Interview with Mike Kelly, KPMG Europe LLP

In this Enterprise 2020 interview, Mike Kelly, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at KPMG Europe LLP, discusses how KPMG is playing an active role to find new ways to involve its people, clients, suppliers and community partners to make a sustainable difference in society.

The interview with Mike Kelly is the eighth in a series of interviews on the future of responsible enterprise with business leaders from CSR Europe's member companies.

You can watch a video of the interview below.

Last year in KPMG Europe LLP more than 6,000 people contributed 59,000 volunteering hours

If you were to look at success around community engagement for KPMG Europe, which is 14 countries now, it might surprise people to know that in the depth of the worst financial crisis we have seen for a generation, employee volunteering has increased. We are quite proud of the fact that the community engagement is getting deeper. But I think with that deeper understanding becomes a much bigger idea about this size of the challenge we all face. We have good community engagement now but we know that we can make a step change; we know that we can go that much further. And that is the ambition for the future.

Why businesses should participate in the European Year of Volunteering 2011

I think if you looked at business as a whole, then business needs to be more competitive: it needs to reduce its resource consumption, it needs to be more innovative, it needs to be forward thinking. That is one of the real benefits of employer-supported volunteering - you are increasing the skill set of your people and you are delivering community benefits. At the macro level, of course, you would want to be actively involved because it is good for your business, it is good for your communities and good for the whole European Union.

Since 2007 KPMG Europe LLP has reduced net CO2 emissions by more than 34%

It is really important that we are very proactive in what we do. More and more of our employees and clients expect us to be doing something on carbon. There are two main strands to the way we are addressing the challenge of getting to a low carbon economy. The first one is the infrastructure: the fact that we have got carbon neutral rail travel in Germany is great - it means that we have got people thinking about it. So, yes, you can travel in a carbon-free way, but you could also think about not traveling at all. Once we have got the infrastructure, and we have done as much as we can there, then it is behavior change.

KPMG was the first professional services firm in Europe to introduce a supplier code of conduct

Our engagement with our suppliers starts with our code of conduct. We did not make it an optional piece; we made it a mandatory clause, amongst all the other contract clauses. So, rather than treating it separately, it became embedded in the contract process. That was the first line in the sand that we drew. Then, we also said that it is not a compliance issue, it is not a yes/no option, and it is very much an engagement/working together piece.

Imagine you are in 2020 speaking to a class of school children

By 2020, I would hope that globally we would have put in place an architecture and framework to address climate change; a pathway to a low carbon economy which we will entrust that to the next generation. We will have failed in all our obligations, if we have not created it by then. We will have to entrust that generation to deliver and correct past generations' mistakes. We have an obligation to make global citizens out of the next generation.

Read more:

• Corporate Social Responsibility
• KPMG Europe LLP Website

Edited by Christine Stewart and Elodie Windels