Responsibility transcending borders

In 2010, the expansion of our sustainability management was able to record successes at our subsidiaries in Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Turkey and Hungary. We have ambitious targets in place which we will be pursuing in the next few years.

Mission: sustainability

Our eastern European subsidiaries have a mission statement based on the "Tchibo DNA" and deriving from our corporate strategy "Strengthening strengths 2010" and "Building Our Future on Tradition". 

To the end of its implementation, we have developed a sustainability management system adapted to these regions; we began to introduce it in 2010.

An international team coordinates all sustainability activities

Our central HQ in Hamburg acts as a centre of coordination for the sustainability activities we are undertaking in eastern Europe and as a point of support for employees in the subsidiaries. In undertaking these tasks, the Corporate Responsibility department works closely with the Board member in charge of eastern Europe and the managing directors of the subsidiaries in the countries concerned. Together, these people form the management team. Since the beginning of 2010, our Romanian subsidiary has been acting independently, and as such our Romanian managing director is also a member of the management team. This inter-country team receives support from the following central departments: corporate communication, legal, corporate development, HR, product management, purchasing, and sales.

Responsible for responsibility: sustainability experts on the ground

Realising the key overarching objectives set out in the mission statement for our eastern European subsidiaries and putting the measures derived from them into action requires operational support from motivated and knowledgeable employees. We have appointed people to act as central points of contact in Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic and Hungary and have given them thorough training, a key part of which involved workshops on “Corporate Responsibility at Tchibo”. Further training events which take account of the requirements placed on the various departments and decision-makers are on the agenda for 2011.

Additionally, the central points of contact in the various countries have begun self-study courses in diverse aspects of sustainability management.

The subsidiaries in Romania, Russia and Turkey will appoint and train central points of contact for sustainability in 2011. After this, we will form sustainability teams alongside the introduction of the sustainability programmes we are currently developing.

We have scheduled the integration of sustainability targets into individual target agreements for employees who are involved in implementing sustainability activities to take place in 2012.

Country-specific sustainability programmes: the heart of the management system The sustainability programmes we are currently developing and setting up will prove tools of decisive importance for the operative implementation of Tchibo-wide sustainability targets in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. We make sure that the programmes take the specific conditions in and needs of the individual countries into account.

Our primary focus in developing the sustainability programmes, a project we embarked on in 2010, is working towards targets and measures which are within the individual countries' sphere of influence. This largely encompasses environmental and societal activities with relation to the administrative sites and Tchibo shops.

In Eastern and Southeastern Europe, the public consciousness associates sustainability particularly closely with involvement with charitable causes, and people expect companies to act accordingly; therefore, charitable involvement is a key part of sustainability management in these countries. Sustainability measures related to products, which of course are at the centre of our business, and to the processes associated with them are managed centrally from Hamburg, according to one standard.

We have taken a first step by conducting workshops with the members of staff in charge in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, in which we identified relevant focal issues and out of which emerged the following specific areas for action:

• Saving resources and energy in administrative offices and Tchibo shops
• Strengthening employees’ rights
• Customer orientation in complaints management, data protection and promotion of sustainable consumption
• Stakeholder dialogue and inter-sector communication on sustainability 
• Strategic involvement in good causes (charity)

We plan to adopt sustainability programmes for all subsidiaries in eastern Europe in 2011.

Initial successes on the ground

The following passages are intended to give you an overview of the sustainability successes we have already been able to record in our sales markets in Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

All geared up for sustainable product ranges

We plan to introduce sustainable coffee products and switch our coffee bars to sustainable qualities during 2011. To this end, 2010 saw us lay the foundations for a successful certification of our

Eastern and Southeastern European country subsidiaries to Fairtrade, Bio (organic), Rainforest Alliance and UTZ Certified standard. We were able to transfer our existing processes for auditing and approval for use of the seals to our subsidiaries in eastern Europe, adapting them accordingly. In other words, we are perfectly prepared for the group certification to the above-mentioned standards which is on the agenda for 2011.

Since 2010, we have been selling our ranges of sustainably produced consumer goods (particularly Organic Cotton, Cotton made in Africa and certified to FSC®) in all our sales markets in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. In the course of the coming year, we will undertake preparations, as in our coffee business, for group certification or verification to the above standards.

Everyone plays by the same rules: Our employee code of conduct is international

In 2010, we incorporated the Tchibo Code of Conduct into the Human Resources Guideline for Eastern and Southeastern Europe, making it an integral part of the guideline, which has been analysed and found to be based on and take account of all relevant International Labour Organization (ILO) conventions.

And everyone has the same rights: Data protection and service across country borders

We have internationally valid data protection guidelines. All subsidiaries of Tchibo GmbH have appointed data protection officers, all of whom have been trained for their task – the coordination of data protection activities in the relevant country. The central data protection officer at company headquarters in Hamburg monitors data protection management and ensures it functions smoothly.

A project, kicked off in 2010, to internationalise our service standards has now concluded successfully, with the result that all customers can now place their trust in the same Tchibo service promise, with only occasional negligible variations where necessitated by national laws or competition regulations. In 2012, we plan to set up a unified complaints management system for Eastern and Southeastern Europe.

Setting a good example: Tchibo Poland

In 2010, Tchibo Poland received the Environmental Partnership Foundation’s “Green Office Certificate”, and with it confirmation that it meets rigorous environmental standards in working environments. We are aiming to achieve comparable certificates for the other subsidiaries in 2011.

Additionally, Tchibo Poland has launched a corporate volunteering programme, in which the company gives financial support to employees to give their time and energies to charitable projects. Furthermore, our Polish subsidiary, working together with our central Corporate Responsibility department, has drawn up new guidelines for donations, which stipulate the conditions in which institutions can receive charitable donations.

In August 2010, we conducted an educational project in Warsaw in cooperation with the Aeris Futuro Foundation. The project’s aim was to raise awareness of environmental issues among Tchibo employees in Poland and motivate them to get involved in environmental initiatives.

Up to speed: The Czech Republic and Slovakia

In 2010, Tchibo Czech Republic and Tchibo Slovakia conducted an in-house training campaign whose aim was to provide employees in our administrative offices and Tchibo shops with information on our sustainability activities and create a greater consciousness among them of the individual issues. We supplemented the campaign with a survey among all employees to ascertain their degree of awareness of sustainability issues and how well-informed they were on our sustainability activities. The pleasing result: In 98 per cent of the questionnaires, the proportion of full and correct answers exceeded 86 per cent. There were prizes for the highest-scoring employees.

Increasing identification with sustainability: open communication is the way forward

Our internal communication of objectives and activities has a decisive influence on the degree to which our employees identify with the issue of sustainability. For this reason, we supply our employees in Eastern and Southeastern Europe with information on our sustainability activities in all sales markets in the form of regular reports in the intranet. Our Sustainability Report is also available in English for all employees, and almost all our national websites feature information on our Group-wide sustainability activities in the relevant national language. We are planning to publish, step by step, our Sustainability Report in the relevant Eastern and Southeastern European languages.

In the course of the next year, moreover, we intend to imitate the success of our communication strategy in Germany, Austria and Switzerland by developing an external communication strategy for our

Eastern and Southeastern European subsidiaries, on which our Hamburg-based Corporate Responsibility and Corporate Communication departments will work closely with the subsidiaries’ managing directors and the national sustainability teams.