Corporate Social Responsibility

Taking the next step on our journey

2011 has seen Colt move beyond the initial progress and success we’ve had; by establishing a new set of goals and targets for ourselves we’re continuing to live one of our core values and show we’re passionate about our community and environment.

Colt’s CSR programme, Colt Cares, is structured around the four classic pillars: Our environment; Our customers and suppliers; Our people; and Our community. The programme continues to be driven by the CSR Steering Group and the work streams that it oversees, but 2011 saw a major restructure of these work streams as we took the next step in our CSR journey.

By the end of 2010, it had become apparent that our initial 11 CSR work streams had either achieved their objectives or had become established within the organisation as business as usual activities. Consequently a review of our work streams was conducted during the first quarter of 2011, consulting with key internal stakeholders as well as identifying best practice and emerging trends externally. The result was the establishment of seven new work streams with a particular focus on sustainability and our people:

Each work stream is headed up by a new senior manager and together these sponsors constitute a new CSR Steering Group, which continues to be chaired by our CEO, Rakesh Bhasin, who retains executive responsibility for CSR. Further additions to the CSR Steering Group were also made to ensure that there was a representative from each of our business and support units on the committee. The CSR Steering Group continues to meet on a quarterly basis and continues to not only monitor the progress of each individual work stream, but to set the wider CSR policies and direction for Colt.

During 2011, we undertook a project to rationalise Colt’s numerous policies, identifying and consolidating ten key policies at the corporate level that all employees need to be aware of. This was an opportunity to revise Colt’s CSR and Environmental policy and recommunicate it to all of our people.

Last year we expanded the number of our CSR targets to nine, introducing a better mix of short and medium term goals which have been the focus of our activity during 2011. We remain on track to deliver the majority of these targets, as you’ll see in the table below. The table also sets out the additional targets we have set ourselves for 2012:

Creating a great place to work

The introduction of the UK Bribery Act occasioned a review and revision of our Code of Conduct, together with specific training being provided to key individuals. It was also an opportunity to formally incorporate the International Labour Organisation’s Fundamental Principals into our Code of Conduct and our Suppliers Code of Conduct. Employees and suppliers are now obliged to join Colt in ensuring that we uphold these fundamental human rights.

One of the main aims of the restructuring of the CSR programme was to create more emphasis on our people and this has been achieved with the establishment of two new work streams focusing on Wellbeing and Diversity. Initially the Wellbeing work stream’s goals are predominately Health & Safety to ensure that we meet our public target of aligning to OHSAS 18001 by end 2012. Within Diversity we are concentrating on gender and age as the two areas that we can most easily track and therefore influence at present.

Our expanded Health & Safety team have created a new H&S Portal through which employees can access all the information they need on Colt’s Health and Safety system including our harmonised set of 32 global procedures. The Portal also contains an incident reporting system for better monitoring of accidents and reporting to the Board. A dashboard of key metrics has been established and scored by all the business and service units across Colt, resulting in a series of action plans that are now being implemented. The team has also launched a training programme of one-day workshops for all key managers, which will be delivered across Colt during an 18-month period. While the aim is to ensure alignment to OHSAS 18001 by end of 2012, the system has been already been fully implemented in Colt India, leading to their successful certification in December 2011.

Colt recognises that a diverse workforce is key to success in the modern business world; it is difficult to serve the needs of our customers if we do not reflect their diversity. A Women’s Group has been established in Colt UK to support and encourage the career paths of women in Colt. Overall, our gender gap has narrowed over the past year by 1% to stand at 74% male, 26% female. To encourage more young people to join Colt, we have been working with the East London Business Alliance (ELBA) and Queen Mary, University of London (QMUL) to create a trial internship programme. This trial will begin in February 2012 with 15 recent QMUL graduates taking part in a series of employability workshops run by Colt employees. To test the new skills that they’ve learnt, all the participants will then be interviewed with one successful graduate gaining a six-month internship at Colt from April 2012.

The appointment in 2011 of a new Director for Leadership Development and Learning signals a longer-term determination to encourage and foster the talent within Colt. We have introduced Personal Development Plans within our Infrastructure Service Unit (ISU) and already there are around 1,000 employees with a plan in place. ITIL training has been completed for all relevant employees across Colt and for the first time, a 2-day management training course was made available to all.
 

Creating and demanding low emission alternatives

The increasing focus on energy and carbon provides us with the opportunity to help customers reduce their impact on the environment and this is the aim of the newly established CSR work stream on External Sustainability.

We believe that our energy efficiency projects across our networks and data centres since 2008 have been successful in establishing a ‘green foundation’ on which all our products and services to customers are delivered. Moving forward we have specific propositions within each of our solution sets that can help reduce customers’ environmental impacts. This was recognised in Verdantix’s Green Quadrant research in Sustainable Telecoms Europe 2011, which ranked Colt as one of the leading companies in its ‘Specialist’ quadrant. The research also highlighted Colt’s strength in Sustainable Hosting through a combination of our IT Managed Services and our highly efficient data centres.

Our flagship sustainability product remains our innovative Modular Data Centre, with a Design PUE of 1.21* that is 40% more efficient than a conventional data centre. In 2011, these Modular Data Centres were shipped to Iceland, where they became the world’s first dual sourced 100% renewably powered wholesale data centre. The northerly location ensures that the data centre’s free air cooling is in operation 365 days a year, while all the electricity to power the IT load is sourced from hydro-electric or geo-thermal. We have endeavoured to ensure that our IT Managed Services are as energy efficient as possible. In line with our 2011 commitment, where applicable, all servers purchased have been ENERGY STAR rated. In addition, roughly 20% of purchased equipment has been in energy efficient blades or larger servers for which the ENERGY STAR rating is not yet available.

Our customers continue to be at the heart of everything we do and this is underlined by the increase in their satisfaction with Colt during 2011 of 3.7% over our 2010 target, exceeding the 2.7% rise we had set ourselves. While this measure of satisfaction will still be tracked in 2012, we have decided to put more emphasis on transactional satisfaction (TSAT) in 2012, focusing on ensuring that 75% of customers are satisfied in our TSAT surveys. We feel that, through their actions, far more of our people can influence this TSAT measure, which makes it more relevant as both a target and for inclusion within our annual incentive programme.

Within our supply chain we have recognised that security of supply and the ethical sourcing of raw materials are increasingly important issues for Colt. As a result, we have worked with Business in the Community to produce a CSR ‘deep dive’ audit that we have trialled with five of our strategic suppliers. The audit provides information on the suppliers’ CSR activities and benchmarks, from which Colt can learn, as well as helping us to understand the key risks in our supply chain and how our suppliers are working to minimise them. This audit is part of a wider programme to create a closer relationship with, and a better understanding of, our key suppliers. As such we will ensure that all remaining strategic suppliers complete the CSR deep dive audit in 2012.

A second facet of better understanding our suppliers is the calculation of the carbon footprint of our supply chain. We have started by focusing on the footprint of scope 3 indirect emissions within Europe. Before publishing this figure we will check it against next year’s footprint to ensure that the methodology and results are robust, but initial indications are that our supply chain footprint is material to Colt. Importantly the production of this footprint establishes a benchmark against which we can implement improvements that will again not only reduce carbon emissions but cost as well.

*PUE as defined by the Colt Design authority document DAPS-004 and based on standard PUE calculation methodology proposed by the Green Grid. This figure is based upon defined operating environments in specific geographic climates under sealed conditions.

Becoming a low carbon company

The creation of our new CSR work stream on Internal Sustainability will ensure that we continue to focus on reducing our impact on the environment.

Colt has maintained its environmental management systems (EMS) with external audits conducted by BSI in seven countries, all recommending that Colt retains its ISO 14001 certification and reconfirming that we remain a low environmental risk company. We will be due for re-certification in 2012, which provides us with the opportunity to bring together our three existing management systems into one Colt-wide system, taking the best practices from each system into the new merged EMS. Click here for a copy of our Environment Policy (pdf).

Through the process of analysing our key environmental aspects and impacts, we have identified that our main environmental issue continues to be energy and carbon, providing us with both risks to overcome and opportunities to seize. Energy prices continue to rise and we are aware of forecast energy demand set to increase by 50% worldwide by 2030. This clearly affects our bottom line costs but equally provides significant incentives for improving our energy efficiency. It also opens up commercial opportunities that are discussed further in the next section: Our customers and suppliers.

Even though our data centre energy efficiency programme achieved its 10% PUE target in 2010, we have continued to the work in 2011, such as improving air flow management and installing cold aisle containment into our remaining data centres and some of our major nodes. The result has been a further improvement in PUE by 14% to 1.79 across our 19 data centres, which is now equivalent to saving approximately €4.2m and 14,000 tonnes of carbon annually. We are determined to push the efficiency of our data centres even further and have therefore set the challenging target of achieving another 3% reduction in PUE in 2012. This will be delivered through the completion of cold aisle containment and the replacement of end of life equipment; for example, in one of our data centres we have seen a 75% energy saving from the replacement of old chillers.

In May we published our 2010 carbon footprint to the Carbon Disclosure Project. Following GHG Protocols we calculated that our footprint had increased by 3% to 137,620 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. This figure covers our scope 1 and 2 emissions together with our business air travel under scope 3. We have estimated that this figure would have been 10,000 tonnes higher had we not instigated the energy efficiency programme within our data centres.

Our operations in the UK fall within the Carbon Reduction Commitment and we have nominated Bernard Geoghegan, EVP Data Centre Services as the individual responsible for CRC within Colt. Following submission of our 2010-11 data, we were ranked 1301 out of more than 2,000 organisations. While we welcome the scheme’s shift towards ranking on actual consumption over the next couple of years, it is unfortunate that the breadth of the scheme makes it difficult to recognise the uniqueness of companies such as Colt. Particularly for our data centre and managed services, customers taking these solutions are effectively outsourcing part of their carbon to us, which we can manage more efficiently.

To reduce our scope 3 emissions we invested over €1.0m in video conferencing equipment at the end of 2010. During 2011 we have seen adoption of this technology increase and across the whole year more than 300,000 minutes of video conferencing has been used by our people with an estimated saving of €345,000. We have also adapted our travel reporting to enable us to track the proportion of zero, one, and two night stays, providing an additional method to calculate the change in behaviour and payback from our investment in video conferencing.

Equally, our Office of the Future project, which invested in areas such as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and the promotion of flexible working policies has resulted in a reduction in commuting amongst our employees. Based on the results of our second Travel to Work survey the average days per week spent working from home more than doubled from 0.14 days in 2010 to 0.3 days in 2011. This is an excellent example of the win-win philosophy behind our CSR activities: our employees benefit from a better work-life balance; Colt benefits from reduced office space costs and often increased productivity; and there is a cut in emissions from commuting.

Moving beyond carbon, Colt also has programmes to tackle paper consumption and to investigate water usage. Following the successful 29% and 9.7%reduction in paper consumption in our offices in 2009 and 2010 respectively, we have shifted our attention to customer billing. To achieve our 2013 e-Invoicing target we have completed the first phase of the project in August 2011 by establishing the capability to invoice customers electronically in all Colt countries. Since then the project has moved firmly into its second phase, the marketing and promotion of this functionality to our customers. We already have 2,000 organisations on e-Invoicing and are on track to meet our 2013 target.

Finally, we have found that in the wider business community, the issue of water resources and scarcity is becoming significant and could soon be as important as carbon and related climate change. So we have created a CSR work stream tasked with systematically measuring our water usage and determining whether this is a significant issue for Colt. We will feedback on the results of this work stream in subsequent reports.

Getting involved to make a difference

2011 was the second year of involvement with the education and children’s charities selected by our employees. In each Colt country, the Country Representative is responsible for all CSR activity at a local level, particularly our community involvement programmes. The Country Representative nominates a CSR Country Champion to organise and implement this activity. Monthly teleconferences of all CSR Champions enable the coordinated delivery of company-wide initiatives and provide a forum for sharing ideas and best practice across the Group.

The objectives and programme of activity will vary in each country according to the needs of each individual charity partner; they will generally be a combination of: 

• Fundraising
• Volunteering and business support
• Awareness generation

For example, in the UK, given the nature of the charity partner, Friendship Works, the focus has been on fundraising to enable the expansion of the charity’s mentoring programmes. This has been achieved through a variety of activities including cake bakes, Golf days, auctions and the sale of Christmas wrapping paper. On the other hand, in Spain, support for Hogar de Nuestra Señora de los Desamparados, local children’s home, has been primarily through volunteering with employees helping at the home four nights a week.

To maximise employee engagement, community activity is concentrated into two period of the year: our Community and Environment month in June and our Christmas Charity Initiative. During June, employees in Germany and Netherlands took part in sponsored runs, while our people in Austria and Denmark collected toys, games and other items for their charity partners. For Christmas, many countries have put wishes from local children on the Christmas trees in their reception areas and are encouraging employees to buy a present for these kids by taking one of the wishes off the tree.

We estimate that across Colt we have raised €24,829 for our charity partners. This has been through employee fundraising rather than donations from Colt. The end of 2011, though, has seen the launch of our Customer Reference Programme, whereby Colt will make a donation to our relevant local charity partner to thank customers who agree to be the subject of case studies or speak at Colt events. Even though the Programme has just launched, it has already donated over €3,000 to Colt charities. No donations are made to political parties.

Our CSR Policy requires that every two years employees select the charity partners they would like to support locally in their country. The CSR Steering Group decided that it was still appropriate to work with charities in the field of Children and Education, although it also expressed a desire to focus, where possible, on the promotion of science and technology. Given this brief, the local CSR Country Champions drew up short-lists of charities, which our employees voted on during a two-week period in October and November. From January 2012 we will be working with the successful charities for the next two years.

Every Colt employee is entitled to two days a year to devote to volunteering activities, either with our charity partner or for an organisation of their choice. In India, Portugal and UK, some employees use this entitlement to mentor local school children on an on-going basis. Others use the days for one-off activities, for example five employees in Denmark spent half-a- day helping the homeless in Copenhagen, while a finance team in London used a day to create a herb garden and repair playground furniture at a local school.

Volunteering is included within some of our Learning and Development programmes, for example all senior managers in Colt India attending a 2-day training workshop spent half-a-day improving the conditions of local villages. It’s also very much a part of our reward and recognition of top performers, during their trip to Kerala, their itinerary included helping to finish a new science block for the St. Thomas Girls’ School in Cochin.

In total, Colt employees have taken part in 557 volunteering days. This is slightly short of our target but does represent a 6% increase on 2010. We will continue to pursue our target of 600 volunteering days in 2012.