James Donald talks to Janet Blake – Global Corporate Social Responsibility, BT Global Services and Mary Jo McFadden – Diversity Manager, BT Global Services
Teleconferencing: the ability to have a meeting without travelling, saves time, travel expense and the environment as it cuts back on fuel emissions. A very neat solution, and 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 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 makes an annual statement on BT’s performance.
“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 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 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, 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 was in the top 10 in three out of four main UK Diversity Benchmarks. BT is 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 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 with the right skills and 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 and we will actively encourage you.”