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Dear Friends of HKBN
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HKBN ESG Newsletter: Winter 2022
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As a company committed to Change and helping businesses operate better, we believe insights and deeper conversations in sustainability and ESG (Environment, Social and Governance) are crucial for resilience in a world of emerging challenges. With our quarterly ESG Newsletter, we bring you the latest HKBN happenings, trends and experiences – that matter most.
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What's New: ESG Strategy Re-defined
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To do a lot more in Purpose and ESG, we're fully embracing our role to Lead as an Innovative ESG Enabler – a strategy focussed on empowering the ESG of our enterprise and residential customers, as well as other key groups like NGOs, social profit organisations, our suppliers and partners. Along with this, we've also streamlined our resources in three core "Ts", Talent Co-Ownership, Technology for Good and Transforming Business, enabling us to drive progress by setting three-year KPI targets in 10 ESG priority areas.
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Cybersecurity from a sustainability perspective
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In a digital world where everything is interconnected, cybersecurity poses a tremendous risk to the value and stability of companies and society. Poor cybersecurity is the result of, and an indicator of, poor governance – and can lead to stolen data and IP assets, loss of customer trust, damage to critical infrastructure, disruption in the supply chain, and much more. To understand why cybersecurity should be a top ESG priority, we spoke with Wilson Tang, our Co-Owner and Director – Information Security.
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Q: Why should cybersecurity be a top concern? |
Wilson: As we shift more and more to the cloud, big data, the proliferation of smartphones, and with critical data being shared across geographical locations, it's become easier for hackers to strike. Unfortunately, many people still tend to think they won't be the unlucky ones, or that they might be too small to be targeted. This has made it very difficult to defend against hackers – who can compromise a business, its assets and its long-term viability at any moment – hence the role of cybersecurity is stronger than ever.
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| Q: What should companies do to improve their cybersecurity posture? |
Wilson: You need to know the kind of data you are protecting, what is the impact of being compromised, and then determine what investment is needed. Inside HKBN, our team invests carefully on technology, as we want to make sure that any investment committed will provide the best protection; and avoids any false sense of security even in insignificant, often overlooked areas. We also strike a balance between imposing necessary controls while keeping the operations efficient.
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| Q: What are the common cybersecurity lapses that you've noticed? |
Wilson: Low awareness for cybersecurity and a lax attitude when using information technology have made it difficult to defend against hackers. Leadership from top management is especially crucial in shaping the culture. Throughout our company, we seriously engage and educate our Talents about cybersecurity daily, and we adhere to strict protocols at every level. Most cybersecurity teams start from a firefighting mode (reactive approach); however, we've taken this further with a proactive approach. Our approach actively hunts for threats and remediates them before they can cause damage. We believe if there is a risk, either we fix it or a hacker will find a way in.
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Talents are essential
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In any company, Talents are quintessential for executing impactful ESG outcomes. To lead (rather than follow) in Purpose and over-achieve our ESG goals, at HKBN we need our Talents to bring their full passion, commitment and alignment. On this topic, we sat down with Adele Chu, our Co-Owner and Associate Director – Talent Engagement to examine how HKBN's focus on Talents is driving our ESG further.
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Q: Why the focus on Talents and how does it relate to ESG? |
Adele: HKBN's success is built on a culture of Co-Ownership, wherein we ask our Talents to invest their money as a skin-in-the-game commitment to drive HKBN's success. This is the best way to create real interest-alignment. With this kind of thinking, we believe the best way to achieve meaningful progress in sustainability is to get our Talents fully committed and aligned with our ESG goals. That would be much more powerful than having the company dictate what we need to achieve from the top.
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Q: How will you achieve that? |
Adele: Fortunately, we are a company driven by a Purpose to "Make our Home a Better Place to Live", which means our culture and our Talents have a sense of responsibility towards making positive long-term change – in synergy with ESG. We know the powerful value of getting Talents involved, and so we're driving this by focusing on Talent Co-Ownership, i.e. motivating our Talent base to adopt ESG factors into their business operations.
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Q: Please describe how Talent Co-Ownership can drive your ESG forward? |
Adele: In some leading global companies, there is a practice whereby senior management are rewarded when certain ESG KPIs are met. While this is a great step in driving ESG, this year we're implementing plans which would incentivise our Talents to integrate ESG elements as part of their business proposals. With thousands of Talents, the scale of this approach would allow us to achieve progress in every facet of our business. For example, this could motivate a system integration Talent to propose more carbon-neutral solutions when consulting on a client's digital transformation journey. Similarly, our procurement team are now extra motivated to push our supply chain to become more ESG-compliant. In practice, we're already seeing our technology teams commit more of their time and resources towards digital inclusion efforts by helping SMEs and NGOs.
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Climate Action: 288,400 kg batteries recycled
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Knowing that our responsibility in climate action remains important, we continue to do our part whenever possible. Ever since 2019, HKBN has been an active partner with the Hong Kong Battery Recycling Centre, a leading facility in Hong Kong that helps us recycle our waste lead acid batteries (WLAB). This year, our recycling efforts diverted 74,824 kg of WLAB from entering landfills, for a total of about 288,400 kg diverted over the past 3 years – a figure that far exceeds the performance of our industry peers.
Got lead acid batteries you want recycled? Visit www.hkbr.com.hk to make arrangements.
For more about HKBN's ESG, check out our ESG Highlights 2022.
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