Vodafone takes its Corporate Social Responsibility seriously. Matthew Brearley, HR director at Vodafone UK, tells us why the Corporate Responsibility Programme is an important aspect of the organisation.

Can you give us a brief outline of your Corporate Responsibility Programme?
We’re about developing meaningful partnerships. At Vodafone we have looked at where we can add real value with things that are aligned to our business and the two key parts of our Corporate Responsibility (CR) programme are social inclusion and climate change.

How is your CR programme shaped by community issues?
We have a team in place which ensures that appropriate consultation is undertaken prior to the development of any new base station. We produce numerous communication materials for concerned members of the public and operate a helpline for anyone with queries relating either to base station siting, or health concerns they may have relating to our network. Vodafone has also invested over £7m in independent research on potential health impacts from base stations and mobile phones and we publicise the views of independent health agencies such as the WHO and the UK Health Protection Agency.

Which organisations do you work with?
The Vodafone UK Foundation, which is our charitable trust, has operated a very successful partnership programme for the last three years, providing social investment support to Shelter, the Samaritans and YouthNet. In addition, it provides assistance to a range of national and local charities, and match funds charitable donations made by our employees.

We have aligned ourselves in Vodafone UK with ‘unlocking’ the potential of young people in 14–24 age bracket. We channel our investment to help them and, in particular, we provide support for technologies that try to prevent, or help with, the exclusion of these youngsters from society. Vodafone has worked with Shelter to open up the Internet to aid their communication channels and allow them to help people in a way that they hadn’t been able to in the past. Rather than just donating money, we have used our expertise from within the business to help them to do something meaningful.

How are you measuring your carbon footprint?
Our major energy impacts arise from the operation of our network of base stations, and data centres. We've taken great measures over the last three years to try to reduce our energy consumption. Currently all of the energy we buy comes from renewable sources, so our carbon footprint has reduced in the last two years. We have set targets for carbon neutrality and we are looking at what additional measures we can take to reduce CO2 production from our network, offices, contact centres and retail stores, and from business travel. We have a very successful waste management scheme, with over 60% of our materials from HQ currently being recycled.
How else does Vodafone tackle environmental issues?

Our HQ at Newbury has about 3500 employees on the campus and it’s designed for energy efficiency – lights dim automatically and all of the air conditioning is energy efficient. We have also had a very successful take-back scheme in operation for the past five years, which allows customers to return handsets free of charge. The handsets are refurbished where possible, and sold, with the proceeds being donated to charity. Any of the phones or accessories which cannot be sold, are recycled.

What role do you think HR can play in encouraging employees to ‘make a difference’ in these issues?
The CR function in Vodafone sits within HR so we have a great role to play in educating our employees. We have put a number of initiatives in place to try and encourage our employees to take an interest and make a difference, and these include:

• A dedicated website on our intranet providing full details of our CR performance
• An environment roadshow for our major properties where we invited local organisations to come in and talk to our employees about what they can do to reduce their environmental footprint
• Q&A session for employees about the steps we are taking to improve our carbon footprint
• We make our annual CR report and regularly provide briefings via our mainstream communications channels on our key activities
• An intranet game which presents a 'climate change challenge' and aims to increase employee understanding of climate change.
• As a leadership team, we also try to provide a role model for our employees, and one of doing this is by ensuring that CR messaging is integrated into the general messages that we're providing to our people.