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An Integrated Corporate Responsibility Strategy: A New Imperative
Immediately following the 2001 merger of Chevron and Texaco, we conducted an internal assessment of our corporate responsibility practices. Our company has a number of policies, programs and activities that relate to corporate responsibility, and around the world, we have gained on-the-ground experience addressing issues ranging from HIV/AIDS to operating in ecologically sensitive regions. But we saw an opportunity to take a more integrated approach to corporate responsibility and, in some instances, enhance or formalize our efforts. This was driven by our desire for our activities and operations to create benefits for society, the environment and the communities in which we work, while simultaneously creating value for our stockholders.
Better Understanding Our Operating Environment and Changing Expectations
We recognize that, like all companies, we must be cognizant of how we manage the social, economic and environmental impacts of our operations. To help us learn about emerging issues, we undertook a series of discussions with corporate responsibility experts and other stakeholders to increase our understanding of these changing expectations and their perceptions of our performance. We also researched what other companies are doing to address corporate responsibility. As we've sought to broaden and deepen our understanding of the issues that affect our business and the impacts of our operations, we've focused on the issues that we believe are of particular relevance to the energy industry given the nature, location and impacts of our operations. These include:
- ethics, transparency and financial reporting;
- community engagement and development;
- human and labor rights;
- health and safety;
- environment, conservation and climate change;
- workplace practices and employee relations;
- integration of corporate responsibility considerations into our supplier relationships.
Reviewing Our Policies and Processes
An important early step in our process of developing an integrated corporate responsibility strategy was to inventory and evaluate our policies and processes related to the issues we believe are most relevant to us and our stakeholders. We are a founding supporter of the Global Sullivan Principles, an external standard covering a range of social and environmental issues. We also have numerous internal policies, programs and activities related to various aspects of corporate responsibility. We saw, however, an opportunity to approach corporate responsibility in a more systematic way. As a result, we have begun developing some new policies and processes that span our worldwide operations which we believe will enable us to manage these issues more effectively.
Our Near-Term Corporate Responsibility Priorities
Building on our existing corporate responsibility policies and activities, we are focusing efforts in the following areas:
- Corporate Responsibility Guiding Principles - We are developing principles that will provide additional operational guidance to employees about how to put The ChevronTexaco Way commitment to "conduct our business in a socially responsible and ethical manner, respect the law, support universal human rights, protect the environment and benefit the communities where we work" into practice in our day-to-day actions and decisions.
- Pilot Projects - We are planning pilot projects in a sampling of operational locations to gain practical experience in taking a more systematic approach to corporate responsibility management. We want to identify where we can better integrate social and environmental considerations into our existing management systems as well as areas where we may need to develop new processes to more consistently incorporate these concerns into day-to-day decision-making. The goal is to learn techniques and develop tools that can then be applied across our company. We believe the pilots also will help us learn additional ways to measure and assess our corporate responsibility performance.
- Human Rights and Community Engagement - Our review identified these two issues as being of particular and increasing importance to ChevronTexaco. Building on our existing policy framework, we are developing a corporate Human Rights Statement to provide additional guidance on conducting our operations in a manner consistent with universal human rights principles. We are planning to test implementation of the statement in the coming year. We also initiated an assessment of our global community engagement activities to learn ways to increase the impact of our efforts.
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