Sustainable development at Bidvest Corporate

Sustainable development at Bidvest Corporate is about reaching a common vision of what sustainability means to Bidvest within the context of a decentralised philosophy; communicating new thinking around sustainability to Bidvest divisions and their more than 100000 staff worldwide; monitoring the company’s progress on this journey and driving key issues that merit a unified approach.

Material sustainable development issues

• increasing awareness of the impact of corporate activity on society and the environment
• achieving coherence around sustainable business issues in a decentralised organisation
• improving Group measuring and monitoring systems

Bidvest Corporate

In addition to head office functions to support Bidvest’s strategic mission, Corporate comprises Bidvest Properties, Ontime Automotive, 2010 Commercialisation, Bidvest Wits and MSC Sports.

Three continuing focus areas aimed at ensuring the long-term success of Bidvest are new business opportunities and their commercialisation, brand-building to underpin shareholder value and sustainability leadership.

• increase awareness of the impact of corporate activity on society and the environment
• achieve coherence around sustainable business issues in a decentralised organisation
• improve Group measuring and monitoring systems

New businesses and brand-building are dealt with in the annual report divisional review of Corporate.

Increasing awareness and achieving coherence

For Bidvest, as with many organisations in South Africa, the concept of sustainable development originally evolved from an early focus on economic empowerment through transformation, to a growing awareness of environmental issues. More recently, in applying the GRI framework, and now responding to the King III integrated reporting imperative, Bidvest Corporate is working to facilitate a common understanding across the Group of the company’s responsibilities towards society. An important role of Corporate is to record the pockets of innovation and best practice from around the organisation and broadcast these to all divisions as possible examples to follow.

These aims are achieved through conferences and seminars, the integrated intranet and website and electronic newsletters. We also publish regular articles in Bidvoice, the staff news magazine and this year covered the Copenhagen Conference, as well as thought-leadership pieces from leading commentators in sustainable development. Televised messages from the CE’s office put strategic issues into simple terms in support of the key proposition that ”together, we can make a difference”. The messages are broadcast to operations across South Africa.

The sustainability management structure is being strengthened further, with more representation at company, division and Group level, allowing experiences to be shared and initiatives to be tested, compared with peers, improved and ultimately rolled out according to best practice.

We conducted an employee survey of our employees’ perceptions in respect of our efforts to apply the principles of sustainable development to the business. The survey was sent to 20,000 employees’ email addresses across the Group, with a response rate of 16%. Generally, employees were delighted to be asked to contribute and were proud to work for a company that was making a difference.

• Clear vision from management
• Commitment from senior and middle management
• Guiding policies and procedures
• Reward and recognition for doing the right thing
• Involvement and commitment from non-managerial staff

While there was general acceptance of our formal definition of sustainability, the challenge remains to move from awareness to tangible commitment and action. Lower level employees want to feel empowered, encouraged and mandated to use their potential.

Measurement and monitoring

An important development this year has been the simplification of the data collection tool. BEE information is monitored and collected by the Bidvest transformation executive, from which consolidated reports are issued, including areas of performance at variance with general trends and targets.

All other human resources, environmental, social and human rights information has been migrated to a simplified database tool. The tool derives important indicators, such as the LTIFR, from a series of questions, each with a detailed help function defining the data required. All reports are now generated directly from the database, improving the speed and integrity of reporting.

A significant challenge is the ongoing need to ensure the comparability of information with previous years. In many cases, measurement has improved, or definitions have become more definitive in terms of what items should be excluded and what included from a data item. Some examples: a new inclusion for some companies has been the costs of dedicated staff when calculating training spend. An exclusion has been the cost of fraud against the company where there was no staff involvement. In order to allow meaningful comparisons, some data has needed to be restated for prior years. We have also been slow to identify and follow up on anomalous data, although this will be greatly improved in the future with the inclusion of variances, which will immediately flag outlying numbers.

Given these challenges, our initial goal of bringing the submission of sustainability data to before the final date for submission of financial packs to the board has been only partially achieved. Going forward, we want to increase the number of intensity measures of issue performance, in order to make more meaningful and lasting comparisons possible.

Last year, we determined to meet King III’s recommendation on quarterly reporting during this year.With the changeover in data collection tool, this was not achieved satisfactorily. From our first 2011 quarter, all companies will be encouraged to use the toolkit, not only to collect and collate their sustainability data, but to help identify key sustainability risks and opportunities. Already, increased use of the tool has identified obvious areas for improvement, and we are seeing these insights in the quarterly sustainability reports being submitted to the sustainability committee.

The Bidvest Academy

The Bidvest Academy incubates leadership and business talent for the Group with an eight-month graduate programme and a short academy programme. The graduate programme prepares managers for a more senior role by introducing them to key strategic issues and the challenges of business sustainability. 64 candidates graduated in October, bringing to well over 500 the number of leaders who have passed through the Academy, and creating a new generation of high-energy executives committed to innovative thinking.

Prior to the March enrolment, we ran pre-academy workshops for delegates, their energy coaches and their direct managers, and also put candidates through an introductory accounting course. 68 candidates were enrolled on the March programme. The Bidvest Academy makes a unique contribution to the business by passing on the business wisdom of current leaders to the young stars of tomorrow.