Community

Community engagement is an important part of being a socially responsible business.

RSA’s community engagement programme focuses on promoting causes that are related to our core business and are important to our customers: safety, social inclusion and the environment.

These are areas where we believe we can achieve the most through our knowledge and skills. We believe that positive engagement with the local communities in which we operate benefits RSA as well as the communities. Investing time and money can help us build our reputation as well as assist us in attracting and retaining the best employees.

The recent economic downturn will undoubtedly have a significant impact on charities. When employees get involved offering their time it can be far more valuable to a cause than money alone. We encourage employees to play an active role because they value participating in community activity. To support this we offer up to two days paid leave each year to volunteer on approved projects.

Working in new and challenging environments can help employees develop important skills such as leadership, project management and team work. We include community engagement projects in the Graduate Development and Fast Track programmes.

We believe that employees are most enthusiastic about getting involved in community engagement when the projects reflect their interests. Regional charity committees meet annually with the corporate responsibility function to agree on focus areas that fit with our three themes. At site level employee charitable committees meet more regularly to select projects within this framework. The committees are responsible for canvassing feedback to make sure we meet employees’ expectations.

This year we continued to rollout volunteer weeks across the Group to Asia, the Middle East, Canada and Scandinavia. A total of 7,250 employees around the world had a great time getting involved in their local communities.

The new community policy provides guidance to our businesses in making the same opportunities available to our employees around the Group. This guidance also helps generate practical thinking about having a greater community impact while being smarter with our money.

Contributions

In 2008, we contributed £3.85 million to community projects, equivalent to 0.5% of pre tax profits. Approximately 35% of our employees participated in voluntary activities, spending on average 2 hours volunteering each.

Distributing reflective vests

“At RSA Sweden, we take child safety very seriously. As part of our insurance services for daycare centres and schools, we have provided 420,000 reflective vests to make children more visible to motorists. My job is to handle applications for the vests made through our website. We also give out reflective vests during our employee volunteering week. As well as improving child safety, this is great for team building.”

Lotta Gillgren
Project Manager (SMC),
Sweden