Accountabilities & responsibilities

The AstraZeneca Board owns our CR strategy and Non-Executive Director, Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, is responsible for overseeing the implementation of that strategy within the Company.

To further strengthen our high level CR management capability, during late 2007/early 2008 we established a dedicated Global CR Team of experienced CR professionals from around the Company.  Part of the Group Public Affairs function, whose work also includes public policy and reputation management, the Global CR Team leads the development of our CR strategy and the alignment of tactical delivery. They work closely with senior leaders across AstraZeneca, and with our Global Compliance function, to ensure that the CR risks and opportunities are identified and managed appropriately, in line with business objectives, and to ensure compliance with all relevant policies and standards.

Our Senior Executive Team (SET) and senior managers throughout the Company are accountable for CR management within their areas, based on the global framework but taking account of national, functional and site issues and priorities.  Line managers are accountable for ensuring that their teams understand the requirements and that people are clear about what is expected of them as they work to achieve AstraZeneca’s business goals. Individually, everyone at AstraZeneca has a responsibility to integrate CR considerations into their day-to-day decision-making, actions and behaviours.

In our 2008 Global Employee Survey, 82% of employees said that they believe AstraZeneca operates to high ethical standards in its dealings with external stakeholders; 85% said that they believe that managers behave in accordance with our Code of Conduct and 83% said that they believe managers hold others accountable for behaving in a manner consistent with the Code.  Find out more about our Global Survey.

SETTING THE TARGETS

High-level CR objectives are included in our SET Business Performance Management (BPM) framework. The targets and deliverables associated with these objectives are integrated into the relevant functional BPM frameworks and appropriately included in individual employee objectives. Performance against the objectives at all levels is reviewed throughout the year, including a quarterly review of the SET scorecard by the AstraZeneca Board.  

In early 2009, we developed a combined Compliance and Corporate Responsibility “Responsible Business” scorecard with defined objectives and accountabilities, to track performance consistently across all SET areas and enable quarterly reporting to SET, the Audit Committee and Professor Dame Nancy Rothwell, as well as annual reporting to the Board and SET. We plan to introduce this new scorecard during 2009.

To find out more about our Business Performance Management, visit our online Annual Report.

INTEGRATION OF CR INTO LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT

In line with our commitment to leadership by example, we continue to integrate CR into our leadership development programmes and in 2008, some 2,100 of our leaders were involved in such programmes (2,364 in 2007, 490 in 2006). These included new manager training, foundational leadership courses and other programmes, such as risk management. (The significant increase between 2006 and 2007 was due both to an increase in the number of programmes that included CR and to improved data collection mechanisms. The slight decrease in 2008 reflects  a year of transition as we worked to establish our global management development curriculum for implementation in 2009).

The content of this page was externally assured by Bureau Veritas, February 2009.