Annual Review 2011/12

As custodians of the BBC's brand, we have a duty of care to act responsibly and appropriately, and to honour the expectations of our customers and partners, for whom the brand denotes quality and integrity. We integrate this into all aspects of our business, from policies and practices to culture and behaviour. Our Corporate Responsibility programmes are designed, where appropriate, to extend our responsibilities beyond our daily business activities.

As we grow our business internationally, it is essential that we ensure that we always trade ethically and minimise our environmental impact wherever possible and also contribute to the lives of our people and the people in our local  communities.

In 2011/12 Corporate Responsibility activity was led by separate specialists, with WEx leaders heading steering groups for the Environment, Ethical Trading and Editorial Standards. John Smith also attends the quarterly BBC Diversity Board meetings. Outreach activity has been led by our Head of Internal Communications. While this has ensured that each area of focus has had leadership with direct responsibility and expert knowledge of their discipline, we recognise that for our Corporate  Responsibility activity to be even more effective, we need more cohesion and expect  to make some changes to the leadership of Corporate Responsibility at BBC  Worldwide in 2012/13.

People

Responsibility for People Development sits with Deborah Rowland, BBC Worldwide's People Director.

Our aim at BBC Worldwide is simple: to be the best employer in the industry. The success of our business is dependent on the commitment and drive of our employees and therefore attracting, retaining and developing the best talent in the industry is critical.

By aligning our people and organisation strategy to our business strategy we have been able to drive forward our work around people development. In particular we have been focusing on:

• Building capabilities for our employees through implementing the  opportunity for continuous learning. This year online training modules were made available for the first time, and more than 1,100 were downloaded from our internal employee website. Mandatory training is also now managed through this website, enabling centralised recording and tracking of all training. As a result, completion rates are high across all areas of mandatory training. At least 3,100 mandatory courses have been completed online since June last year

• Training our managers, through a Management Essentials training module which has now been opened up to employees in the USA and Australia in order to bring out the best in managers and teams alike. Since  commencement over 300 managers have completed the module and a second Management Essentials module has been introduced in the UK, USA and Australia

• Inspiring growth and development for the emerging talent through our  Aspire programme, a one year accelerated development programme open to all employees which gives them a WEx member as mentor for the  duration of the programme. After the success of the programme in the UK and Europe, Aspire has now launched for our US employees

• Implementing a fair, transparent and differentiated reward structure which recognises performance and is aligned with our values

• Putting diversity at the heart of our organisation to drive our global mindset across the organisation

• Providing a great place to work that is warm, fun, collaborative and is a purpose-led culture through offering a stimulating physical work environment and a culture that promotes engagement with, and pride in, our business

• Continuously improving the appraisal cycle and ensuring the system is clear
  and simple to follow which will allow further accountability for employees and support a dynamic, empowering organisation

• Motivating our employees through the implementation of personal  performance bonuses. From 2012, most employee bonuses will be linked to personal performance, including adherence to our values, as well as  operating business and/or company financial achievement

• Communicating the pension options for employees now a new defined contribution pension option is in place

Plans for 2012/13:

• Creating five Professional Academies in Sales, Business and Legal Affairs, Finance, IT, and Marketing for the enhancement of professional skills in those disciplines

• Launching a global recruitment website in June 2012 to raise the profile of BBC Worldwide and expand our access to talent

• Developing a new Inspire programme for top talent to provide them with coaching, mentoring and deployment into roles that give development challenge and new experience, expected to launch in 2012/13

• Developing a global mobility policy to ensure that, where necessary to meet the needs of the business, employees can be deployed internationally on a  fair, consistent and cost-effective basis

Ethical Sourcing

The Ethical Sourcing programme is overseen by a dedicated Ethical Policy team and governed by the Ethical Steering Group, chaired by BBC Worldwide's General Counsel, Martyn Freeman. This group provides regular reports to WEx.

Each year, BBC Worldwide sources and licenses millions of products that carry the  BBC brand. We try hard to ensure that workers at the sites manufacturing the  BBC-branded products are treated fairly. We recognise that many factories will  struggle to be fully compliant with some aspects of our Ethical Policy straightaway  and so, in line with best practice in this area, our approach is to work with those  factories that meet our minimum requirements who have shown commitment to  improvement in critical areas.

However, we take a zero tolerance approach to the issues of the employment of  child workers, the use of bonded labour, uncontrolled working hours and dangerously poor health and safety provisions. Our policy is to work with suppliers  who address these critical issues provided that those suppliers are entirely open  and honest. Transparency is an absolute requirement and is vital for making  progress in improving conditions for workers.

We require independent third-party audits for our manufacturing sites in high-risk countries prior to manufacture. We determine the level of risk through industry data and expert advice and we will only accept audit reports that provide a detailed assessment of working conditions in each factory. All audits are carefully reviewed and graded by our team according to a traffic light system.

A site is graded red when it does not comply with our minimum standards; we call   this a critical failure point. In this event, we can suspend the production of our  product until we are satisfied that the failure has been corrected. Through this  approach, we are able to track real improvements in factory working conditions.  Only factories that have no unresolved critical issues are approved to manufacture  our products.

We also conduct control audits, sometimes referred to as 'forensic audits', to check  the effectiveness of the overall programme. These control audits are carried  out by labour standards experts and are accompanied by BBC Worldwide staff. There is a strong emphasis on listening to workers and getting to the root  causes of issues.

We appreciate that there also can be issues in lower risk countries, and we have  started expanding the scope of our audit programme to these areas.

Plans for 2012/13:

• Collaborating with key industry companies to raise the standards for all  factory audits and work together on the most pressing issue of  transparency in audits

• Ensuring that all operational and commercial staff, senior managers, and  legal teams receive updated training on ethical trading

• Extending audit programme to joint venture companies

Environment

The environmental strategy is overseen by the Head of Ethical Sourcing and Environmental Policy and Deborah Rowland, BBC Worldwide's People Director.

This year has seen a review of our environmental strategy. We have collated up-to-date utilities data from our offices around the world, providing a more complete picture of energy, water and waste. A team from our Aspire management training programme conducted a detailed investigation into office waste and  recycling levels, and the results will be used to drive behavioural change and  increase recycling.

We send zero waste to landfill from our main office building, by diverting  nonrecyclables to a waste-to-energy plant. A rainwater harvesting system in the same building minimises our use of mains water, saving 1.7m litres of mains water per annum.

Our three regional headquarters buildings in London, New York and Sydney have high environmental building ratings, namely BREEAM Excellent, LEED, and Nabers . Office systems include lights that dim automatically according to outside daylight, and centralised pull-printing to reduce paper and energy use. BBC Worldwide is  carbon neutral for offices and business travel: BBC Worldwide employees who park at the media centre must pay for parking, and the money is used to buy Gold Standard carbon offsets to balance unavoidable emissions. In the UK, domestic and close European flights are not allowed by the company's 'Travel Less, Travel Light' green  travel policy, with exceptions reported to WEx.

BBC and Lonely Planet branded books and magazines are predominantly printed  on FSC certified paper, as are, since June 2011, the paper sleeves for our DVD  titles.

In March 2012, we launched an international online environment training module aimed at all employees. The aim is to ensure our employees around the world understand and follow our environment policy.

In April 2012, the PPA Production &Environment Awards awarded the Head of Ethical Sourcing and Environmental Policy, Best Environmental Person Award.

Plans for 2012/13:

• Developing further targets for our data on energy usage, water usage,  waste to landfill and waste to be recycled

• Launching international environment manuals for BBC Worldwide premises and staff

• Publishing environmental packaging guidelines for BBC Worldwide products

Outreach

Our outreach work is headed up by our Head of Internal Communications.

We believe it is important to help improve the quality of life for people in the communities local to our operations. Not only is this part of being a 'good neighbour', but it also helps provide a fresh perspective on working life. As a commercial entity we believe it makes sense to focus on projects that are relevant to our skills base and businesses, or which provide some team-building or personal development opportunities. In this way both parties benefit and commitment increases.

Our outreach activity now has several well established projects, mostly UKbased. This year over 50 employees participated in the following volunteer schemes with  local students: Lawyers in Schools providing guidance to students to complement their Personal, Social, Citizenship and Health Education studies; Explore Media  Days on 'building brands' which saw 10 employees mentor 25 local students; 32  BBC Worldwide employees have taken part in the Take Two mentoring scheme  which helps to improve young people's confidence and communication skills; Jack  Tizard Scheme in which 12 of our employees visit children with profound and  multiple learning difficulties in their lunch hour. We also recently launched our Reading  Partners Scheme which aims to help improve literacy in primary age children; 17 BBC Worldwide employees have volunteered for this programme.

Our employees also participate in ad hoc Team Challenges such as playground  tidyups and painting tasks in local schools and the BBC Worldwide Choir has performed in a variety of community settings, to much acclaim.

We share our expertise and encourage young people interested in the media through 'guru lectures' given by our employees at schools and colleges. We also offer two paid summer placements via the Career Academy organisation to  students from disadvantaged backgrounds. We were partners in the English Speaking Union Young Writers and Public Speaking Awards held in Holland,  Belgium and Hungary.

We also enable our employees to support BBC-affiliated charities such as Sport Relief and Children in Need through a variety of fundraising activities. They are
also able to donate to a registered charity of their choice via Payroll Giving.

Plans for 2012/13:

• Develop our outreach policy and increase our activity internationally

• Hold two Explore Media Days, one mock interview day, four Team Challenges, involving over 150 students and 80 employees in the year

• Recruit two Career Academy interns for summer 2012

• Establish work experience opportunities for local students

• Monitor and assess the impact of the new Reading Partners Scheme

• Recruit up to 40% more volunteers for Jack Tizard, providing improved support to the existing 12 volunteers

Take Two Mentoring

In January 2012, we completed a year in the pilot of the 'Take Two' mentoring scheme. The project sees volunteers from a number of local businesses including BBC Worldwide, BBC, UKTV, L'Oreal, Leo Burnett and Coca-Cola mentor students aged  14-18 from schools in the West London community.

The aim of the project is to improve students' confidence, self esteem and communication skills. BBC Worldwide has been a keen supporter of the scheme from the outset and to date we have had 32 volunteers from BBC Worldwide take part in  the scheme, with one of our staff receiving the 'Anthony Lillis Volunteer of the Year  Award' for her services this year. The scheme is overseen by Hammersmith and  Fulham Council and is sponsored by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and has seen 88  London students benefit from mentoring in its first year.