Corporate Social Responsibility

Passionate about our community and environment

The success of Colt Cares, our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme demonstrates that we truly are passionate about our community and environment; that our new value is embedded within Colt and is at the heart of everything we do.

Colt continues to organise its CSR programme around the four pillars of Environment, Marketplace, Workplace and Community. After two years of activity, our initial 11 CSR work streams, have now completed their goals or have become incorporated into business as usual activity.  This prompted a restructuring of Colt Cares at the beginning of 2011, creating seven new work streams with a greater focus on both sustainability and our people.

Each work stream is sponsored by a senior manager and collectively these senior managers form the CSR Steering Group that meets on a quarterly basis and is chaired by Rakesh Bhasin, CEO. The Steering Group not only monitors progress of each individual work stream, but sets the wider CSR policies and direction for Colt. Starting in 2010, the Steering Group has, on a rolling basis, been considering the key issues for one of four pillars Colt Group S.A. together with the associated risks and opportunities; so far the Environment and Workplace pillars have been discussed.

Quarterly updates on the progress of Colt Cares are provided to senior managers and a briefing paper is presented at the Colt Board meeting every six months.

 In each Colt country there is a nominated CSR Champion, responsible for implementing activity at a local level. 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.

Last year, we announced eight CSR KPIs that would provide a focus for our activities in 2010. We achieved seven out of the eight targets, including improving the Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) of our data centres by over 10% and gaining ISO 14001 certification for all Colt countries, only falling short on our aim to freeze the number of flights taken. The table below summarises these achievements, together with the targets for 2011.

Creating a great place to work

We carried out our Employee Survey in February 2010 generating a response rate of 75% across Colt. For the key indicator, the Employee Engagement Index, a composite of satisfaction, referral, loyalty and pride measures, our people rated Colt at 66, broadly in line with the Global Norm of 67. CSR was rated highly with an index score of 75, reflecting the internal success of Colt Cares as well as the importance employees attach to this area.

Intrinsic to our strategy of becoming Europe’s information delivery platform has been the need to ensure that our employees have the right tools and training to work effectively. Our customer services and operations team have been trained on ITIL v3, while our customer serving units focus on providing solutions for customers, not just products. This new emphasis is highlighted by the Chartered Institute of IT awarding Colt the status of a Professional Development Organisation. Moving forward we will launch a pilot scheme for a formal graduate internship programme.

The protection of staff, visitors, contractors, customers and assets has always been a key concern of Colt’s. The minimisation of health and safety risks is overseen by a team of executives, who, in 2010 authorised expansion of the H&S team, a new strategy and performance indicators. Our H&S Policy statement commits us to becoming a company that sets the standard for H&S best practice, and lays down an objective of alignment with OHSAS18001, which we will target by end of 2012.

Development of Colt Talent Manager, a leading-edge tool that is delivering a step change in our performance management, was completed in 2010 with the addition of new modules for recruitment, personal development planning, 360 degree feedback and compensation.

Colt upholds the UN Declaration of Human Rights and the ILO Fundamental Convention; the revision of our Code of Conduct in 2011 provides us with the opportunity to formally incorporate these into our internal policies. We are committed to attracting and retaining the best talent so discrimination in any form, either during recruitment or in the workplace will not be tolerated.

Our approach to flexible working was launched in 2010 supported by the Office of the Future project that will provide the enabling technology to work and collaborate in new ways. Colt’s first Travel to Work audit, which generated a 40% response rate from employees, will provide one benchmark by which to gauge the success of this new approach, as well as highlighting ways we can promote more sustainable commuting to work.

The development of internal labour maps has allowed us to better understand age and gender diversity across Colt, enabling us to drill down by division, country and management level. Headline results have already been discussed at the CSR Steering Group, which agreed that diversity and inclusion will be a major focus in 2011.

Creating and demanding low emission alternatives

Customers will always be at the heart of everything we do; we will always go further for our customers. Based on the results of last year’s customer satisfaction survey, together with our on-going transactional surveys we have made improvements right across the customer experience. In the 2010 annual survey conducted in November, we exceeded the 5% increase in satisfaction that we had targeted, recording a 5.4% rise in our Customer Loyalty Index (CLI). While we do not provide actual satisfaction figures for reasons of commercial confidentiality, we can disclose that 73% of customers believe that it is important or very important to have a clear CSR strategy. The objective for 2011 has already been established as a 2.7% increase on our 2010 goal, which is again targeting an upper echelon improvement. Customer satisfaction was restored as a component in employees’ Annual Incentive Plans in 2010 and will be increased in 2011.

As well as focusing on reducing our own energy and carbon footprints, we are increasingly conscious of the part we can play helping our customers achieve their environmental objectives. In 2010, we launched our fully operational modular data centre, which, with a Design PUE of 1.21*, incorporates leading-edge energy efficiency technologies to significantly reduce energy costs and environmental impacts. Our modular data centre can be operational in four months rather than the 12 to 18 months it takes a conventional data centre to be ready for installation of equipment. This provides CIOs with unheard of flexibility to manage their expanding IT infrastructure. Recognising this, the concept was a finalist in this year’s WCA’s Green Award.

Colt is already providing managed service solutions, such as hosting on Colt managed and virtualised servers, which further reduce carbon footprints. We are also developing, with our partners, an exciting range of cloud computing solutions that will improve energy efficiency. Alternatively our network solutions can reduce travel emissions by enabling flexible working as well as collaboration through video and tele-conferencing.

Alongside our work with customers, we have continued to promote CSR to our suppliers and have tracked compliance through audits and a proprietary system. By the end of the year, we had improved on our target with 81.2% of core suppliers with a CSR policy or strategy in place. In addition 67% hold ISO 14001 certification for their Environmental Management Systems. Our goal for 2011, while maintaining the same level of compliance, is to continue this dialogue by developing a ‘deep dive’ CSR audit then piloting this with five of our strategic suppliers.

Our Sustainable Procurement Policy requires us to take into account the entire lifetime cost of any product or service we source. As a result, all the IT equipment we purchase for internal use is now ENERGY STAR rated.

*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

In 2010 we successfully extended the ISO 14001 environmental certification to cover all our operations in all Colt countries. External assessors auditing our Environmental Management System (EMS) at a sample of our sites across Europe found no non-conformities in any of our locations and praised the maturity of the system that had been established. Our focus will now shift to maintaining our ISO 14001 accreditation and continually improving the management of our environmental impacts. Click here for a copy of our Environmental Policy.

As part of the work to roll out our EMS, we confirmed that the most significant environmental issue for Colt is the consumption of electricity to power the operation of our data centres and pan-European network. Clearly, rising energy prices pose the greatest risk in both the short and longer-term, which we are mitigating through a series of energy efficiency initiatives.

Over the past two years we have been successfully working to improve the efficiency of our data centres as measured by PUE, a ratio that measures the total electricity usage of the data centre compared to the energy consumption of the servers and IT equipment within it. Through a combination of initiatives such as improving air management, optimising chillers and instigating cold aisle containment we have exceeded the 10% improvement target we set ourselves for 2010. For reasons of commercial confidentiality we do not disclose our actual figures, but our rolling 12 month PUE across all data centres has been reduced by 10.4%.

Following this improvement to the infrastructure, we will turn our attention to tackling the other 50% of energy consumption in data centres: the IT load. We will ensure that all growth in our managed services in 2011 is delivered on energy efficient equipment. In addition, we will explore how we can encourage our customers to take a similar approach with the equipment they co-locate in our data centres.

Our IT department has completed a second tranche of server virtualisation that is estimated to save over 1.5GWh, which means that we have now fully virtualised our internal servers. In addition, the team is piloting new software to automatically turn off computers at the end of every day that would provide significant energy and cost savings. Added to these we continue to promote our ‘Switch off’ campaign to all employees, encouraging and reminding them to turn off all lights, computers and monitors when not in use.

Energy consumption contributes the vast majority of our carbon emissions, followed by our air travel. During 2010 we completed the work improving our reporting on flights to include kilometres travelled and amount of carbon emissions generated. Unfortunately we were not able to maintain flights at their 2009 levels: instead, as a result of a large number of kick-off conferences and road shows at the beginning of 2010, we saw our air travel increase by 20% with 11,118 flights. Moving forward, to counter this rise we have invested in 26 new video conferencing units located in the offices which see the heaviest internal travel. We will encourage a change in our behaviour to ensure that this investment in video conferencing pays back in three years.

Our overall carbon footprint for 2009 rose by 28,514 tonnes to 133,610 tonnes CO2 equivalent, covering all our Scope 1 and 2 emissions as well as our business travel for Scope 3. Part of the increase is due to a difference in the way we reported renewable energy contracts in Belgium, Ireland and the Netherlands, but it also reflects the fundamental link between carbon and the provision of our products and services. 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.

The final environmental target set last year was a further reduction of paper consumption in our offices. With the installation of new printers, which incorporate ‘follow me’ printing functionality, combined with Colt’s ongoing ‘Think before you print’ campaign and the introduction of print free days in some locations, we witnessed paper consumption reduce by 9.7% to 7.9kg per employee. We will continue to push for further reductions in our offices, but we will now switch our focus to moving all our customers over to electronic billing – e-Invoicing – in the next three years, which will save 18 tonnes of paper per annum.

We have also begun to examine the impact of water on operations. To avoid flood risk our data centres and nodes have always been located away from flood plains and now, as part of our EMS, we have started to monitor our water consumption more closely. In addition, we replaced the water cooling tower at our Madrid data centre, a move that is estimated to save two million litres of water annually in a drought area.

Getting involved to make a difference

As a communications business, we have decided that it was appropriate to focus our charitable work on organisations involved with children and education.

Across Colt, our employees undertook 526 days of volunteering with charities and not-for-profit organisations including schools. This equates to over 10% of employees taking part in one day of volunteering activity. Our volunteers have taken part in long-term commitments such as:

• mentoring students in reading and maths in India, Ireland and the UK

• supporting weekly homework clubs for disadvantaged children living near our Lisbon office in Portugal

• helping to care for children in a home in Madrid

• adopting a playground in London  

One-off projects include:

• renovating a hostel for teenagers in Austria

• improving school classrooms in the UK

• renovating school playgrounds in Sweden

Given such commitment from our employees, we are aiming to increase our volunteering days to 600 in 2011.

2010 was the first full year of working with the charity partner selected by employees in each country. The support we provide is tailored to the needs of the individual charity but will generally encompass access to Colt resources, business and IT skills, volunteering and fundraising. Throughout the year, our people have raised more than €50,000 for our charity partners.

Considerable community activity took place in June, which was designated the month when Colt focused on its value ‘Community and environment’. The success of this month has prompted us to repeat of such activities in June 2011.