Vodafone tops the SR list
The mobile phone giant has come first in a survey by AccountAbility and csrnetwork, a British corporate responsibility network.
The accountability rating looks at the extent to which companies have built responsible practices into the way they do business and looks at how well they account for the impact of their actions on stakeholders.
The analysis is based on factors such as engagement with stakeholders - whether the company communicates with people who may be affected by its business - and to what extent the company embeds social and environmental targets into strategy as well as financial ones.
The accountability rating also looks at whether executives and managers are being rewarded for meeting social and environment goals. Set up in 1995, AccountAbility assesses the world's top 50 companies from the Fortune Global 500 list.
‘Corporate responsibility has matured,’ said Simon Zadek, the chief executive of AccountAbility. ‘In the early phase, companies looked at the impact of what they did, then the focus changed to openness and transparency. We’re now in the third generation where we measure the degree to which companies have embedded social and environmental strategies into their practices.’ Other companies in the top five included BP, Shell and EDF. Bottom of the list was US petroleum company Valero Energy.
