Vodafone does not consider corporate responsibility (CR) as a mere philanthropic gesture or add-on. It is part of our core business (see our strategy). Our CR management mirrors the way we manage our business, with a global team of CR managers working across the business with a presence in each local operating company.
A key challenge in a company of approximately 71,000 employees is to embed CR at every level in every local operating company. Achieving this means communicating with employees and creating an organisational culture where the instinctive course of action is the responsible course of action, based on our Business Principles.
Our approach to CR is to:
- Engage with stakeholders to understand their expectations
- Respond to stakeholders with our evolving CR targets and programmes
- Report progress back to our stakeholders.
Understanding our stakeholders and their priorities
We recognise that as our business evolves, new CR challenges emerge. We conduct extensive stakeholder engagement to identify the issues most material to our business and shape our strategy accordingly.
Responding to stakeholders' expectations
By listening to stakeholders and responding to their concerns, we have made significant progress in our CR programme.
We have collected over six million handsets for recycling and conducted more than 3,600 supplier CR assessments over the last four years. We are implementing our strategy to cut our CO2 emissions by 50% by 2020. Vodafone is leading industry initiatives to help parents protect their children from potential risks related to mobile phones. Our products and services are expanding access to communications to people in emerging markets and reducing preventable exclusion. See our performance and commitments.
When we established our CR department eight years ago, we set out to be a recognised leader in CR. Vodafone has since then:
- been ranked third in a 2007 UK MORI survey asking NGOs and CR experts to name leading companies in CR
- topped a poll of the global CR community by Corporate Register to nominate the best CR report of 2007
- won the ACCA award for best CR report in 2006 and for tax and public policy reporting in 2007
- been consistently ranked among the top five companies in the Accountability Rating for the last three years
- continued to be included in the FTSE4Good and Dow Jones Sustainability Indices.
Experts and stakeholders generally agree that Vodafone is leading the industry on specific issues such as child protection and improving access in emerging markets.
Reporting our progress back to stakeholders
We monitor CR performance across the Group through robust internal reporting systems. We report our progress to stakeholders through this Group CR website and our annual printed CR Review.
Twelve of our local operating companies also publish their own CR reports to respond to the concerns of local stakeholders. See more on our CR reporting.
Our progress against targets is subject to external assurance. The performance pages of this site are assured by Deloitte & Touche LLP. See their assurance statement.
