Date and Time
March 28, 2018
9:00 am-11:00 am
CET
Location
Paris
Topic
Sustainability Management
Investors, governments, and other stakeholders are calling loudly for business to demonstrate a meaningful commitment to integrity. In January, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s biggest investor, issued a letter stating that a company must not only deliver financial performance, but show how it is contributing to society.
However, there is evidence that this external pressure is not yet translating into substantive organizational change. Companies may have CSR or sustainability departments and may engage in large philanthropic initiatives, but they generally seek to manage integrity via ethics and compliance departments designed to deflect and manage regulatory risk. Rather than focusing on specific initiatives and departments, action needs to shift to building integrity across the whole organization.
Beyond this, the public sector has a critical stake in supporting private-sector integrity. Alignment with the private sector is critical to fulfill the OECD’s recent Recommendation on Public Integrity, which calls for bringing together the private and public sectors to share good practices and lessons learned on the complementary benefits of integrity in business activities.
BSR and the OECD will host an invitation-only side event at the OECD Global Anti-Corruption & Integrity Forum. Participation in this session will help shape and refine the Action Framework for Integrity Leadership that will be launched at this year’s Forum. This session will build upon emerging best practice and provide concrete guidance on how companies can build greater capacity for organizational integrity. We will cover how companies can:
- Adapt traditional approaches to a transformative transparency environment, including disclosing and engaging on issues such as tax avoidance, inequality and economic inclusion, money laundering, and human trafficking
- Engage collaboratively with peer companies seeking to build organizational approaches that can meaningfully anticipate and respond to these growing societal pressures
- Rethink leadership, governance, and internal management structures
- Rethink their external engagement strategy to focus on building stakeholder trust
- Support greater integrity and transparency on lobbying, political financing, and other areas where public policy and the corporate agenda intersect
This session will also feature representatives from the public sector and explore the role of government in supporting integrity leadership in companies.
Event partner
