Implementing our code of conduct
The fundamentals of our environmental, social, and ethical standards are laid down in our Business Code of Conduct (BCC) and its directives. The BCC governs all our business decisions, including finance, purchasing, and supply management, and specifies policies for a wide array of subjects, such as corporate gifts, child labor, ILO conventions, working hours, sexual harassment, free-market competition, bribery, and the integrity of our financial reporting. A worldwide network of regional compliance officers monitors our implementation of the BCC, and we are introducing a BCC training program.
So that employees can submit complaints regarding violations of the BCC anonymously, without fear of repercussion, we created the Whistleblower Policy and its accompanying registration system. A company-wide database, will record possible breaches and ensure that timely action is taken to remedy them.
Beyond our own operations, we expect ethical behavior from our key suppliers. Since 2006, we've implemented a three-pronged approach to managing sustainability in the upstream supply chain:
- We request that all our key suppliers sign the NXP Supplier Sustainability Declaration, which includes statements on their environmental record, health and safety (such as the provision of safe working conditions), and human rights. All our key suppliers, without exception, have signed the declaration.
- We ask our key suppliers in certain countries to perform self-assessments that examine their organization's implementation and deployment of the Declaration.
- We perform our own audits to verify that the Declaration is indeed deployed in our suppliers' organizations. During these audits, we've found some non-conformances, but all of them have been dealt with immediately. To improve our audit process, we plan to upgrade auditor training, refine our auditing procedures, and revise our procedure for registering findings.
Our commitment to ethical conduct even extends to the people who design with and use our products. We've signed a number of agreements with several of our customers to address ethical and ESH issues, and regularly seek opportunities to join global or industry initiatives for sustainability among our peers and suppliers.