As a founding member of Building Responsibly, Wood has been a part of the Building Responsibly Steering Committee since its inception in early 2017. Wood’s former Group Head of Ethics and Compliance, James Walker, held the Vice Chair position until 2019, when he handed over this responsibility to Jess Verdon, Sustainability Manager for Multiplex.
Building Responsibly welcomed Craig Paterson-Cheyne as an additional representative from Wood, to help support the team with the launch of the Worker Welfare Principles and their ongoing implementation across the member companies. Joining the team just ahead of our members day in June 2018, Craig participated in the launch event for our Principles. The challenge was set from this point for each of our member companies to incorporate the Principles within their organisations. Meanwhile, the Steering Committee began work on guidance note material that could support the high-level Principles and their ongoing implementation.
Being new to the team, Craig offered to share the work that Wood has done to date and the journey Wood has been on to promote awareness and adoption of the Worker Welfare Principles, as well as support for Building Responsibly more broadly.
Craig had this to say:
Wood’s commitment to Building Responsibly over the years is testament to the value we place on the importance of industry collaboration on worker welfare. We believe that coming together on such an important issue allows us to target common challenges and drive meaningful change within our industry.
Craig added:
Since the launch of the Principles, Wood has focused on raising awareness with senior leaders in our organisation, within functional teams, and across our global employee base. Since the launch, we’ve been able to embed the Principles within our code of conduct and supply chain code of business conduct, ensuring these are woven throughout the content to set the minimum expectation of our people and supply chain partners.
Building Responsibly is now focusing on the production of short guidance note material that will provide practical help for implementing the Principles. In addition, the team has been working on a self-assessment tool that will follow the publication of the guidance notes. Wood has kindly developed and shared a simple Excel tool, which will be adopted by Building Responsibly and will be the group’s next focus to add value for our members.
Craig explained:
At a board level within Wood, there is appetite for us to start assessing our business against the Worker Welfare Principles. With a focus on our areas of heightened risk, the self-assessment tool—which we have shared with the wider team and with some of our clients and peers—will be a natural progression from the guidance note materials that Building Responsibly aims to publish in Q4 2019. Once we finalise these, a revised version of the self-assessment tool will be drafted, and we will look to begin auditing our business in the coming 12 months.
Craig presented Wood’s approach to supporting the principles at a recent Shell Contractor forum on Building Responsibly. Craig has kindly shared the slides from these sessions for added insight—please download them here.