ASSESSMENT OF CSR REPORTING

Fondation Guilé is convinced that corporate extra-financial reporting is a driver of change, externally as well as internally. It has the potential to enhance stakeholders’ perception of a company, and to build trust. It is now acknowledged that CSR reporting acts as a stimulus for internal development and has a positive impact on business decisions and outcomes.

The Guilé Engagement Team has developed the GuiléReportingAssessment™ methodology since 2006, to provide an external view of the quality and comprehensiveness of a company’s CSR reporting. This analysis produces immediate benefits by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the CSR disclosure and implementation, in particular:
– identification of information gaps with regard to the universal Global Compact principles
– exploration of areas for improvement to further develop CSR practices.

Evaluation

TWO DIMENSIONS: COMPREHENSIVENESS & QUALITY

The first dimension deals with COMPREHENSIVENESS: how well the reporting describes a company’s status of implementation of the four issue areas of the Global Compact (human rights; ILO core labour standards; the environment; anti-corruption).

Depending on the information found, a company’s performance is rated as ‘basic’, ’emerging’, ‘advancing’, or ‘outstanding’ on each of the ten principles.

The QUALITY dimension focuses on applied reporting practices that are crucial for ensuring a credible and accurate disclosure.

BENCHMARKING – A GLOBAL PICTURE

The assessment results may be benchmarked against peer companies, sectors, companies within the same country or region.

IMPROVING THE IMPLEMENTATION OF SUSTAINABILITY OVER TIME

The Guilé assessment is aimed at identifying strengths and weaknesses and offers valuable perspectives for further improving a company’s implementation of and reporting on sustainability.

No matter its size or its countries of operation, every company has room for improvement in achieving its Corporate Responsibility goals. For this reason, Fondation Guilé offers its GuiléReportingAssessment™ system to all companies interested in receiving our analysis which is:
a) completely neutral and extremely exhaustive
b) based exclusively on public information disclosure
c) a mirror of a company’s current capacity to report on its extra-financial challenges management strategy
d) proposed at cost price because we are a nonprofit foundation.

FLYER about the GuiléReportingAssessment^TM

PROMOTING THE GLOBAL COMPACT PRINCIPLES

Since 2005, Fondation Guilé has been actively encouraging compliance with the universal principles of the United Nations Global Compact. These 10 principles, covering human rights, the right to work, environmental protection, and the fight against corruption, are universally applicable to varying extents, regardless of the size of a company or the region it operates in.

Begun by former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, the idea for the Global Compact was first unveiled in Switzerland in 1999 during the World Economic Forum in Davos. One year later, the initiative was implemented in order to attract the attention of business leaders and have them commit to following these civic principles voluntarily with self-regulation.

The United Nations Global Compact is not a binding regulation but a process that calls for companies throughout the world to exhibit full transparency to their many stakeholders in all nonfinancial aspects related to ESG challenges (environmental, social, governance). Consequently, this initiative supports the foundation’s vision of creating value for shareholders while at the same time contributing to the common good in a manner that goes beyond the dispassionate rules of governance.

In 2006, Fondation Guile had signed a Memorandum of Understanding with the Global Compact office to act as a booster for these 10 principles.

Memorandum of Understanding – 2006

Fondation Guile also collaborated with the UN Global Compact in designing the “Blueprint for Corporate Sustainability Leadership”: read more