These past 18 months have made it clear that companies have an opportunity to create positive change, not just for employees and customers, but for our local communities. We are all global citizens.
From diversity to human rights and the environment, those who can make a difference, should.
We are excited to share our Corporate Citizenship Report for 2021. In it, we describe our vision and action plan for how we can strengthen our people, products, purpose and planet in the coming years.
OpenText has always upheld high standards of ethics, integrity and corporate citizenship. Last year, we launched our first Corporate Citizenship Report, where we committed to supporting our employees, customers and communities throughout the pandemic, as well as doing more to champion Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I), continuing to improve our environmental footprint and strengthening a culture of Tech for Good.
I am proud to share that we have made important strides in each of these areas. In this year’s report, we highlight our achievements, and also explore where we need to do more, and how we plan to get there.
Our COVID-19 Response
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, we have been committed to ensuring the safety and well-being of our employees, supporting our customers and investing in our communities.
Employee health, safety and wellness has been our top priority throughout the pandemic. We moved to remote work in March of last year, and our employees have the option to continue working from home until January 2022. We also established the $3M OpenText Employee Relief Fund to support employees in the event of financial hardship due to the pandemic, organized a vaccination campaign for our employees in India, and have worked with local leadership to make sure that our insurance and benefits cover tests and vaccinations in all of our global locations.
Throughout the pandemic, we have continued to provide our customers with the same 24×7 support that they have come to expect. By fully leveraging the OpenText Cloud, we helped companies transition to modern work, re-worked supply chains so that customers could remain competitive, and supported the documentation of clinical trials to combat COVID-19. Our technology is also protecting enterprise systems, SMBs and consumers from ransomware and online scams, which became even more important with the proliferation of endpoints as employees worked from home.
OpenText has a long-standing tradition of volunteerism and supporting the communities in which we live and work. In 2020, we took that commitment to the next level by launching our OpenText Navigator Fund to address the most pressing needs in OpenText communities. For our first project, we chose to help combat food insecurity.
In total, we donated $1 million USD to food banks in 21 countries to supply over four million meals to those in need.
The Navigator Fund provides us with an amazing opportunity to support our communities in new ways, and to build an even stronger and more engaged company.
Equity, Diversity & Inclusion
The social protests and exposure of racial oppression in 2020 increased our resolve to improve our own efforts around diversity. In a series of town halls, we brought together colleagues from racialized communities to hear their perspectives—a truly eye-opening experience. While I was grateful to hear that the OpenText culture has largely been an inclusive one, we also heard about specific areas that we could strengthen, and areas where we could do more.
In response, we expanded our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (ED&I) program, creating a dedicated team led by a new Director of ED&I. The focus of this program is on supporting and developing under-represented minorities, with a strong emphasis on gender, race and Black communities.
We remain passionate about a working environment that is inclusive of everyone. We firmly believe in the power of diversity and the ability of multiple backgrounds and points of view to contribute to a stronger whole. Diversity drives innovation, and the technology industry as a whole must be an inclusive one.
Environment
Climate change remains a fundamental challenge that we need to address urgently. As a tech industry leader, OpenText has both an obligation and an opportunity to take action to mitigate our environmental impact and help our customers do the same.
We recently reaffirmed our commitment to the Ten Principles of the United Nations Global Compact, and we are continually integrating these principles into our business strategy, culture and operations. This includes setting goals for improvements to our own environmental performance, and helping our customers to improve their environmental performance by enabling modern work, digitizing paper-based processes and creating greater visibility into supply chains so that purchasing decisions can be based on ethics and sustainability ratings.
Looking Ahead
I see so much cause for optimism in the years ahead. The growing complexity of global disruptions will continue to test our resilience—yet now we know that together, we are capable of overcoming seemingly insurmountable challenges.
With the pandemic, we saw scientific communities working together to develop safe and effective vaccines in record time. The reduction in travel led to less pollution, giving us a glimpse of what could be with a commitment to reducing carbon emissions. The global social justice reckoning is leading to much-needed reforms to improve our businesses and institutions at all levels.
We have also seen amazing acts of kindness and generosity, of people supporting their neighbors and communities coming together. As we move through the pandemic, we all must amplify our roles as corporate citizens. In work and in life, our mindset determines our path to service, satisfaction and success, and I envision a future that is more abundant, more purposeful and more sustainable. Ultimately, we want to create a better future for all—and OpenText will be contributing to this goal.
At the beginning of the pandemic, we told our employees that we were Tous Ensemble or All Together. We meant it. We look forward to continuing to work together in the years to come to support our employees, customers and communities to bring about positive change.
Tous Ensemble. All Together.
