Promoting our business policies

No business can survive without having guidelines in place to explain how it does business and how its employees are expected to conduct themselves.

In our case, this is achieved through a number of policies we've put in place to cover key areas of our business. They support our employees in carrying out their daily work in accordance with our values. These policies are managed by a cross business Policy Review Group led by our director of Regulation and Energy Policy, which coordinates the review and promotion of our policies. In 2007, the group has concentrated on reviewing policies that apply to all employees and cover risks with a high potential impact on our ability to deliver our business objectives. As a result, these policies have been simplified and now follow a common format.

Policies are only effective if the people they apply to are aware of them and understand them. So we've also considered each policy from the point of view of our employees to make sure they are clear on their responsibilities.

We've also embarked on a programme of publicising and increasing the understanding of each of these policies through a number of our regular communications channels, including poster campaigns, our face-to-face team briefs and electronically, via our intranet. This last method was particularly effective as it enabled us to track the number of employees who had visited our site to read the policies.

Taking into account that we have a large number of employees who operate out in the field where access to company electronic communication can be limited, we also provided printed summary sheets setting out the main thrust of the policies and their responsibilities