Policy and programme development
A corporate responsibility programme should be built around the specific environmental and social issues associated with the company’s activities, rather than any arbitrary standards or benchmarks.
We help clients decide exactly which environmental and social issues they need to worry about.We do this by taking clients on a journey through all of the activities that they undertake and the products and services they provide, identifying potential issues along the way.
We then, jointly with the client, identify a short list of priority issues, taking account of the scale and nature of the impacts, regulations, the company’s degree of control and the potential to affect its reputation.
The next step is to develop a set of explicit policy commitments on each of the priority issues. These commitments will form the basis for:- framing and driving internal actions (objectives, targets, initiatives)
- measuring improvement (eg against KPIs)
- communicating the programme to staff and externally
Framing specific actions to implement policy commitments needs a great deal of care. Objectives and targets need to be meaningful, yet realistic, and it is critical that company staff play a leading role and buy-in to any actions that are set. We facilitate this process but we do not dictate.
In some circumstances it may be appropriate for a company to implement a formal management system as part of the corporate responsibility programme, notably the international environmental management system standard ISO 14001, or the related British Standard BS8555. We have considerable experience in helping companies to establish these management systems and can also advise on integrating them with other systems such as OHSAS 18001 (health and safety management) and ISO9001 (quality management).
See the Clients page for examples of work that we have undertaken with some of the best-known businesses to develop their policies and programmes.
