Passionate about our community and environment

In 2009 we continued to make progress with Colt Cares, our Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) programme. This was recognised with Colt becoming a finalist for the WCA’s Green Award 2009. In challenging economic times we believe we must work even harder to be a responsible and sustainable business.

Colt organises its CSR programme around the four pillars of Environment, Marketplace, Workplace and Community. We operate 11 CSR work streams, which have been created to address the issues most specific and relevant to Colt. Each work stream is sponsored by a senior manager. 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.

Monthly updates on the progress of Colt Cares are provided to senior managers and a briefing paper is presented at each Colt Board meeting. In addition, the achievement of Colt’s eight CSR targets was a personal objective of every member of the Company’s Operating Committee.

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.

In 2008 we announced eight CSR KPIs for 2009. We achieved all the targets set for completion by the end of 2009 and are on track with the one KPI that extends into 2010. The table below summarises these achievements, together with the targets for 2010.

Creating a great place to work

Health and safety remains of paramount importance and Colt aims to eliminate all unnecessary and unacceptable risks from the workplace and reduce all remaining risks as far as possible. Whilst meeting or exceeding UK and European legislative requirements, our aim is to become a company that sets the standards for health and safety best practice within the telecommunications industry.

We recognise that we must provide the right level of skill and support to all our business divisions along with the best possible environment for everyone at Colt to succeed. During 2009 we developed our People & Change Division to create centres of expertise and provide strategic and tactical support to the businesses. Our priority is to help line managers support and develop employees using global best practices and by deploying leading-edge tools.

The Colt Competency Framework was introduced in 2009. This was launched following extensive development and testing and describes the qualities, characteristics, attitudes and behaviours that are key to success in Colt. The competencies have been designed to support a wide range of uses including:

•  recruitment and selection
•  managing, reviewing and improving performance
•  training, development and self-development
•  building teams, and
•  succession planning and managing careers at Colt.

Colt Talent Manager is an example of a leading-edge tool that we introduced in 2009. It is designed to deliver a step change in our performance management activities. Used by all employees, it supports Colt’s annual performance management process including goal setting, competency development, mid-year and year end reviews and regular performance reviews throughout the year. During 2010, we will introduce new modules covering resourcing and recruitment, career and learning management, 360 degree feedback, succession planning, and reward management.

In recruitment, equality of opportunity remains central to our culture. Colt is committed to attracting and retaining the best people and discrimination on the grounds of race, gender, age, gender orientation, religious beliefs or disability is not acceptable and contravenes our policies in this area.

All employees have now completed training on our Code of Conduct. This goes beyond previous requirements to respect the UN Declaration of Human Rights and ILO Conventions and comply with national human rights and employment legislation.

We launched a trial of an Office of the Future with employees in London and Frankfurt. The project concentrates on creating and facilitating smarter ways of working in addition to introducing new IT equipment and software. The trial supports our environmental objectives with more energy efficient technology that can be powered down overnight automatically and with functionality that reduces the need to travel to Colt offices.

Through these and other initiatives introduced in 2009, we saw the voluntary turnover rate of our employees reduce by 3.8 percentage points in 2009. In early 2010 we will conduct an employee survey that will create a benchmark from which we will set and publish targets for 2011 onwards.

Creating and demanding low emission alternatives

In 2009 we implemented robust processes and procedures around our customer satisfaction surveys. The 2008 annual survey results were analysed to create action plans that address key areas of our service. Feedback loops are in place to ensure that we quickly respond to all customers’ issues and quarterly transactional surveys allow us to focus on the most important aspects of customers’ experience. Following this work we are setting ourselves the challenging target of increasing our Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) by 5%. To achieve this we will be introducing improvements in every aspect of our customer experience: across communication, sales, service delivery, customer service and billing. Success in this measure will form a key component in employees’ Annual Incentive Plan.

Our Managed Services Division is developing a range of products and services such as cloud computing that will reduce our customers’ carbon footprints. In a recent contract, Sdu Uitgevers migrated their existing Den Haag based data centre to Colt’s Amsterdam data centre whilst also transferring more than 450 applications into a new, more energy-efficient virtualised environment.

Alongside our work with customers, we have been promoting CSR to our suppliers and have tracked compliance through our ARIBA system. By the end of the year, 76% of our core suppliers had a CSR policy or strategy in place, exceeding the target set in last year’s annual report. In addition 63% hold ISO 14001 certification for their Environmental Management Systems. Our goal for 2010 is to continue this dialogue and raise the level of core suppliers with CSR policies to 80%.

Our Sustainable Procurement Policy requires us to take into account the entire lifetime cost of any product or service we source. Benefits are evident in the equipment procured for our next generation network and the energy saving features on our Office of the Future hardware.

Becoming a low carbon company

We promised to bring our existing management systems up to the standard required to gain ISO 14001 certification in at least one Colt country. Throughout 2009 teams from Facilities, Data Centre Infrastructure Systems (DCIS), Group Sourcing & Supply, IT and Service Delivery have established comprehensive environmental management systems in three Colt countries. Our operations in India, Spain and the UK all gained ISO 14001 certification from the accreditation body, BSI.

Using the expertise, processes and procedures developed during 2009, we will roll out environmental management systems across the Group and ensure that the rest of Colt is ISO 14001 certified by end 2010.

During the accreditation, Colt was identified as a ‘low risk’ company. Our main environmental impact remains the power consumed by our data centres and networks. We are determined to reduce this impact by improving 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). An Energy Efficiency Programme targeting seven of our largest data centres with 14 initiatives has been launched for 2009-10 to improve PUE by 10%. In addition, we have developed innovative water cooling systems at our data centres in Milan and Zurich, which reduce the need for mechanical cooling.

Elsewhere, we continue to promote our ‘Switch off’ campaign, encouraging all employees to turn off lights, computers and monitors when not in use. In our head office, this – together with the installation of light sensors – has resulted in a 10% reduction in electricity consumption. Moreover, our next generation network uses the latest energy efficient equipment, providing us with a 55% saving in electricity.

We committed to reducing flights by 5% during 2009. Our new travel policy, stipulating that flying should be a last resort, promoting easier and smarter alternatives to air travel, helped us to exceed our target and record a 10% reduction in flights. We will cap flights at this 2009 level while also working to introduce a carbon-based monitoring and reporting system.

In July 2009 we launched the first phase of Colt’s fully supported video conferencing network linking our offices in London, Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid, Barcelona, Valencia, Gurgaon and Bangalore. We have subsequently extended the network to include Dublin, Geneva and Zurich.

Our energy usage and business travel comprise most of our carbon footprint. 2009 was the first year in which we calculated, for 2008, our carbon footprint for the whole of our operations across Europe and India, publishing the figure via the Carbon Disclosure Project. Our carbon footprint for 2008 was 105,096 tonnes CO2 equivalent, a figure that covers all our Scope 1 and 2 emissions as well as our business travel for Scope 3.

Another aim has been to reduce the amount of paper we consume by 10% and increase the amount we recycle. In 2009 we exceeded this target and paper consumption in our offices (measured by purchased volume) fell by 29%. This was achieved through promoting a ‘Think before you print’ campaign and converting all printers to double-sided printing wherever possible. We will continue our focus on paper consumption by targeting a further 5% reduction in 2010. To promote more recycling, we have launched a ‘Bin the bin’ scheme in India, Spain, Sweden and the UK, where personal desk bins are removed and, in their place, the number of communal recycling bins is increased. Preparations are also advancing well to implement ‘Bin the bin’ in Austria, France and Ireland.

Getting involved to make a difference

Our target for volunteering was exceeded with 224 days contributed by Colt employees in 2009. This year we launched our volunteering programme, giving every employee up to two days a year away from the office to help charities and not-for-profit organisations. Our people responded enthusiastically to this:

•  in Spain, employees helped out at a local childrens’ home four evenings a week
•  in India, employees carried out a series of improvements to local villages
•  in Portugal, our people renovated a local school
•  in Austria, we staffed the Christmas Market stall for our chosen charity partner, and
•  in September, all 150 attendees of our Senior Management Event in the UK spent half a day on projects at six local schools creating gardens, providing advice in a business challenge and repainting outside areas.

Given such enthusiasm, we are raising our volunteering target for 2010 to 400 days.

As a communications business, we decided that it was appropriate to support the work of charities focused on children and education. In addition, Colt made cash charitable donations of €7,000 during the year (2008: €31,000). Towards the end of the year employees in each Colt country voted on a charity partner to support and work with over the next two years.