The Corporate Impact Reporting Initiative

Reporting on our performance is an essential part of our commitment to our stakeholders and that means talking about our weaknesses as well as our strengths. Being involved in this initiative has helped us to see more clearly where we need to improve and provided the context for drawing up a timetable for doing better in the future.

We wanted the shared learning the project offered and the networking opportunities. Our involvement has been the catalyst in identifying Key Performance Indicators for the business and has helped drive sustainability into our business strategy. If KPI's are not an integrated part of business strategy, then they are just a collection of disparate good things.

For the LE Group participation has been a learning exercise - the start of a journey to fully understand, measure and improve our major impacts on society. For us, particularly because of the devolved nature of the Group, the project has provided a driver for collating and understanding information at the macro level. It has also provided the structure to produce our first Environment and Corporate Responsibility report. We found that in general terms the progression worked well and, following our gap analysis, we are using the levels to prioritise our actions.

We chose the Winning with Integrity framework because it has the benefit of being do-able. We're aiming to publish a scene-setting environment and social report by November 2002 and took part to see where others are at. It has provided a safe way to start off on reporting and measuring and a more digestible framework than others. Through our involvement we've been able to get used to seeing what's needed and get used to gathering it. We see our web audience as small but influential: opinion formers.

Being involved involved shared learning which helped us to develop an indicator framework which we can apply across all our markets as part of their CSR auditing and reporting process. This is being piloted in France, Switzerland and the UK in 2003 for reporting in 2004. The website supplements our paper-based UK social and environmental report.

We joined to learn how to build on our experience of reporting. We had a good track record on environment reporting but wanted to pull together our entire CSR activity and learn how to report credibly on that. Having the framework of the Business Impact Review Group to steer our efforts has proved extremely valuable. It has enabled us to work internally to collect relevant data.

The cross-functional CSR Team put together for the Corporate Impact Reporting initiative is made up of representatives from litigation, procurement, environment, corporate affairs, market research and customer relations. We've found value in reporting on an independent website. We expect our web audiences to include: investors; government and local government; employees; big business customers and suppliers. We got involved because the project offered a way to structure our reporting, and move from our traditional community focus to cover the corporate responsibility agenda. It is a digestible and an effective process for embedding corporate responsibility in the organisation and has had cross-over benefits: in previous years our environment report had a couple of social indicators, it now has more of the social dimension, reflecting the website data.

We find the Business in the Community Winning with Integrity framework has helped us to improve the structure behind our reporting, whilst allowing our reports to still evolve in line with the needs of new media reporting and retain creativity in the design and approach. The framework is not as prescriptive as some. In our second year of using the framework it has helped us address weak areas, and to continue to promote our best practice approach to integrated social and environmental reporting. The website has helped us collate and report on specific indicators and for us to benchmark ourselves against other leaders in the field.