2012 Corporate Sustainability Report

Having a clear vision is the first step toward making real progress. 

As we continue to advance sustainability within the company, our desire is to bring lasting value to our customers, employees, shareholders, partners, communities and the environment. We are humbled yet inspired by the challenge and the potential. How we arrived at this moment is important. Research and insights direct our path, leading us to expand our vision for sustainability in an organic, intrinsic way. Footprint reductions have given us the fuel for invention. We will continue to push ourselves forward using our creativity and innovation to fully realize our goals.

Steelcase is no stranger to sustainability. We’re celebrating 100 years of not simply growing, but innovating. Not simply creating goods, but creating good. Not simply earning profit, but earning trust. We share this report as an open dialogue, documenting our momentum by sharing real-life stories from the people who are transforming the future and transcending their job descriptions to impact the world.

People are the heart of possibility. What’s possible for our company and society in the next 100 years? We can’t wait to find out.

One decision, one deed, one day at a time.

As I reflect on our 100th anniversary year, I couldn’t be more excited about the future of Steelcase.

During our centennial celebration, we have looked to the future as well as the past. Steelcase has always been a company dedicated to unlocking human promise—and as a part of that, a company devoted to sustainable business practices. Our commitment to these practices ensures we contribute to the social, economic and environmental conditions that allow people to reach their full potential.

We made amazing progress on our 2012 environmental footprint reduction goal, and that success has us fired up to keep the momentum going. Moving forward, we’re going to up the ante on our promise of sustainability. We’ll challenge ourselves to push harder, leverage our leadership and make a deliberate leap forward. Sustainability will be a motivating force for driving innovation and transformation within the company.

Imagine the potential when sustainability is fundamental rather than incidental to every business. At Steelcase, we believe we can harness the power of our actions to make enduring positive change. Our sustainability initiatives benefit the communities where we live and work. They also advance the fitness of our company. We’ll work to make every decision through the lens of its impact on people, profit and the planet.

Weaving sustainability into the core of our business unlocks the potential for real change. And change happens thanks to people. With 100 years of momentum, we look forward to deepening our promise to bring sustainable value to the people we care about most—our customers, employees, shareholders, partners and communities.

I invite you to take a look at what we’re doing. Read the stories, examine the plan. Then join us as we shape the next century together.

Jim Hackett
President and CEO

From the very beginning, a century ago, the founders of Steelcase instilled the values of social and environmental responsibility.

They believed these values were part of what made a company successful. These values still exist today, evolving within our sustainability strategies and global business practices. They are fortified by our strong commitment to integrity and doing the right thing for our customers, shareholders, employees, business partners, associates and neighbors.

These principles are the foundation of our company, passed on from decade to decade and employee to employee.

At Steelcase, we live by a set of values that guide day-to-day interactions and provide a compass for our company:

• Act with integrity
• Tell the truth
• Keep commitments
• Treat people with dignity and respect
• Promote positive relationships
• Protect the environment
• Excel

Past, present and next: Engaging with stakeholders
Many occasions create opportunities to reflect, recharge and refocus. At Steelcase, we’re taking advantage of our 100th birthday to do just that — to dream big about the future. We’re setting our sights high as we think about what it means to create holistic value as a globally integrated company operating in a globally connected world. 

Beginning in 2011 and continuing into 2012, we’ve been on a quest for insights and understanding around sustainability and its impact on and meaning to our stakeholders now and in the future. During this time we have:

• Embarked on a company-wide corporate social and environmental responsibility diagnostic
• Surveyed our customers and studied their inquiries to understand their corporate priorities around sustainability
• Hosted workshops to listen to architect and design partners, customers and other thought leaders on their vision for the future of sustainability
• Completed an internal culture survey to help us further understand the expectations of our employees

The purpose of all this work is to help Steelcase advance our social and environmental performance to match the expectations of our many stakeholders, shareholders and partners.

Key strategic objectives
We are taking an intentional step forward, elevating sustainability as a lens for innovation on a global scale. We’re focused on the future and defining the action that will shape our next 100 years.

Our commitment is to:

• Strengthen sustainable development in our worldwide operations and in our supplier partners, including environmental and human health, social responsibility and economic prosperity
• Ensure operations protect the environment and health of our employees, neighbors and customers through actions that conserve resources, reduce waste and promote a closed loop system
• Invest in education and training to ensure stakeholder engagement and employee ownership and stewardship
• Engage with suppliers, dealers, customers, researchers and environmental agencies

You will continue to see:

• Transparency and authenticity ­­– When we hit our mark, we’ll momentarily celebrate and move on to challenging ourselves further.  When we miss our targets, we’ll determine the cause and push harder
• Products and solutions designed to benefit people
• Actions that further the science and practice of sustainability through collaboration with customers, business partners and environmental thought leaders
• Socially responsible operations
• Collaboration with and increasing expectations of our supply chain partners
• Reporting of global metrics
• Perseverance towards reducing our global environmental footprint by another 25% by 2020

Careful measurement is key to managing impact.

In this year of upping the ante on our social and environmental practice, we’re also committed to measuring and reporting on our progress in a transparent and authentic way.

This is a snapshot of the information we are using to measure ourselves against social, environmental and economic domains. We will continuously strive to expand our reporting as we begin tracking metrics in areas we haven’t addressed before, refine existing metrics for global accuracy and improve our focus on sustainability and comprehensive progress reporting.

For more metrics, please see the GRI index.

Social

 Environment

 Economic

*Includes: SCS Indoor Advantage™, NF Environment, Blue Angel, BIFMA Level® and Cradle to Cradle^CM certified products.