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October 2007
"Our field is desperate for measurements. We need hard and fast data. Every other department has data, every other part of the business has data, but until now, we have not."
That was the reaction of Barbra Anderson, Director of Social Responsibility at Sabre Holdings, upon piloting The Center's new Assessment Tool™.
The Corporate Citizenship Assessment Tool™ provides a simple and quick assessment of a company’s corporate citizenship management practices. Based on a series of questions within three dimensions of corporate citizenship, this self-assessment is intended to help a company better understand what needs to be managed in order to better integrate corporate citizenship efforts into company culture and strategic planning. The tool has the following important features:
- It is a confidential self-assessment tool.
- It is simple and easy to do online by one individual or a cross-functional team.
- It examines the state of a company’s corporate citizenship management practices, not its performance.
- It promotes cross-departmental communication and collaboration on corporate citizenship issues. It is for the company level, but can be used for assessing different subsidiaries.
- It is complementary with most other frameworks, such as the Global Reporting Initiative, the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices, and the FTSE4Good Inclusion criteria.
- It is useful for identifying gaps and areas in which a company’s program lags its other citizenship achievements.
- It allows companies to revisit and edit results as more information becomes available.
The tool gives a company an overall score on corporate citizenship management, with category and subcategory scores, as well as guidance on how to improve corporate citizenship management. This information can be used in many different ways: as a snapshot of your company’s current state of corporate citizenship management, as a resource for identifying strengths and weaknesses, as the basis for peer group benchmarking and comparison, or as an internal tool for collecting information from different departments or subsidiaries to better plan and manage corporate citizenship.
Tool is based on the Corporate Citizenship Management Framework
The Assessment Tool™ mirrors The Center's Corporate Citizenship Management Framework™, which is based on the concept that corporate citizenship has three key dimensions:
- Community: non-commercial activities that address social and environmental challenges from the very local to the global.
- Products and services: commercial activities that find market solutions to social and environmental challenges.
- Operations: responsible business practices that integrate a commitment to corporate citizenship across all business units and corporate functions.
These three dimensions align with the evolution of corporate citizenship over the last four decades. Community engagement was the focus in the 1960s and 1970s, followed by operations, with its concern for the environment and supply chains, in the 1980s. The newest frontier is the impact of product and services: how they are made, how they affect consumers, how the companies that make or provide them treat employees, how they modify products to reach emerging markets.
In this three-pronged model, community involvement has not disappeared or lost importance, but is now more concerned with the wider and deeper question as to how a company works with society in confronting social challenges and community issues. The key challenge now is to understand all these dimensions and stakeholders in order to address social issues in a way that combines social and business benefit.
In the community dimension, this requires making a crucial transition from transactions to relationships, focusing on integrated social partnerships rather than scattergun or even strategic philanthropy.
In operations, this means moving beyond compliance to internally generated comprehensive codes of practice and conduct.
In products and services, this means shifting to sustainable products and services.
The Sabre Holdings Experience
Sabre Holdings, which includes Sabre Travel Network, Travelocity, and Sabre Airline Solutions, started its community involvement program back in 1998. Its business has changed much in those intervening nine years, from being a business-to-business technology company to having a growing business-to-customer component, and from a company with 84 percent of employees in the U.S. to a company with half of its employees outside the U.S. As a result, Sabre Holdings needed to recalibrate its programs and educate its leaders about why.
The company's first step was to build a framework for gathering information about existing CSR-related initiatives across its businesses in 45 countries. For this, Sabre developed an internal survey to gather company-specific initiatives.
Its second step was to pilot The Center's assessment tool. Said Anderson, "We found tremendous value in the tool. It provided a comprehensive perspective of topics within the CSR scope, and broadened my horizon of the many areas we should be considering under the umbrella of corporate citizenship. It also brought to light many things we were already doing right, but hadn't necessarily considered as part of our corporate citizenship or relevant to our business."
For example, explained Anderson, several environmental programs such as carbon offsets were beginning to bubble up in the company, but they were not being considered as part of a broader, collaborative, company-wide CSR scope in terms of value to consumers and business. Making that connection gave her the leverage she needed to pull together an environmental initiatives team, which has led to a large-scale initiative with dedicated resources.
Anderson found The Center’s tool particularly helpful in creating Sabre Holdings' 2006 CSR report, which had been under development at the time. Using the tool gave her the impetus to reflect a more comprehensive view of various initiatives throughout the company, and to view them as CSR initiatives and understand better how they relate to the business. The report, which was released in May, can be viewed at www.sabre-holdings.com/aboutUs/corporate/csr.html.
With the mission of advancing the company’s CSR-integration, Sabre plans to use the collected data to leverage existing good works, seek opportunities to add more value to the business by aligning efforts, and craft key messages, all in a comprehensive manner. It will provide a baseline to bring together internal subject matter experts to establish a pan-Sabre Global CSR and Reputation Council.
Some helpful advice from Anderson and The Center about using the tool:
- Work in teams. No one will know all the answers, so it is best to work together. Although during the pilot, only one person can log in at a time, you can still work together gathering information before entering it. After the official launch, there will be a single official company assessment, but there can be any number of unofficial ones.
- Use The Center as your knowledge broker. If your score is low on a particular category, The Center can work with you to determine how to improve, or direct you to issue experts or other companies that have already tackled similar challenges. The initial score can serve as a baseline to track future improvements.
- Customize the tool to fit the particular situation of your company. Different companies have different needs and different situations, and the tool can be customized to them. One foreign-based company working with The Center added its own internally generated metrics and standards, and is having each of its subsidiaries fill out the tool so that it can do country-to-country comparisons.
- Uneven scores are not always a cause for alarm. Sometimes a low score should alert your company to the urgent need to do more. However, sometimes it means that you have little information or exposure to that area. Once you determine why your score is low, the next question to answer is whether to apply more resources, or to accept that this is not a priority for your company at this time.
Assessment Tool to launch in 2008
The Corporate Citizenship Assessment Tool™, currently in beta test mode, will officially launch in early 2008. When it does, companies will finally have a way to evaluate their corporate citizenship management. With such an assessment in hand, and with expert feedback from Center staff, businesses can identify their most pressing shortcomings and develop their programs to the point where they become an essential part of the overall business strategy.
For more information on the Corporate Citizenship Assessment Tool™, including how to participate in the beta pilot, contact Vesela Veleva at 617.552.8680, email velevav@bc.edu.
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