The London Paralympic Games casts the spotlight on the outstanding achievements of athletes with disabilities. While the athletes get the attention they deserve, all disabled need to be given greater opportunity to succeed in their chosen field of endeavour. Company cultures and employment practices need to be adjusted accordingly if they are to meet basic corporate social responsibility (CSR) goals. This is one important aspect of CSR which will be explored during the upcoming International Singapore Compact CSR Summit 2012, to be held on the 27 & 28September. Read more

By Will Henley for Guardian Professional (30 August 2012):

Achievements of disabled athletes in the Paralympics are celebrated but how much support and opportunity is there for disabled people in corporate environments?

Great Britain, with a disabled population roughly 11 million strong, is predicted to clean up in the Paralympics medal tally thanks to years of encouragement and investment in its disabled athletes.

But while the achievements of the athletes are to be celebrated, millions of non-sporting disabled people face an ongoing battle in finding success and competing at the highest level in industry.

According to government statistics, in 2011, just 48.8% of people of working age with physical or mental impairments were employed, next to a national average of 77.5%

Although figures for the private sector are difficult to obtain, the gulf is probably worse still if you exclude public sector workers, suggests Liz Sayce, chief executive of Disability Rights UK and the author of a recent government-sponsored review which recommended expanding state funded access to work support for disabled employees.

The problem, she says, is due in part to a “built-in risk aversion” among many companies. “Big organisations sometimes have a lot of procedures around safety. [Others] don’t really know what is involved and have anxieties about what it would mean to employ disabled people.”

Even when a disabled person makes it onto the payroll it can be tough to break through the corporate glass ceiling, she says.

A survey of over 1,400 professionals conducted by Disability Rights UK’s predecessor, Radar, in 2010, found that non-disabled staff are three times more likely than disabled counterparts to earn over £80,000 and are twice as likely to become board-level directors.

“The odds are stacked against you,” concludes Sayce, who blames a corporate culture of overprotectiveness and lowered expectations.

“Managers, with the best intentions, just overlook people for promotion. They think, ‘Oh, we wouldn’t want to put more stress on the person.’ Of course for a disabled person who is ambitious, they want the opportunity. It’s not at first discrimination, but it results in discrimination.”

Companies that fail to encourage disabled employees are however missing out, insists Tim Taylor, diversity and inclusion manager at Lloyds Banking Group, Britain’s largest retail bank.

In refusing to take a chance on perfectly well qualified disabled candidates, firms put themselves at a competitive disadvantage, he says.

“Many of our customers have disabilities and if we are going to understand their needs it helps us to have disabled people in the organisation. [In addition] a lot of disabled people bring a unique life experience: they can be good at problem solving, innovation and planning. These are all skills which are really helpful to us.”

Lloyds was one of the founders of Radar’s Radiate national network for senior and talented disabled professionals. The business also has its own internal employees network, a personal development programme and a workplace adjustment scheme to help disabled staff adapt office space and IT.

Taylor explains that the company, which has over 104,000 employees, is hoping to raise the level of debate among employers and managers across the country. “For too many people it is about wheelchairs and white sticks [and] not about people who are actually very talented and happen to have a disability.”

This is not to say that Lloyds is quite there yet. Internal surveys show that only about 3.5% of staff – and just over 1% of senior managers – identify as being disabled. Under-reporting could be an issue here, he suggests. Employees may choose not to disclose an impairment or may not recognise that a minor condition even qualifies. But with the right support he is confident of improvements.

Leadership from the top has been vital, he says. But Lloyds’ standpoint does not come from a sense of corporate social responsibility. “[CSR] has been the traditional approach and there is a lot of merit in that, but at Lloyds we tend to want to lead on the business case. It’s good for the customer, it’s good for colleagues, and it can help to make or save money. That argument resonates more.”

Susan Scott-Parker, founder and chief executive of the Employers’ Forum on Disability, an NGO with 120 global firms of the likes of Barclays and Accenture among its members, is one leading advocate who sees the potential of business as a driving factor in instituting positive change.

“What [employers] can do differently that will make it easier [for people] to succeed, get promoted and contribute to the business is the essence of this new approach to disability,” she says, pointing to the Business Taskforce on Accessible Technology EFD launched in 2008. The initiative commits members to only buy technologies that conform to a common accessibility standard.

Another case in point, Scott-Parker says, is drug maker GlaxoSmithKline, which has adopted a work placement scheme known as Project Search. The initiative helps young people with learning or other disabilities to gain the skills that will enable them to make the transition from education to work.

“What GSK is doing,” she says, “is enabling a group of, say, 10 people with disabilities to become more employable. They may take six or eight of them in the knowledge that the rest will go on and work for other employers.”

The idea is to not just recruit good people for the company but to also build a pipeline of talent for the entire community. “The point is, it has to be right for the person, and right for the company. We don’t want companies to think that when they do something in this space they are doing people a favour.”

But while much onus lies with business behaviour, other sectors also have a vital role, the chief executive adds, noting the challenge facing employment agencies such as Job Centre Plus in educating unemployed disabled people – and in turn firms – about available government funded access support.

“Business has to behave differently, welfare to work agencies have to behave differently, and government has to learn how to fund the system in a different way. All three have to change their behaviour,” she says.

In this way, improving the lot of disabled people in the workplace and giving companies the best possible pool of talent is not quite a marathon, much less a sprint. It’s more of a relay. Those affected will be hoping that business doesn’t drop the baton.

Will Henley is a journalist, communications specialist and executive member of the Commonwealth Journalists Association.

Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Singapore Compact presents:

The 4th International Singapore Compact CSR Summit 2012 is back. Themed “Trends, Threats and Opportunities”, the conference will highlight the value of CSR and look at aspects of sustainability, focusing on the social, environment and business impacts.

Leading the distinguished array of speakers at the event which focuses attention on the growing awareness of sustainability as the next business megatrend is Mr Kwek Leng Joo,  President, Singapore Compact for CSR  and Managing Director of City Developments Limited, a company which has set high standards as a for corporate social responsibility and sustainability in Singapore and internationally. It is the only Singapore developer to be listed on both Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes and FTSE4Good Index Series and the only Singapore company listed on the Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations for three consecutive years.SR Awards 2012

Plenary sessions and workshops during the 2-day conference will explore CSR with regard to value creation, the environment and human capital while providing in-depth perspectives across sectors and the ASEAN region. As an extension of the past three years’ Summits, thought leaders will share their research and findings addressing different business stakeholder groups and impart CSR strategies on how to ride the uncertainty.

Here are just four of the CSR leaders who will be present to speak at the summit:

• Jeremy Moon is Professor and founding Director of the International Centre for Corporate Social Responsibility. His research interests include comparative CSR, CSR and governance, and corporate citizenship. Jeremy won a Beyond Grey Pinstripes European Faculty award for preparing MBAs for social and environmental stewardship in 2005. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society for the Arts. He is co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of CSR (OUP) and co-author of Corporations and Citizenship (CUP).
• Ann Florini is Visiting Professor of Political Science, School of Social Sciences, Singapore Management University, and Non-resident Senior Fellow in the Foreign Policy Studies Program at the Brookings Institution in Washington, DC. Her research addresses innovations in governance of both the public and private sectors, with emphasis on global governance. As a Brookings senior fellow, she designed and ran the Global Governance Initiative on behalf of the World Economic Forum (2000-2005), releasing the Initiative’s reports each year at the Forum’s annual meetings at Davos. Prior to joining SMU, she was the founding director of the Centre on Asia and Globalisation at the National University of Singapore (2006-2011), where she created and led programs of research on the intersections of business and public policy, Asia’s roles in global affairs, and energy and natural resources policy.

• Dr Michael Schluter trained as an economist, obtaining his PhD at Cornell University. He worked as a research fellow with the International Food Policy Research Institute, and was an economics consultant with the World Bank in East Africa. Michael is now a social entrepreneur and has launched six charities whose work includes theological research and social ethics (Jubilee Centre), international peace-building (Concordis International), alternative finance (Citylife) and social policy (Credit Action). In 1994, he launched the Relationships Foundation; he is also on the board of Relationships Forum Australia. Michael is co-author of The R Factor (1993), Jubilee Manifesto (2005) and The Relational Manager (September 2009) and has contributed to a number of other books looking at social issues from a relational perspective. Since 2009 he has been directing the work of Relationships Global. In 2010-11 Michael worked with a South African company to pilot the use of tools to measure stakeholder relationships in five large corporates in South Africa. Michael is an experienced speaker who addresses audiences all over the world, and was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s New Year honours list in 2009.

• Toby Webb is the Founder of Ethical Corporation and CEO of Stakeholder Intelligence(SI). He founded Ethical Corporation, the leading magazine and conference business on CSR world-wide, back in 2001. Since then, he has organised, spoken at, and chaired dozens of conferences, advised the UK Prime Minister on CSR, written UK Government CSR policy (Responsibility Deals) and overseen the publishing of more than 8000 articles on sustainable business, and more than two dozen research reports. Toby also runs Stakeholder Intelligence(SI). SI is an advisory, training, facilitation, and research company based in London, with a global network of experts and clients all over the world. Finally, he is also a lecturer in Corporate Responsibility at Birkbeck College, University of London and Trustee of the Boxing Academy, a London-based charity, and Advance Aid, a disaster relief NGO.

Singapore Compact CSR Awards 2012

Having received tremendous response in 2011, the Singapore Compact CSR Awards is open to submissions again this year. This year, four awards including Best Workplace, Green Champion, Best Community Developer and Caring Employer will be given out. The awards will be presented during the opening ceremony of the 4th International Singapore Compact CSR Summit on 27th September 2012 at Raffles City Convention Centre, Singapore.

The CSR Awards this year continue to recognise organisations which have responsible business practice across the areas of environment, community and their people, and demonstrate working in partnership with stakeholders to achieve long-term sustainability of the business. The competition is open to all Singapore-based organisations of any size, including sole traders and government agencies.

Source: www.singaporecsrsummit.com