About this site

We engage with and support associates on an ongoing basis in many ways beyond their daily interactions with co-workers and managers, such as:

• Print, online and broadcast communications
• Regular associate engagement surveys
• Interaction with Chief Culture Officer
• “Breakfast clubs” with executives and senior management
• “Just Ask” Q&A events with company leadership
• International Corporate Social Responsibility taskforces
• Associate Resource Groups (ARGs)
• 2 Million & Change associate giving program
• Company-wide Earth Week activities and campaigns
• Volunteer Opportunities
• Staples Share Fund (associate assistance fund)

We continued our corporate governance outreach program this year, which helps us understand and respond to shareholder concerns in a timely fashion. Through this initiative, senior management meets regularly with a variety of shareholders and proxy advisory groups to discuss the governance issues that are most important to them and also discuss our executive compensation program. Management then briefs the Board of Directors and its relevant committees and takes action as appropriate.

• We respond to surveys that seek information about our corporate responsibility programs and performance, such as the CDP and the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices questionnaire.
• We also meet with firms that include corporate responsibility information in their investment portfolio screening process.
• We conducted in-person and phone meetings with larger institutional investors, labor unions, pension funds, corporate social responsibility investors and proxy advisory groups.

To make sure that we're doing a good job, we survey customers in our retail, online and contract businesses, monitor quality assurance efforts, drop in on stores unannounced through "mystery shops," and interview customers directly. Each month, we conduct tens of thousands of customer satisfaction surveys across each of our North American business units and receive feedback from thousands of customers.

In our retail operations we ask customers to rank a variety of customer service factors, including customer engagement, cashier courtesy, speed of checkout, ease of finding merchandise, product availability in store, and associate knowledge.

In our contract and online businesses, we assess our customers’ overall satisfaction as well as specifics such as the ease of the shopping experience — online search capabilities, accuracy of product images and ease of checkout — as well as the packaging and delivery service, and satisfaction with any problem resolution.

Our Customer Service portal on staples.com^® allows customers to submit inquiries and comments about our Corporate Responsibility programs.

Staples customers are also our fellow citizens, our neighbors and our friends. We contribute to local communities through corporate contributions, in-kind donations and grants from the Staples Foundation^sm, our private charitable arm.

Staples engages with NGOs that are considered leaders in their respective areas of expertise to help us enhance our performance across our Corporate Responsibility areas, such as:

• Partnering with GreenBlue, Rainforest Alliance and World Resources Institute to help drive further improvements in our sourcing practices for forest-based products, such as paper
• Partnering with Plant-for-the-Planet to reward Staples Advantage customers in Europe for reducing our collective environmental impact through reducing the number of small orders, purchasing eco-conscious products, and category consolidation
• Staples Community & Giving supports hundreds of organizations each year, including strategic partners like Boys & Girls Clubs of America
• Engagement with the Ethics and Compliance Officers Association (ECOA), whose members represent the largest group of ethics and compliance practitioners in the world
• Partnering with Hire Purpose, an organization dedicated to finding employment for Veterans; the Network of Executive Women (NEW); and Women For Hire to support our diversity and inclusion goals.

We seek to be a valued and trusted member of the communities in which our associates and customers live and work. Staples works closely with all the non-profit organizations we support, whether they are long-term national partners such as Boys & Girls Clubs of America, or small grassroots groups receiving a Staples Foundation^sm grant to fund a local program.

From cause marketing and sponsorships to grants and product donations, Staples supports non-profit organizations focused on education and job skills, as well as schools, in a variety of ways. In 2015, we gave more than $13 million to non-profit organizations and schools around the world.

• Though our grant program, 2 Million & Change, Staples associates helped to direct over $2.5 million to more than 875 organizations across 24 countries in 2015.
• Staples^®Â stores support non-profit organizations through We Care gift cards and in-kind product donations. These donations allow organizations to get the supplies they need from Staples to help make a community event or program a success.
• Staples is building on its proud history of supporting teachers, students and education by donating to DonorsChoose.org, a nonprofit that has helped fund school classroom project requests in public schools across America. Staples has donated more than $3 million to DonorsChoose.org to fund nearly 1,800 classroom projects for more than 2,000 teachers, impacting more than 200,000 students.

We engage with suppliers to promote ethics in the supply chain, environmental excellence and innovation, and a diverse supplier base.

• Our Supplier Code of Conduct requires suppliers of Staples® brand products to adhere to all applicable labor standards and health and safety regulations as well as environmental laws. Factories in "at-risk" geographies are audited for compliance with those standards. We engage with our Staples^® brand suppliers both in the United States and internationally to make sure they understand the provisions of the Supplier Code of Conduct.
• Staples continues to work with suppliers and other stakeholders to continue to advance product sustainability in our Staples^® brand and name-brand products. In addition to our work on paper-specific issues, we’re supporting product-related sustainability research.
• We track more than 40 environmental attributes in our products, and ask our suppliers to disclose the relevant information in our SKU management database.

Staples is a member of several trade groups as described in our 2015 Political Contributions Disclosure.

From a sustainability perspective, we are active members in the Retail Industry Leaders Association’s (RILA) working groups dedicated to environmental topics:

• Retail Sustainability Initiative, an industry-wide educational forum for the largest U.S. retailers. It brings its members together to share leading practices, network, identify future trends, benchmark with peers, and collaborate on common industry sustainability challenges.
• Energy Management Program, a multi-year program to guide energy, carbon and cost reduction across the retail industry.

In addition, through our Supplier Diversity Program we participate in several diversity councils, such as the National Minority Supplier Development Council.