Today we released our fourth annual citizenship report. As we have learned through our global citizenship program, corporate social responsibility is a slow and steady — but ultimately rewarding — journey within an ever-evolving landscape. Fiscal year 2014 (FY14) marked an important point in our journey to show up differently by focusing on citizenship issues across our key stakeholders. Today, I’m enormously pleased with what we accomplished during FY14.
Our highlights:
For Our People
- Rolled out our Global Citizenship Dashboard tool in every Edelman office to operationalize citizenship at the ground level. In fiscal year 2015 this will evolve to a Citizenship Score (C-Score) — like our Quality Score (Q-Score) — using uniform metrics to evaluate progress over time for our offices and the company as a whole.
- Strengthened our Community Investment Grant Program and provided 121 grants, the most we have distributed since the start of the program three years ago, in more parts of the world than ever before.
- Instituted a new system to track employee training globally through the Edelman Learning Institute, including establishing a goal of every employee completing 24 hours of annual training in fiscal year 2015.
- Reached an important milestone in women’s leadership, with 58 percent of positions Level 4 and above now held by women.
For Our Clients
- Developed a procurement working group that is improving our policies and processes around environmentally and socially responsible purchasing that also provides economic opportunity. These practices will become more fully embedded in the coming year.
- Our Business Continuity program – Business Continuity Incident Management and a Business Recovery – is currently in all Edelman offices.
For Our Communities
- Launched a new pro bono and volunteerism policy that doubles the amount of paid time off each employee may use to volunteer in the local community and focuses on skill-based volunteerism for greater community benefit.
- Decreased our carbon intensity — the full-time employee equivalent measure of our carbon footprint — by seven percent over our baseline year, achieved Carbon Trust accreditation in our London office.
- Continued engaging in external partnerships and working groups including GRI, IIRC, SASB, SPLC and others to further collective knowledge and practices in citizenship.
- We became active with the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship Professional Services Sustainability Roundtable, a collective voice for the professional services sector working at the intersection of sustainability and business across many industries.
Looking ahead, I’m excited about our opportunities to even more closely align citizenship with our business. I am grateful that while my father and mother were alive, Edelman was able to establish a strong foundation for integrating citizenship, building on longstanding values and leadership as an ethical and community-focused business. Their values remain an inspiration to us all.
John Edelman is managing director of global engagement and corporate responsibility.