This year has been a big year for us. In July 2010, we became 100 per cent owned by Staples, Inc. the world’s leading office products company. We are leveraging the Staples group experience to share best practice learning, capabilities, systems and practices.

This involves transitioning our programs to align more closely with the global company. Our corporate social responsibility initiatives are now brought together under the banner of Staples Soul – which emphasises our commitment to delivering social, financial and environmental value. Staples Soul comprises the four pillars of Ethics, Community, Environment and Diversity.

We have achieved a number of significant milestones in these pillars in the reporting year:

Ethics: We worked with one of our key offshore suppliers to help them achieve compliance with our Ethical Sourcing Policy.

Community: We raised $46,000 to help those affected by the devastating floods that affected Queensland in early 2011.

Environment: Our Environmental Management System achieved certification against the international standard ISO 14001 in 2011.

Diversity: We have increased the number of females in senior leadership roles from nine per cent in 2008 to 35 per cent in 2010. We also launched our Reconciliation Action Plan and have initiated our Supplier Diversity Program. We have received external recognition for these programs.

Our corporate objectives to maintain profitable growth and develop our people are closely linked to how we manage our sustainability performance. For example, our industry-leading position on sustainability helps us to drive sales and we invest in our people to develop a high performance culture.

Engaging with our stakeholders is an important way in which we can understand what is expected from us in our sustainability and business performance. We conducted a survey in 2010 to find out what matters most to our stakeholders. They said that the most important issues for us to address are: ethical sourcing and sustainable procurement, eco-conscious products and services, product quality and customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, and customer engagement on sustainability and packaging. One area which we have not covered in this report in as much detail as we would like is customer satisfaction. In previous years we conducted satisfaction surveys with our customers to measure how we are meeting our customers’ needs over time. However, due to the change in ownership this program was put on hold in 2010 while we transition to the new Staples program. We will aim to report more fully on this in future years.

The other material issues identified as being important to our stakeholders are covered in more detail throughout the report but I would like to highlight a few of the key initiatives here:

Ethical sourcing – We are working with our suppliers to ensure they abide by our Ethical Sourcing Policy which requires them to treat workers fairly and operate in a safe and environmentally sustainable manner.

Employee satisfaction – To support our associates’ professional development, we have increased our training and development substantially, doubling the total amount of training hours from 9,050 in 2009 to 21,063 hours in 2010 and conducting training for sales people. We also launched our Leadership Development Program, attended by around 100 of our senior leaders, to help managers create the kind of environment where people can succeed.

Sustainable procurement – In 2010 we launched a range of programs to help our customers meet their sustainable procurement goals and to reduce their own impacts such as the Go Green Guide, GreenBizCheck and the Simple Steps Program. These programs take time to develop and it was a challenge to collect additional product data on all of our EarthSaver products to be featured in the Go Green Guide. The challenge for us now is to keep progressing these programs so that our customers are able to reach their own sustainability goals.

Eco-conscious products and services – We increased the number of products classified as EarthSaver from 2,610 in 2009 to over 3,636 in 2010.

You can read more about how we have performed against the targets we set for 2010 in the targets section. In this section you can see that we have performed well against the targets we set but there are a few areas in which we did not manage to reach the target. For example, one of our targets was to work with Dare to Lead for Business to develop our Indigenous Employment Strategy. Unfortunately this organisation closed its doors in 2010 so we will be developing our Indigenous Employment Strategy in the coming year instead. You can also read about the targets we have set for 2011.

We recognise that while we have made significant progress on sustainability in the past few years there is still much work to be done in terms of measuring and reporting our impacts more fully. We will strive to continue to improve our management and reporting of these issues going forward by continuing to improve our data collection systems for measuring our environmental impacts as well as extending the information we publicly disclose on the diversity of our workforce and governance bodies.

I would like to thank our associates, customers and suppliers for their support and dedication in making this business a success.

We welcome your feedback on this site. Please get in touch with us at csr@ce.com.au

Yours sincerely,

Paul Hitchcock
CEO
Corporate Express Australia Pty Limited

Learn more about Corporate Express' efforts and what we're doing to become a leader in business ethics, environmental sustainability, community engagement and diversity.