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 Building Knowledge, Building Buy-in: At Verizon, cross-functional group provides the foundations for movement
The Center spent the last two-and-a-half years working with mid- to senior-level managers in eight companies to explore how they worked to advance corporate citizenship in their organizations. An important aspect in most of these efforts is communication with external stakeholders — including policymakers, NGOs, and customers — in both partnership and adversarial roles. For Verizon Communications, ranked 12th on the Fortune 100 with more than 200,000 employees and $71 billion in annual revenues, a truly integrated corporate responsibility program requires a scale few other companies need.
Consumer Board: An Outside Influence
A compelling factor for advancing corporate responsibility at Verizon was its Consumer Advisory Board (CAB), a cross sectoral panel that represents external stakeholders, including customers, advocacy groups and government officials. This 25-member board meets quarterly to advise the company on a broad range of issues, including quality, marketing, and customer service policies that are important to Verizon’s many constituencies and locations. The CAB engages internal and external experts to provide guidance and public opinion on the issues it covers, including products, policies and business practices. The CAB is so highly regarded by this customer-focused company it has survived several mergers and acquisitions since its origin at New York Telephone, a former Bell operating company.
Corporate Responsibility: The Next Step
Verizon has many well established and effective citizenship oriented programs, most notably a long-running supplier diversity program, an award-winning employee diversity strategy, an innovative program that provides access for disabled individuals, and a substantial philanthropy program managed by the Verizon Foundation. While each program is successful in its own right, and many are considered flagship programs, they were not connected under a wider, more comprehensive corporate responsibility strategy.
Always attuned to Verizon’s external environment, the CAB perceived the need for an overarching corporate citizenship approach. “They identified it as an area in which we needed to focus, primarily because it was an issue that external stakeholders monitor, and it has a significant impact on Verizon and how we do business,” says Patrick Gaston, president of the foundation and former vice president of strategic alliances. When the CAB catapulted this concern to the forefront, Verizon’s citizenship practitioners were able to leverage the heightened visibility of citizenship to sell the concept up through the company.
Seizing the opportunity to generate momentum, Verizon assembled a cross-functional group to develop recommendations for moving corporate responsibility forward. The company created a corporate responsibility core team (CRCT), comprised of some 25 Verizon managers from diverse functional areas, such as procurement, branding, finance, marketing, network operations, environment, and strategic planning. The CRCT received a limited but clear mandate from its senior management co-chairs: conduct research before implementing a plan. The team’s objective was to present research-based recommendations to Verizon’s corporate leadership council (CLC), the company’s most senior leadership group. These recommendations would address ways Verizon could build upon the foundation of existing citizenship programs and engage senior management by defining a vision of corporate responsibility at Verizon.
The CRCT’s first step was to identify what corporate responsibility meant to Verizon. Initially, the team members had no firm grounding in corporate citizenship issues or an understanding of Verizon’s current activities in that arena. As a result, they developed a plan to enhance their understanding of corporate citizenship by creating four working groups, each with different data-gathering responsibilities:
- Inventory – Identify current corporate responsibility activities throughout Verizon
- Best practices/benchmarking – Determine what other companies are doing, particularly other telecommunications companies
- Stakeholders – Map Verizon’s stakeholders with respect to corporate responsibility
- Metrics – Assess what should be measured and how
Just as the task force prepared to provide early findings to senior leadership, major organizational changes at Verizon (including reduction in force and senior corporate responsibility staff changes) temporarily slowed the momentum of the corporate responsibility work. While many companies find that this type of organizational change can stall efforts for the long term, some of the personnel shifts at Verizon actually gave the practitioners allies in new areas. And when the new team settled into place the effort quickly regained momentum. This new team includes Kathy Brown, senior vice president for public policy and corporate responsibility; B. Keith Fulton, vice president, strategic alliances; and Chris Lloyd, director, strategic alliances.
Armed with the information the CRCT compiled, Brown engaged the senior leadership by presenting recommendations for moving forward. The first step was a presentation to CEO Ivan Seidenberg. Because of the breadth of preparatory work and the impetus from the respected CAB, the team was able to present the business advantage of corporate responsibility to Seidenberg, who gave them the green light for moving ahead.
Next stop was the CLC meeting, at which Brown and her boss, Tom Tauke, Verizon’s executive vice president of public affairs, policy, and communications, made specific recommendations around strategy and implementation. Brown and Tauke later met with the Public Policy Committee of the board. Both groups approved producing Verizon’s first corporate responsibility report, which was released in January 2005. Generating ongoing support from senior management has continued in parallel with other work on the report, a web site, a revised values statement, and several other strategic paths for action.
Senior management supports a broader corporate responsibility strategy, says Brown, “because the strategy advances our goal of transforming the perception of Verizon from a regional telephone company to a broadband, wireless, and video services company.” Notes Lloyd, a key executor of the strategy, “Our goal is to transform Verizon into a great American company, a great American institution. We see corporate responsibility as a way to transform the reputation of our company, from the inside out.”
The Difficult Part Begins
Fulton recognizes that the difficult part is institutionalizing a culture of corporate responsibility. “Our challenge,” he said, “is to develop a culture in which employees make decisions that are consistent with our values and informed by stakeholder interests. We want a decision-making process in which employees consistently identify relevant stakeholder and company interests and consider how the two intersect with our corporate values.”
Through the confluence of external and internal pressures, the prevalence of successful existing programs, a commitment to building knowledge before taking action, and the commitment of several practitioners, Verizon’s corporate responsibility approach was built on incremental and deliberate preparatory work. The dynamic relationships that emerged among the practitioners and the other key groups — from the Consumer Advisory Board to the senior leadership team and the corporate responsibility core team — was the winning formula for initiating momentum within Verizon.
This Verizon example is one of the many stories highlighted in The Center's new publication, Integration: Critical Link for Corporate Citizenship. The publication is based on The Center’s two-and-a-half years of research exploring how mid- to senior-level managers in eight companies work to advance corporate citizenship in their organizations.
» Read more about The Center's report, Integration: Critical Link for Corporate Citizenship.
» Download the complete report (pdf)
» See more "In Good Company" examples. | 
