How we've started our journey

With a company that's just over a year old, how do you begin to identify the issues that should be at the heart of a CR strategy? Here's how we started the ball rolling...

Concentrating on what matters

In the fast-moving world of CR, there are plenty of hot topics to have your say on. But we want to do more than have an opinion. We want to effect change wherever we can. We'll be focusing closely on our key responsibilities to our stakeholders - the things they expect us to be accountable for.

Social and environmental questions are important to us, but we won't stop there. We'll also be starting by tackling some really straightforward business and operational issues that demand close attention to our values, behaviours and ethics.

So, our CR approach is pretty fundamental in terms of scope and priority. We're not picking and choosing the issues we want to focus on, we're going exactly where the 'responsibility question' takes us.

Considering our products and people

To explain our impacts and responsibilities in the best possible way, we decided that it made sense to focus our central story very simply around our products and people.

That challenges us to understand how our products are made, sold, used and disposed of - their 'cradle to grave' story - and how people are impacted by that process. We've made a start at piecing together the story and have uncovered a range of risks and opportunities that we're working out how to manage. To find out more about our risk management process click here.

Listening to others

To help us define our issues and begin to shape our strategy, we looked, initially, towards a number of external sources of information.

As a member company of Business in the Community (BITC) - a unique movement of over 800 UK companies that are committed to improving their positive impact on society - it made sense to use the four main 'impact areas' they identify, as a starting point. These have helped us define our issues and responsibilities. You can see these in the table below.

Each of these impact areas generates some major issues that we need to attend to. Although, as we'll explain later, we think workplace concerns (getting things sorted internally) represents our biggest priority right now.

We've become members of the CSR Media forum which has helped us gain a better understanding of specific 'responsibility challenges' in our sector. We've also looked at the latest good reporting guidelines put together by the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to shape the issues that we need to be reporting on in the future. If you'd like to know more about GRI, you can visit globalreporting.org.

These are guidance tools, not absolute ways of doing things. We've decided the best way to proceed on our journey is by using these as signposts. But we are always open to good ideas and, if you'd like to make suggestions which you think will help us improve, we'd love to hear from you.