One of the UK’s largest property investment management companies has
asked senior executives to lead progress on eight different aspects of
corporate responsibility.
Prudential Property Investment Managers (PruPIM), which is part of
M&G, Prudential’s UK and Europe investment management arm, has
appointed the executives as ‘sponsors’ for business conduct,
procurement, construction, investment, property management, community
investment, communication and corporate culture. Each will have overall
responsibility for one area.
They will be expected to take an active role in ‘advocating, promoting
and participating in CSR activities’ to ‘ensure that their particular
CSR initiative is on the agenda when business policy is being
formulated’ and to make sure targets are met.
Among their tasks will be to: 
set up and implement supplier audits (procurement)include environmental considerations in investment appraisals as a matter of routine (construction)educate property occupiers about the financial benefit of treating property assets in a responsible manner (investment)integrate employee volunteering programmes with business, team and personal development objectives (community investment)incorporate CSR into assessments of what employees contribute to the business (corporate culture).
The sponsors are all from the company’s senior executive management
team and include human resources director Sanjeev Sharma and managing
director Martin Moore.
PruPIM’s assistant director of corporate responsibility, Siobhan
Hewitt-Devine, told EP the appointments were ‘to demonstrate that there
is leadership on CSR from the very top of the business rather than it
just being something done to the company by us on the CSR team’. She
said: ‘It means the senior management team buys into CSR and ensures it
takes place.’
Hewitt-Devine said the company did not intend to link corporate
responsibility performance to senior executive pay at this stage,
although that could eventually happen.
The identification of eight areas with sponsors is part of PruPIM’s new
corporate responsibility strategy for the years 2005-08. The policy has
been finalized after an in-depth re-evaluation of its CSR approach.
The internal review concluded that the establishment in 2003 of a
corporate responsibility operations committee with members from across
the company had helped to embed CSR in the business, but that most
attention has since been on short-term ‘tactical initiatives’ rather
than long-term strategic goals. The new strategy is aimed at remedying
this.
PruPIM, which manages nearly 1000 properties, said headline objectives
will be fleshed out over time. ‘The nature of some of these initiatives
is such that measurement is often difficult and intrinsically
subjective,’ it said. However, the company intends to find ways of
measuring its performance more accurately.
