everything they do. This can have a huge knock on influence and have a much greater impact than anything we could do just by ourselves.” BT itself though has reduced its own UK carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent since 1996 and has recycled 42 per cent of its UK waste. BT has also been number one in the telecommunications sector of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the last seven years.
BT’s influence with its suppliers does not stop at the way they produce hardware for BT, they are also interested in who is doing the production. Mary Jo McFadden is Diversity Manager of BT Global Services: “We ask our suppliers for statistics on their staff breakdown, so we can look at things like gender splits. We can then influence the way they recruit and who they recruit.” Mary Jo believes that diversity starts from the way employees are recruited for these companies and for BT. “We work with recruitment suppliers so that when we are looking for talent we look in as wide a pool as possible and our workforce, no matter where around the world, has to mirror the local population.” When BT was looking for more female engineers they placed case studies in Company Magazine, a UK magazine for young women and a newspaper in Scotland and profiled one female apprentice. “Basically we were challenging stereotypes, showing that you don’t have to be butch and macho to be one of our engineers,” says Mary Jo.
This approach has worked and in 2007 BT is in the top 10 in 3 out of 4 main UK Diversity Benchmarks. BT is also now benchmarking its global performance via the Schneider Ross Global Diversity Network, with the results due in March 2008. Part of BT’s recruitment approach to a wide a pool of talent as possible obviously involves hiring MBA graduates and Janet recognises the strengths they can bring to the company: “They are an important resource group – with both practical experience and theoretical knowledge. At BT we have an open approach on skills and capabilities and have a real mix of people from all kinds of backgrounds. We have a special fast track programme for people we recognise has having the right skills and who are hungry to make the next move and very often these people are MBA graduates. If you have an ambitious streak you will have the ability to do well at BT as we will actively encourage you.”
“When we employ MBA graduates, we find they often have a great passion, with a personal value set which they are looking to realise in a working context,” continues Mary Jo. “They are very engaged and are often very perceptive individuals – very keen to work in CSR or diversity. But on the other side, sometimes they don’t understand that BT is a company, not a charity. The best MBA graduates we have are the ones who realise that everything we do needs to have a business model – in a way that is sustainable but is also responsible to our share holders. They need to find the business case and make it work for the business. They can’t just be passionate about the subject, but need to articulate this business case.”
BT is also heavily involved with charitable work, giving £21million a year either directly or in kind. Their main charity in the UK is Childline, who they have partnered for 11 years. This is a free and confidential helpline for children and young adults in the UK, and BT staff help run the call centres having been trained by the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) to work as counsellors. It is a charity that Mary Jo is personally involved with – last year she and 36 fellow BT workers went on a sponsored trek to Lesotho and raised over £60,000. “Lesotho is an amazing part of the world and part of the money we raised also went to Cotlands orphanage near Johannesburg. It was a very humbling experience and helped me appreciate how much poverty there is in the world.” It was also a great opportunity for personal development. “The trek was very hard, but I did not want to give in, or be the one at the back every day.” Their Better World campaign aims to give every young person a voice and includes a global development partnership with UNICES that will benefit disadvantaged children in South Africa, Brazil and China.
For details of BT’s work in CSR and diversity, see www.bt.com/betterworld