Our vision and strategy

In 2000, reflecting the growing understanding of sustainability in industry, Carillion began to look at the way in which it could become a more sustainable company. These are the steps Carillion has taken since then.

Step 1. Sustainability Policy.

To provide a focus to a suite of related policies (environment, human resources, Health and Safety, click here) we developed our Sustainability Policy to bring together the vision, values and objectives of Carillion’s business under the guiding principle of “sustainable solutions for the way we live”.

Step 2. Business Impacts.

This is portrayed by our “sun” diagram, which allows us to show the linkage between our policy, the Governments objectives and our key sustainability impacts (waste, design, community, etc). This diagram can be used when considering the impacts of a specific project or contract and has become our Carillion definition of sustainability. Note that Ashridge Business School have recognised this as an example of good practice in their report “Making Corporate Responsibility Work: Lessons from Real Business”

Step 3. Strategy Model.

In 2001 we developed a strategy model that links our business objectives to our sustainability objectives. The model was developed with senior team involvement, including our Chief Executive, as a tool to understand how KPI’s could be used to improve sustainability performance whilst demonstrating how they deliver business benefit and contribute to the achievement of business objectives. The Mayor of London has held up our strategy model as an example of good practice in his publication "Making your plans sustainable: A London Guide" This was further developed in 2003 to identify our major challenges, for details click here. In 2004 we reviewed our strategy model and objectives to ensure they were based on tangible outcomes to be delivered by 2010. This resulted in the Business Plan for 2004 and demonstrated that it was as important to deliver the intangible issues as it is toe deliver hard-nosed cash backed business objectives. In fact it was seen that community and environmental objectives both enabled and legitimised the success of our business objectives in a process of continual improvement.

Step 4. Action Plans, Communication and Training.

A suite of action plans provides the necessary focus and management tool to ensure delivery. Throughout these steps we have realised that this can only be successfully implemented with consistent communication of our policy and aims. We need everyone to ensure everyone understands their roles and responsibilities to enable us to become a socially responsible company. This is a priority from induction and throughout their career development. For examples, see Sustainability Week and Learning and Development.

To see how this programme of work is managed see managing sustainability section and for how it is developing see our next steps section. Our sustainability strategy and the journey we are making towards becoming more sustainable organisation is described in more detail in the paper “A strategy for sustainability” published by The Institution of Civil Engineers in the first issue of the journal Engineering Sustainability. Link here to a diagram showing our journey towards becoming more sustainable.