Ronan Dunne was appointed chief executive of Telefónica O2 UK in January 2008. Previously chief financial officer of Telefónica O2 UK, before joining O2 Dunne held senior financial positions in the banking and corporate sectors.

O2 recently announced an ambitious three-year sustainability strategy called Think Big Blueprint. The plan pledges to deliver up to 4m tonnes of carbon savings, help up to ten million people live in more sustainable ways and enable up to a million young people to develop skills through local community initiatives.

Ethical Corporation: How do you engage with your employees on sustainability?

Ronan Dunne: We’re rolling out the opportunity for every individual employee to make a pledge supporting the underpinning of sustainability targets. It might be something as personal as, “I’m going to use the O2 Healthy App to lose weight” through to “I’m going to reduce my carbon footprint by using more online meetings”. We are also giving our employees the information, through things like our O2 Recycle programme, to engage customers and demonstrate to them how they can make a change for the better.

With our large corporate customers, our sales guys can demonstrate some of the things that we’ve done, such as putting smart meters on our network or introducing flexible working, where we’ve reduced the carbon footprint of our head office by more than 50%. 

Ethical Corporation: How do you explain to your board, shareholders and other stakeholders the business value of your social investment programmes?

Ronan Dunne: Telefónica has a very strong corporate and social responsibility programme, so we make ourselves accountable internally. We’re now partnered with Forum For The Future, we engage with external stakeholders and NGOs and, by publishing our Blueprint, we’re effectively increasing the visibility and accountability of the commitments we’re making.  

Ethical Corporation: What do you think the consumer reaction will be towards not receiving a charger, as standard, when they buy a phone?

Ronan Dunne: In 2008, we introduced the first universal charger. We also got involved in the movement within the industry to encourage manufacturers to move to a single type of connector for chargers, the micro USB connector, and now more than 90% of the devices that we sell are using it.

By building more energy-efficient chargers and creating a universal type of connectivity, we’ve created the conditions in which we can at least start the conversation about whether somebody needs a replacement charger. It’s that journey that will allow us, we hope by 2015, to move the default setting to “don’t need a new charger” rather than “have to have one”.

Ethical Corporation: How will you promote responsible recycling of mobile phones?

Ronan Dunne: We’re incentivising our customers to recycle by offering them cash for their old phones. About 85% of the phones can be re-used, refurbished. Those that can’t we make sure are dismantled and, where we can, we recover any of the recyclable elements. The residual waste is disposed of environmentally, in line with the Weee Directive.   

Ethical Corporation: What are some of the techniques and methods you use to engage with your suppliers on sustainability?

Ronan Dunne:  We introduced our Eco Rating scheme, which gives a rating to every individual handset we sell for all manufacturers who are participating in the scheme. The rating includes not only the efficiency of the device and the nature of its use, but also the ethical and sustainability supply chain for producing that device.

Ethical Corporation: How do you engage with suppliers who are not meeting your sustainability standards?

Ronan Dunne: As a business that’s in the business of staying in business, we’ve two choices: we can draw a line and exclude people and then potentially not be an agent for change; or we can embrace and actively encourage people to move on the journey with us.

We’ve chosen the latter approach and I think Research In Motion is a very good example of that: a company that didn’t participate in the Eco Rating scheme at the start. Rather than cut them loose, we’ve worked to encourage them and give them the confidence to participate, and now they do.

Ethical Corporation: For the consumer, do you think that a negative perception of a company’s sustainability could be a deal-breaker?

Ronan Dunne: Not yet, but what I do think is that a number of companies will be more committed to the sustainability agenda when the economy recovers and customers will be ruthless in their assessment of opportunism. There’s a great expression, I don’t know who said it first, but it’s this: “When you do something first, customers know you do it for them; when you do something second, they know you do it for yourself.”



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