OUR RESPONSIBILITIES
A downturn can be a tough test of an organisation's dedication to corporate responsibility (CR). But our commitment - as individuals and as a firm - remains undiminished. We believe it's strategically important to be a responsible and well managed (see Leadership and governance) business; and we continue to improve our CR performance.
Scoring more: to benchmark our CR efforts we once again took part in the CR Index run by Business in the Community, because it's robust and takes a broad view of what's involved in CR. In the 2009 Index we maintained our Silver rating with an improved score, due largely to higher ratings for our performance in the workplace and in local communities.
Running it personally: our Managing Partner, Simon Michaels, has taken personal responsibility for our CR performance. He also set a challenging precedent in 2009 by joining the BDO staff who ran the London Marathon to raise money for charity. Other staff contributed to a further rise in community volunteering.
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Keen to be green: the environment continues to be a significant concern for most of us. In a recent internal survey of attitudes to environment issues, 90 per cent of respondents described themselves as interested, very interested or totally committed to the environment. We continue to work to live up to expectations of our people on a number of fronts - last year we cut our CO2 emissions by a massive 19 per cent in our buildings outside London and by 14 per cent for air travel. We would have recorded a further fall in our overall emissions, but for a single one-off item: our first full year's occupancy of 55 Baker Street in London. This resulted in an overall emissions increase for the period of 6 per cent. We've identified a number of measures to improve our performance this year.
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