Our Approach

Vision and Strategy

In accordance with our vision, we plan to deliver sustainable long term value by building trust with our key stakeholders by considering their economic, social and environmental issues in our day-to-day business activities. To do this we are pursuing the following objectives:

1. Embedding the principles of Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability into our corporate governance and strategy;
2. Developing processes that help us understand material changes in society, technology and natural resources that can affect our business;
3. Connecting our business to serving a social purpose in ways that engage, incentivise and empower our employees;
4. Developing robust data gathering processes that collect and disseminate information on metrics on our key business activities internally and externally; and
5. Developing and implementing strategies that utilise our technology, innovation and entrepreneurial strengths to add social and environmental value while increasing our top and bottom line.

These objectives align and support our corporate vision and strategy and will allow Cobham to grow and transform into an integrated leading subsystems supplier of innovative aerospace, defence and civil technologies that protect lives and livelihoods by keeping people safe and secure, enhancing communication and decision-making processes and enable aerospace and defence platforms in all types of environments.

Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability has a key role to play in delivering the key enablers we have identified in our corporate strategy.

Growth

With respect to Growth, many of Cobham’s key customers have an increasing focus on sustainability and Cobham will respond by focusing on enabling them to meet their own objectives while meeting our own.Application of our governance and values will also enable us to enter emerging growth markets with confidence.

Technology

With significant fiscal pressure on traditional sources of military revenue, some of our key customers are repositioning themselves to focus on emerging growth markets such as global security including energy and environment. Cobham is well-positioned to continue serving these customers with its technology and designing products and services with the environment in mind is a key element of our strategy.

Talent

Competing for high-performance talent will continue to be significant area of focus and Cobham recognises that for the new high performance talent, working for a company that views sustainability as core is becoming increasingly important. Changing demographics and skills availability continue to remain a considerable issue across science and engineering sectors.

Transformation

Standardising our businesses processes and fostering organisational learning is a key component to supporting the transformation effort. This includes how we address issues like business ethics, compliance, health & safety, environment and engaging with our key stakeholders. Standardisation that builds in our core values will also help to create a shared sense of identity and enable us to build and leverage our brand.

Governance

During 2008, the emphasis has been on developing our governance structure to expand upon, among other things, the inclusion of social and environmental dimensions in our decision-making, to identify the material issues we need to focus on and to develop our strategies for taking these areas forward.

During 2008 we established a Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Committee to:

1. Review the effectiveness of the Cobham’s internal process and controls for identifying risks and opportunities in relation to material issues in relation to society, technology and natural resources;
2. Review and challenge Cobham’s performance on managing these issues; and
3. Monitor the integrity and effectiveness of the Group’s communications on its performance.

The Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Committee is chaired by the Chief Executive who has overall accountability for Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability matters affecting Cobham. Its members include the Chief Operating Officer, the Group Communications Director, the EVP Cobham Corporate North America, the Chief Legal Officer and the Director, Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability. The committee oversees the Business Ethics and Compliance Committee which was established in early 2008 and will oversee a Safety, Health and Environment (SHE) Committee to be established in 2009.

In addition we have reviewed our governance documentation to further embed our values and our strategy into the way we do business. We have clearly set out the Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability roles and responsibilities of our key company officers , our decision-making processes, our performance evaluation processes and our assurance processes. Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability ranks equally in terms of importance with our proven financial performance management processes. 

Key Focus Areas

In 2008 we decided to consolidate our previous six key focus areas into three broader focus areas:

1. Safety, Health and Environment (SHE) – Providing safe working conditions and practices for our people and reducing our environmental footprint
2. Business Ethics – Acting ethically and responsibly towards our key stakeholders
3. Stakeholder Engagement – Proactively and systematically engaging our key stakeholders to understand their concerns and changes in our operating environment

These three focus areas encompass and build on the six narrower focus areas we reported on in the previous two years. Staff safety, carbon footprint, chemicals and hazardous materials management, waste reduction and supply chain management are all now covered under SHE. Anti-corruption now forms part of our broader Business Ethics focus area.

Our strategy is to standardise and systemise our management approaches in these focus areas such that our performance can be effectively and efficiently monitored, challenged and enhanced.

A summary of our performance data can be found in the PDF version of the full report.

Please click here to read our 2008 CR Report (2.75mb PDF) detailing our performance and progress in our Corporate Responsibility activities.