Tesco 2006 Annual Report Download - page 14

12 Tesco plc
Operating and financial review continued
Resources and relationships
Customers Our customers have told us what they want from
an ‘Every little helps’ shopping trip and this year 12,000 of
them attended our Customer Question Time to offer ideas on
how we can improve. Clubcard also helps us to understand
what our customers want, whilst allowing us to thank them
for shopping with us – this year we gave away over £320m
in Clubcard vouchers.
We don’t always get it right but we try to make their shopping
trip as easy as possible, reduce prices where we can to help them
spend less and give them the convenience of shopping when
and where they want – in small stores, large stores or on-line.
Employees With over 389,000 staff in 12 countries, we play
an important role in creating employment, fostering skills
and generating economic development.
Our people are our most important asset. Looking after our
staff so that they can look after our customers is one of the
corevalues of the business. We are committed to providing
market-leading working conditions for our staff and we
encourage our suppliers to do the same.
In the UK, we offer our staff a market-leading package of pay
and benefits.
Employee Share Schemes Over 165,000 of our people have a
personal stakein Tesco. Our Shares in Success and Save as You
Earn schemes resulted in our people receiving benefits of
£181m this year.
Training and Development We are committed to developing
our people to bring out the best in everyone and do what we
can to enable all our people to reach their potential. All our
staff have access to training programmes and personal
development planning to ensure that they have the right
skills todo their job.
Diversity Wetry to ensure that at all times and in every
aspectof employment, including recruitment, training,
and development, everyone receives the same treatment,
regardless of factors such as gender, age, colour, creed, race,
ethnic origin, disability,marital status, religion or belief, trade
union membership or sexual preference and orientation.
Suppliers Tobe a successful, sustainable business we have
to ensure that our drive to bring cheaper prices is achieved
without compromising our standards, reducing quality,
damaging the environment or harming the suppliers and
workers who produce the goods we sell. So we take a
partnership approach to working with suppliers – sharing our
knowledge and listening to suppliers’ feedback. This includes
providing technical expertise, advice and insight into customer
trends and making regular payment, on time.
We are one of four signatories to the UK Government’s
statutory Supermarkets Code of Practice. Since the Code’s
introduction we have run tailored training for all Tesco buyers
to promote understanding and compliance. If problems do
arise in supplier relationships we aim to air and resolve them
through constructive discussion. To aid this process we
appointed a Code Compliance Officer to hear formal
complaints, confidentially if requested, and we hope that our
annual Supplier Viewpoint Survey encourages suppliers to
giveus more feedback on our relationships. Our target is for
feedback to show that at least 90% of our suppliers view Tesco
as being trustworthy, reliable, consistent, clear, helpful and fair.
We carry out ethical audits and target ourselves to cover 100%
of our high risk own brand suppliers and ensure all commercial
teams have received training on supply chain labour standards.
Corporate responsibility As a responsible Company, Tesco
works hard to bring real benefits to the communities we
serve, the environment and the economy. This is recognised
through our inclusion in the FTSE4Good and Dow Jones
Sustainability indices.
Our fundraising efforts haveagain delivered great results. Each
year we contribute the equivalent of at least 1% of our pre-tax
profits to charities and good causes and a total of £41m was
given during 2005/06 in donations, stafftime and gifts in kind.
Our Charity of the Year was Age Concern, for which staff and
customers raised £2m.
Environment We are committed to playing our part in tackling
climatechange by reducing our energy use and emissions from
our distribution fleet. In 2005/06, we reduced our energy use
per square foot by 15% which has saved 59,000 tonnes of
carbon dioxide emissions.
Against a baseline of 2000, we want to cut the average energy
use in our buildings (KwH/sq ft) in half by 2010, delivering a
huge reduction in carbon emissions. We built our first model
energy efficient store in Diss, UK, in 2005. The store uses 20%
less energy than comparable stores by using clear roof sections
tomaximisenatural light, wind turbines power the tills and cold
4
We now stock a
range of 17 different
LCD and plasma
TVs from the
leading brands.