Securing a Sustainable Future

By Debra McLaughlin, Sr Mgr, Corporate Responsibility

We are proud to share our 2018 Corporate Responsibility (CR) Report, which highlights the progress we’ve made in delivering on CR commitments to our people, your information, and the world. In this, our 11th CR report, we share both the progress we’ve made and the areas where we need to improve, as both are a part of our CR journey. 

Our 2018 report also describes how we are contributing to specific UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The SDGs represent a unique opportunity to align our core business capabilities with society’s pressing needs and we provide progress updates on efforts towards Goal 4 (quality education), Goal 5 (gender equality), Goal 8 (decent work and economic growth), Goal 10 (reduced inequalities), and Goal 13 (climate action).

Here are a few highlights from this year’s report:

Climate Impacts: In 2016, Symantec set a goal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) by 30 percent by 2025. We reached our goal seven years early, reducing GHG emissions by 32 percent in just three years, primarily through space consolidation projects that lead to an overall reduced footprint and decreased energy use. We’ve also set a new, more comprehensive GHG reduction goal, and we launched a company-wide, global campaign to inspire employees to become environmental stewards: Going Green in 2018.

Community Engagement: We saw a 28 percent increase in total volunteer hours by employees, putting us close to our 2020 goal of an average of four volunteer hours per employee. We launched a new signature program called FAST (Fostering a Secure Tomorrow), which leverages Norton and LifeLock tools and services to help protect foster youth from identity theft, and continued our software donation program with TechSoup, donating over 440,000 product licenses to 22,000 nonprofits in FY18.

Diversity in Tech: We did not make progress on our employee diversity demographics in FY18. We have a newly expanded strategy focused on building a culture of inclusion and spent a lot of time listening to our employees this year. We conducted five global employee focus groups and have used employee feedback to adjust our priorities. 

We are celebrating diversity progress in our Symantec Cyber Career Connection (Symantec C3) program, which aims to address the significant shortage of qualified cyber security candidates and help change the trajectory of the tech workforce—specifically for women, minorities, and veterans.

Working with nonprofit educational partners like AAUW, NPower and Year Up, we have introduced a total of 10,000+ students to careers in cyber security. We are proud that 71 percent of our graduates are under-represented minorities in technology and 25 percent are female. We also have seen incredible results: in FY18, 82 percent of Symantec C3 graduates were employed in cyber security or pursuing a degree within six months of graduation.

Privacy & the Social Impact of Technology: In conducting our sixth materiality assessment as part of our CR Report, we paid special attention to the evolving privacy landscape and also noted a new material issue: the social impact of technology. 

At Symantec this means building internal policies and practices that ensure Symantec’s compliance with emerging privacy regulations; delivering products and services that enable consumers, businesses and governments to protect their personal information; engaging policy makers and other stakeholders on privacy related issues; managing our products responsibly to reduce the risk that they are used to infringe upon privacy rights or freedom of expression; and supporting global communities through our software product donations. 

We encourage you to read our report and to send us your feedback, which will be used to help shape future programmatic and reporting priorities. We’d also like to thank our employees and partners for all they do every day to help Symantec secure a more sustainable future.