Managing Corporate Responsibility

The Pillars of our corporate commitment

Through our approach to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and in line with our values, we strive to be one of Canada’s leading corporate citizens. We follow the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) definition of CSR, which is:

A firm’s accountability to internal and external stakeholders for organizational performance towards the goal of sustainable development.

We are committed to pursuing the integration of economic, social and environmental considerations into our business practices and fostering a culture of sustainability. We strive to create CSR programs that are viable for the long term and to ensure that we can fulfill our CSR commitments in both economically good and challenging times.

The TELUS approach to integrating CSR considerations into the business and fostering a culture of sustainability consists of four principal pillars:

1. Engaging the TELUS team through employee resource groups such as Connections, community volunteerism and giving programs, such as Team TELUS Cares, and environmental programs, such as our TELUS Green Teams, and the use of social media resources
2. Integrating key CSR metrics into the enterprise-wide strategic planning and reporting processes, including CEO and key executives’ performance objectives
3. Designing cause marketing campaigns that make a direct link between our business priorities and growth and the well-being of our communities
4. Leading in CSR governance and disclosure through our CSR Leadership Team, consisting of senior leaders from across the business, our award-winning annual reports and CSR reports and regular CSR updates to the Audit Committee (Corporate Governance Committee, effective May 2011) of the TELUS Board of Directors.

At a business operations level, our view of CSR includes but is not limited to:

CSR reporting highlights

Year over year, we strive to bolster not only our CSR practices but also how we report them. We focus on:

• CSR process (how we build the report)
• Content (what we put in the report)
• Media (how we share the report).

For the third year, we chose to produce an online-only report to limit the amount of material we print. This year, we changed the underlying web platform of our report. This allows us to deliver more versatile content and user-controlled options in the future. We have also improved the navigation and layout of our website based on usability testing with some of our key stakeholders. This information has been integrated with the navigational enhancements we made last year that were based on how we manage the various aspects of our CSR practices.

In terms of printed material, we plan to produce approximately 10 per cent fewer brochures and postcards than we did last year. At the same time, we are disclosing more information about our sustainability practices, including data on our international contact centre operations. As such, we are declaring our report at a GRI-G3 “A+” level and have asked PwC to confirm our rating.

In alignment with our commitment to our customers and stakeholder feedback, we have also significantly enhanced the customer section of our report. Here we strive to discuss the challenges, opportunities and successes that are most significant to customers.

In addition, we continued to have all contributors to the report provide a statement as to the reasonable accuracy and veracity of the material they have provided. We believe this is a leading-edge global practice in CSR reporting and is in addition to the executive review and sign-off process we have used for many years.

Download our report.

• Download the Report Brochure2.5 MB
• Get the full report6.8 MB