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BT Interview
BT and CSR. Two well-known acronyms worldwide – CSR features highly on the list of priorities for MBA rankings in terms of who recruits want to work for – in one company that is leading a path of Corporate Social Responsibility. James Donald spoke with Janet Blake, Head of Global Corporate Social Responsibility, BT Global Services, and Mary Jo McFadden, Diversity Manager, BT Global Services.
Teleconferencing. The ability to have a meeting without travelling. Saves time, saves travel expense and saves the environment as it cuts back on fuel emissions. A very neat solution - and also a very neat way of summing up BT’s corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda. “BT’s teleconferencing products are aimed at stopping people flying, which obviously affects climate change,” explains Janet Blake, head of Global CSR at BT Global Services. “But we also see the rise of teleconferencing as a great business opportunity for us. As we help more customers with these products, our business can grow.”
This is the key to BT’s CSR policies – help save the world and make money at the same time - and is included in their CSR Leadership Panel’s remit in slightly more euphemistic terms, but boiling down to the same thing, that BT needs to: “develop innovative new products and services that will meet shareholder expectation and help explicitly to build a more sustainable and equitable world”. BT’s CSR Leadership Panel, chaired by Jonathan Porritt, founder and director of Forum for the Future, gives BT a global perspective on what to focus on in the future and every year makes a statement on BT’s performance. Other members include Elisabeth Laville, founder and director of Utopies and Nick Robins, Head of SRI Funds at Henderson Global Investors.
“CSR has long been part of BT’s core business,” says Janet. “In the 1930s we started developing equipment for hard-of-hearing customers and making sure everyone had access to our services. Obviously CSR has moved on from then, and rapidly grown in the last few years – but with all this growth, we still have to make a business case for any development. CSR is not an add-on for the business – it is embedded at the core of our business as we have to continue to grow in a sustainable way. We cannot grow and expand at the cost of the world.”
BT has grown to be one of the world’s leading communications companies, with their major activities including networked IT services and local, national and international telecommunications services. BT started serving global companies in 1984 and today has 10,000 multi-site organisations as customers worldwide, of which 3,400 are multinational companies. They operate across 170 countries around the globe, and have over 106,000 employees. Their size gives them a great influence, which is channelled by their CSR policy says Janet.
“A big corporation has two hats – your own responsibility to get your house in order, plus your position in the ecosystem of other companies. BT spends Ł6.8 billion around the world, with over 20,000 suppliers – which gives us a great influence with them, so we can insist that they too are ethical and green in everything they do. This can have a huge knock on influence and have a much greater impact than anything we could do just by ourselves.” BT itself though has reduced its own UK carbon dioxide emissions by 60 per cent since 1996 and has recycled 42 per cent of its UK waste. BT has also been number one in the telecommunications sector of the Dow Jones Sustainability Index for the last seven years.
BT’s influence with its suppliers does not stop at the way they produce hardware for BT, they are also interested in who is doing the production. Mary Jo McFadden is Diversity Manager of BT Global Services: “We ask our suppliers for statistics on their staff breakdown, so we can look at things like gender splits. We can then influence the way they recruit and who they recruit.” Mary Jo believes that diversity starts from the way employees are recruited for these companies and for BT. “We work with recruitment suppliers so that when we are looking for talent we look in as wide a pool as possible and our workforce, no matter where around the world, has to mirror the local population.” When BT was looking for more female engineers they placed case studies in Company Magazine, a UK magazine for young women and a newspaper in Scotland and profiled one female apprentice. “Basically we were challenging stereotypes, showing that you don’t have to be butch and macho to be one of our engineers,” says Mary Jo.
