Our corporate responsibility framework
Thinking globally, acting locally
We have a huge number of operations, in a wide range of countries and cultures across the world. Everything we do has to reflect and respect those local circumstances, and no more so than in the area of corporate responsibility.
That said, it's important to have a strong global framework, so that everyone knows what is expected of them, and what we do is consistent, and builds our overall reputation.
Within this framework each local CEO is accountable for the corporate responsibility programmes in their area, and is expected to put in place a clear management and governance structure to help them do this. A key element of this is the establishment of local corporate responsibility forums, which review and monitor local progress and include line managers from Human Resources, Environment, Health and Safety, Legal, and other operational departments.
Each local operation is also putting their own dedicated individual or team in place, to co-ordinate corporate responsibility activities on the ground, develop and run new programmes, and liaise with local communities.
The framework is backed up by policies, manuals and toolkits on specific subjects, such as Business Conduct, Health and Safety, and the Environment. There is also help and support available from a network of corporate responsibility professionals at both a regional and global level.
This includes information and implementation guidelines for specific programmes such as stakeholder engagement and resettlement, and an internal knowledge management programme for managers to discuss programmes and performance.
Local benchmarking
Because we operate in such diverse environments around the world we've developed our own benchmarking system for evaluating corporate responsibility policies, management, and risk profiles of our different local operations.
So far we have focused on steel production facilities in Algeria, Canada, Kazakhstan, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Spain, Ukraine and the USA. Looking forward, we complete the exercise for all our major production facilities, before moving on to our main mining sites.
The data gathered during the benchmarking has helped us develop tailored action plans in partnership with regional management, using the corporate responsibility framework. These include corporate responsibility governance structures, policy development, stakeholder engagement programmes, audit processes, training, and the selection of metrics and targets to assess performance.