It is now commonly acknowledged that companies who incorporate environmental and social concerns into their governance structures perform better in the long run, but the benefits of a Corporate Responsibility (CR) programme don’t end there.

CR goes hand in hand with boosting your engagement, developing a positive employer brand image, and creating a strong talent pool in your local community.  And while letting it slip down your agenda might seem to make sense today, it could be to the detriment of your business tomorrow.

At Standard Life, thinking about the long term is second nature to us.  As an asset managing company, our customers trust us to make returns on investments, grow pension funds and protect their wellbeing.  Corporate Responsibility – which for us means running our company to the highest ethical, legal and professional standards in the interest of our shareholders and customers – is inherent to our day to day work.

CR programme

Our CR programme is closely aligned with our business strategy; as a result of this, delivering our CR objectives becomes the business of everyone at Standard Life, and therefore embeds itself in our day to day work. Over and above this connection to our core business, we understand the additional value a well-constructed CR programme can deliver – for our business results as well as for our staff, our external stakeholders, our communities and our environment.  And this is why the results of a recent survey of HR professionals, which found CR slipping to the bottom of their “to do” lists, is surprising to us at Standard Life.

Responsibility report

Looking after the interests of our people is one of our key CR themes at Standard Life, and will be an ongoing priority for us.  As reflected in our 2007 Corporate Responsibility report (which can be found online at www.standardlife.com), we aim to make our company a place where our people can be fit, healthy and comfortable being themselves at work.  While this benefits the people that work for us, it also means they are more engaged – and therefore in the best place to deliver the exceptional experience our customers have come to expect from Standard Life.

We view our responsibilities to our people in a holistic fashion, establishing CR as a business as usual activity.  To this end, a great deal of different activity sits underneath the ‘people’ dimension of our CR programme, including:

• Helping individuals understand how they can make a unique contribution by playing to their strengths, and offering development opportunities accordingly

• Providing a range of development options to our people, including e-learning, where 1,168 courses were completed in 2007

• Investing in employee health, safety and wellbeing

• Utilising our Corporate Community Investment policy to develop our people, by offering our people’s expertise to secondments

• Recognising and valuing the diversity of our global workforce through policy and process.

We view this kind of activity as fundamental to running our business – not only in our people’s interest, but also to ensure that we deliver performance.  Besides the enhanced performance that highly engaged people deliver, we also believe that this activity is an investment that enables us to drive down the costs associated with issues such as staff turnover and absence. 

However, we aim to go further than this.  Beyond the win-win scenarios described above, our Corporate Responsibility programme seeks to deliver benefits across three dimensions - for individuals, for the company and for the wider world.

Step in in Life programme

Our Step up in Life programme, recently recognised by Business in the Community’s Big Tick Awards, illustrates this particularly clearly.  In this programme, our staff deliver presentations to senior school students on a range of topics relating to the world of work – from job applications and interviews, to how to succeed at work.  Our staff undertake this activity on company time, but in return for this investment on our part, our people gain confidence by presenting to large groups of students – gaining invaluable experience. 

But over and above the experience our own people gain from this activity, we introduce ourselves to the next generation of Standard Life staff and customers, giving them some of the skills they need to build a successful career.  And regardless of whether these students deal with us in the future, we believe that we are strengthening the community in which we operate by passing on our experience and expertise. 

Growing Confidence programme

Similarly, the Growing Confidence programme, which focuses on developing emotional wellbeing for primary age children in Edinburgh, enables us to develop our people to the benefit of the community.  Together with the City of Edinburgh Council and the School of Emotional Literacy, we are sponsoring the development and delivery of educational material for primary school staff.  One of the ways in which we help is by providing experienced coaches, many of whom are from our senior leadership population, to help teachers implement the Growing Confidence programme in the pilot schools, enabling our people the chance to develop their skills in a different environment.

InvolveME - EnvironMEnt

We also see the potential difference our people can make in delivering our environmental ambitions to reduce what we use, recycle more and dispose of sensitively.  To this end, we launched our InvolveME in the EnvironMEnt programme in 2007, which encouraged our people to consider the environmental impacts of their working lives, focusing on energy, waste, water and paper use.  This programme will continue to be rolled out in the future in conjunction with the establishment of Green Teams in each of our offices.  These Green Teams, managed on a floor-by-floor level in our larger offices, empower our people to engage with the “think global, act local” philosophy and put them in control of changing the processes they own for the good of the environment.

Awards

And when great work is undertaken for our communities and environment, we believe in celebrating the ways in which our people make a difference, both inside and outside of our corporate programmes.  Our Chairman’s Awards is an annual event dedicated to doing just this, sponsored by our company Chairman, Gerry Grimstone.  Awards are presented in a range of categories for fundraising, volunteering, and environmental impact, and both teams and individuals can be nominated for the work they do in their community.  As I’m sure you’ll imagine, the stories we hear in the running of this event are by turns touching and inspirational, both personally and professionally. 

The awards remind us of the huge difference that an individual can make – and illustrate the influence a company such as Standard Life can have in supporting its people to enhance their communities.  Whilst there are many compelling business drivers for championing CR, the simple fact remains that it is the right thing for us to do.  Even when times are hard, there are few reasons more compelling than this for you to continue supporting your organisation’s CR plans.