In these tough economic times, our business success depends more than ever on winning and maintaining our neighbours’ trust.

Without that trust, we will not be able to do the big, complex new energy projects our strategy requires or achieve top-quartile performance in our facilities.

Trust depends on relationships. And relationships are only built over time: by listening to the many different points of view in a community; by responding to the concerns that matter to our neighbours; by delivering on what we promise and by working with communities to create local benefits.

We have a structured company-wide approach for listening to our neighbours, for working with them to reduce negative impacts from our operations and produce local benefits, and for raising the skills of our staff in this area.

All our refineries and chemicals facilities, as well as all upstream operations where impacts on the community could be high, have social performance plans in place. Staff in these facilities work with their local stakeholders to implement these plans. At our major refineries and chemicals facilities, the implementation of these plans is reviewed every three to four years by experienced social performance staff from other locations. We also do social performance reviews at depots in our distribution business (where petrol, diesel or other products are stored before being delivered to customers).

Social performance professionals in our central Social Performance Management Unit and in our businesses support people in critical positions, like refinery managers or major project leaders. Between 2006 and 2008 management teams at all but three of the refineries and chemicals plants we operate received coaching from social performance professionals through our social performance plan and review process. Social performance has also been given a more prominent role in our Project Academy.

We also work closely with external experts, through a series of strategic collaborations. In Alaska, for example, Living Earth Foundation, a non-governmental organisation (NGO) we have worked with for many years, is setting up a community-based dialogue network called “the big conversation”. It is a way for communities near our planned exploration activities in the Beaufort Sea to discuss amongst themselves their concerns about oil and gas development, their priorities and the way forward.

We continue to learn in this area and to refine our approach. At present we are working on improving the assessment of social risks in our due diligence process, so that we better understand these risks in projects we acquire. We are also focused on fully implementing the changes in our project development process so that project teams start early enough with social performance in new projects, and take the time needed to build relationships.

HIRING AND BUYING LOCALLY

Using local contractors and suppliers, and hiring local staff are particularly important ways to create local benefits and build trust. We have programmes to use local companies and to attract and train local staff in more than 90% of the low and medium income countries where we operate. These programmes include local recruiting efforts, education and skill building programmes, and training to help local companies meet our standards and compete successfully for contracts. A few of these programmes are required by governments. Most are voluntary. From our financial systems around the world we estimate that we spent $19 billion on goods and services from locally owned companies in these countries in 2008, up from $17 billion in 2007. In 2008, according to our human resources system, more than 90% of our staff worldwide were locals.