Being ethical means doing the right thing. This is the foundation of being a sustainable company. We have clearly stated our principles in our Code of Ethics which explains the basic standards of behaviour expected of our colleagues in connection with their official duties. Like many other companies, a set of policies, standards, and standard operating procedures are maintained to provide further guidance on the operating practices. Training and regular audits by functions support and monitor the implementation of our requirements.
We align and enhance our current corporate guidelines and management system to meet international standards in areas such as anti-corruption; operational risks (e.g. fire, life, safety and food safety); data privacy and cyber security; human rights (e.g. labour practices, harassment); crisis and business continuity (e.g. natural disaster, pandemic crisis). Walking the talk is our core belief in practicing sustainability, therefore we are committed to ensure all our hotels achieve the international standards and verified by third party on regular basis.
Integrity and trust continue to be more important than ever in today’s business world, we must ensure we always conduct our business in an ethical and responsible manner. Transparency is the key to build trust and enable stakeholders to make conscious decisions. It is also an important driver for improved performance and creation of stronger impact across our value chain, and accelerate more sustainable practices. We aim to be a transparent and trustworthy company internally and externally.
We can’t operate responsibly without inclusion of our supply chain. We appreciate our partnerships with suppliers for better efficiency, innovation and sustainability as described in our Environment chapters. We would also drive the best ESG risk management practices along our supply chain.
Hotels are prone to all different types of risks that can pose harm to our guests, colleagues and other stakeholders. We are always responsible for protecting the people and assets in our hotels in case of undesirable incidents occurrences. With the information explosion era and the wide applicability of technology, we develop a simple and effective integrated management system. We simplify and revamp to build a “Company Standard” system to enable our colleagues to do the right thing at the right time.
We also want to create a culture where colleagues understand that we expect them to uphold the high standards set out in our policies and procedures. All new colleagues will receive the Code of Ethics through the induction training at the First60 Certification programme. Depending on the job duties of our colleagues, they will also receive regular communications, refresher training, and team briefings on various aspects of our compliance programme. All colleagues are also aware that they have a duty to report any breaches of our Code of Ethics and some policies.
In addition to the standardised training programme at hotels, there is a Global CONNECT Event relating to an internal review and refresher training on a selected topic concerning corporate ethics across the group. Governance and risk preparedness can sometimes be a boring topic. Therefore, we encouraged our hotels to create fun videos to promote how colleagues can prepare and manage risks so that they think it through and understand the process to help minimise risks to life and safety and are prepared if any incidents happen.
We begin with choosing the suppliers who can provide the sustainable products or services based on our Responsible Purchasing Guidelines and Sustainable Hotel Design Guidelines. You may read more details in the Sustainable Sourcing and Sustainable Hotel Design sections.
We also recognise that through leadership and monitoring along the supply chain, we can promote adoption and support of business integrity, fair labour practices (such as prevention of child and forced labour, human rights and health & safety) and environmental protection. In order to manage the social and environmental risks in our supply chain more systematically, the Supplier Code of Conduct is formulated and communicated to the suppliers through tendering documents and also sent to our significant suppliers to obtain their acknowledgement.
We also introduced a supplier self-assessment checklist to monitor the environmental and social performance status for our selected suppliers at Group level. The suppliers are required to fill in the checklist regularly to keep us informed on their compliance status and any improvement.
