Triple bottom line - the sustainable approach

Social responsibility to be documented systematically

For many years, Novo Nordisk has supplemented its annual accounts with an environmental report. Now a third component - a social report - is on its way.

Novo Nordisk's Social Report is intended to document and describe the way the company handles its social responsibility towards its employees and society at large.

Social reporting is a new way of documenting a company's performance in terms of social conduct. Measuring and documenting social dimensions of the company internally and externally allows Novo Nordisk to systematise the dialogue with the company's many stakeholders.
Novo Nordisk will publish its first social report in 1999. The report is expected to appear during this summer. The purpose of the Novo Nordisk Social Report is to document and describe social dimensions of all areas in the company. Since about 60% of the company's employees are in Denmark, the report will focus mainly on the Danish operations. However, it will also include illustrative cases from Brazil, Bulgaria and China. The goal is to expand the scope of future reports to cover all the company's operations in all countries.
Social reporting covers a wide range of issues such as health, safety and working conditions, performance development and activities connected with community relations.

The third component
This kind of reporting does not yet have many standards. An annual report describes a company's financial performance, an environmental report is used increasingly to document a growing sense of responsibility for the physical environment around us. However, to date very few companies have tried to describe their performance in terms of social behaviour - the third component in an overall evaluation of the company.
The Triple Bottom Line (TBL) is an expression used to describe how companies are being measured increasingly not by their financial performance alone, but by their collective environmental, social and financial performance.
For Novo Nordisk, social responsibility begins at home with its own employees, but it also encompasses central issues such as human rights.
The prime objective of Novo Nordisk's first Social Report is to document performance in terms of social behaviour. This entails describing social activities in the broadest possible sense and viewing social responsibility as a complete entity - how does the company preserve and develop the ability to work, to adapt to the future, to accept new challenges - for itself and its employees?
Apart from obvious areas like occupational injuries and diseases, other issues that can be included in the scope of a social report are rehabilitation, working in teams and training and development.
However, Novo Nordisk's Social Report is not intended to serve exclusively as documentation proving that the company practises what it preaches. It is also intended to lead to inter-disciplinary sharing of the knowledge that emerges from the countless activities taking place - often far from each other geographically and professionally.

Long process
The decision to embark on a social report follows in the wake of last year's internal ‘Values in Action' project, in which a group of employees representing the entire organisation joined forces to review Novo Nordisk's way of working against its defined values. The group was also briefed to discover ways in which the company's values could be documented and reported. It was an obvious step for them to recommend that social responsibility should be described in an annual social report.
One area that stood out clearly early in the process was the company's impact on people, particularly employees. Novo Nordisk wants to be a challenging place to work. In order to remain attractive to highly talented people, the company also needs to document the social dimension of its dealings with employees.
Novo Nordisk wants to be one of the companies that set the global standards for social responsibility, practice and reporting. However, Novo Nordisk will establish a systematic dialogue with its key stakeholders to ensure that the social issues we deal with are the ones of primary interest to them, and that the report is found to be appropriate. Together with the external verification of the report, dialogue with stakeholders will provide the essential credibility and assurance that reporting practices will be refined and expanded in the years ahead.

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