AstraZeneca Turkey - Internal Communications Campaign of the Year

Company: AstraZeneca Ilac San. ve Tic. Ltd. Sti. , Istanbul, Turkey
Company Description: AstraZeneca, which mainly focuses on the areas of Cardiovascular, Renal and Metabolism, Oncology, Respiratory diseases threatening hundreds of millions of people in the world, invests approximately $5.9 billion per year in R&D. With products available in 100+ countries and manufactured in 17 countries, it is among top 10 pharma companies in Turkey.
Nomination Category: Corporate Communications, Investor Relations, & Public Relations Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Communications or PR Campaign of the Year - Internal Communications - 100 or More Employees

Nomination Title: AstraZeneca Turkey Zero Carbon Working Group

‘Ambition Zero Carbon Programme’ significantly accelerates a plan to have zero carbon emissions from operations across the world by 2025 and ensure our entire value chain is carbon negative by 2030, bringing forward decarbonisation plans by more than a decade. In order to achieve zero carbon by 2025, AstraZeneca will convert 100% of its energy consumption to renewable sources for both power and heat, and have a 100% electric vehicle fleet. As AstraZeneca Turkey, we established our "Zero Carbon Working Group" to contribute to this strategy, to protect our nature and to support locally future generations’ having a healthy life in Turkey. Zero Carbon Working Group aims to raise awareness and create consciousness among AstraZeneca Turkey employees in order to contribute positively to the nature in line with our zero carbon strategy and sustainability targets;because we believe that transformation begins with individuals. The primary goal of our project is to show that simple changes in our daily work and home life have very important contribution to the positive change of nature.

AstraZeneca Turkey employees were called to establish a Zero Carbon Working Group and the group was established on 30 June 2020. A strategy plan was created with the members of the working group. Zero Carbon training was receivedin cooperation with the Sustainability Academy in order to coordinate and plan the activities consciously and target-driven. Online workshops were organised for all employees. These workshops contents were related to water saving, energy saving, composting at home, orchard in pot, ecological practices in the city, zero waste. Detailed informative contents were shared regularly throughout the year taking into account special days.The contents were included “What is Zero Carbon?”, “What is Carbon Footprint?”, “How to make our lives minimalist?”, “Digital Clean-Up”, “Tips for Recycling”, “How to support biodiversity?”, “Saving Oceans”. Sustainability and environment experts from academy and other prestigious platforms were invited as speakers and they shared significant information with our employees.We have also prepared informative kits for the families of our employees. On April 23 Children's Day, a special bokashi compost workshop for children was also organised. We also shared inspiring posts on internal communication platforms. Awareness was also created by using alternative platforms such as Clubhouse. We donated 80,000 saplings to environmental foundations both to support our awareness efforts and to contribute to the forests of the world.We have dedicated our in-house corporate magazine to zero-carbon content quarterly.Sustainability interviews, social media posts, advertorials dedicated to our projectwere also organised through media.

The Zero Carbon Working Group organized various events, workshops and acitivites. As a result of these efforts, zero carbon awareness was raised for all AstraZeneca Turkey employees. The participation rate in the online broadcasts and workshops we organized was more than half of the employees. We also provide the records of these events accessible on our corporate platforms and in the follow-ups we can measure the view rates continuously as increasing. The positive employee feedback about how they adapt the practices to their own lives and they learn through working group’s activities is quite high.It was an highly effective project that increased our sustainability score in internal surveys. In short-term rotation programs it was the second project that received the most applications from the employees in order to take responsibilty in the project. The project was expressed as best practise by company employees on internal communication platforms. We had approximately 4 million reach in conventional and social media with the communication activities carried out within the scope of the project.