The integration of corporate social responsibility (CSR) into MCI Group has been spurred on since it became a signatory of the United Nations Global Compact in 2007. The Compact acts as the world’s largest CSR initiative, providing ten guiding principals for organisations to adopt and weave into their day-to-day strategies. These principals, focusing on human rights, labour rights, environment and corruption, have since formed the bedrock for MCI’s CSR Policy, its Business Code of Professional Ethics and Supplier Code of Conduct.

In 2009, nine hotel partners committed to signing MCI’s Supplier Code of Conduct. Suntec Singapore has also signed a partnership deal with MCI, which will make the venue the preferred partner and provider of MCI Group for conference placement, under the provision that it adheres to MCI’s CSR principles.

GOOD PARTNERSHIPS
Michael Luehrs, MCI’s sustainability services manager, is pleased with how the partnerships have been made: “I think the more difficult tests will come in the future as we start to ask our partners to provide us with more detailed information to support our need for measurement and data.

"Points such as kilowatt hours per guestroom/meeting room, or kilos of waste recycled as compared to total waste or water usage statistics may present a challenge to the operations teams at the sites we visit. Our findings may also result in a need to ask some properties to perform at a higher level of sustainability and this may test our relationship.”

MCI has pinpointed priority areas within the company that will organise its approach to a sustainable business. These include employee development, with more than 50 per cent of staff having already received introductory training in CSR and sustainability from its sustainability team.

Another priority is reducing environmental impact. MCI has collaborated with MeetGreen to pioneer its methodology and combines this with MCI’s Sustainable Event Management framework to allow project managers to analyse, measure, benchmark and improve the environmental and social impact of an event.

This was recently used for the International Climate Change Conference 2009 (ICCC 2009), held last October in Hong Kong, with great success.

Future plans within MCI are to develop a ‘human rights and anti-corruption training module for staff, develop more community partnership programmes and implement online CSR training.