Within the year, the Group strengthened its community strategy, providing every member of staff with a day off each year to volunteer and empowering its individual businesses to create their own strategic community partnerships. It also created the Global Green Week, providing a platform to build staff engagement and increase coverage on environmental data for reporting.
Peter Rigby, Informa’s chief executive, says, “2009 was challenging but I’ve been determined that we are not knocked sideways by what’s happened in the world, and continue the good work we’ve been doing in CR because as a Group we’re fully committed to it”.
Informa has added to its award-winning employee benefits programme by offering every employee a day off each year to participate in a volunteering activity of their choice. Informa has over 150 offices in more than 34 countries, employs 8,500 staff worldwide and is recognised as one of Britain’s Top Employers.
The new volunteering strategy is a result of a 2009 staff survey which showed 86% of employees were interested in getting involved with a local charity near their own office while 58% wanted help fundraise and give their time to good causes, rather than do just one or the other.
The new strategy also encourages Informa’s businesses to create and build partnerships with local community or charitable projects, rather than having ideas fed from ‘top down’. Working examples of this include two Informa businesses spearheading their own projects - IIR South Africa’s support of the township project, Ekukhanyeni (Home of Light and Hope), as well as IIR Telecoms & Media and Télécoms Sans Frontières (TSF).
Informa has also successfully spent time and energy building a more global programme, particularly with environmental responsibilities. Keith Brownlie, Group CR and HR Director explains, “True employee engagement of any programme has to come from the top of a business and we’re lucky to have someone who is happy leading on this. For instance, Peter took Green Week by the scruff of its neck, encouraging and challenging his global CEOs and helping them to engage with their staff too. Support quickly galvanised through the Group.
“The success was incredible. In a follow up survey, 95.4% of staff knew about Green Week, no mean feat for an archipelago of global businesses like ours. Indeed, the programme was shortlisted with 2 other companies in the International Green Awards for its activity and employee support. Smartly, the initiative provided segments of much needed environmental data that we’d found difficult to obtain in some parts of the business.”
In continuing efforts, Informa is analysing its overall ‘Be Involved’ CR strategy in 2010 to build on last year’s successes, not least enabling individual divisions to take more ownership of all relevant and appropriate CR activities for their own business, market and customer needs.
The Informa Corporate Responsibility Report is published online.
