GE Citizenship

Operational Excellence

The dedication GE shows to profitability and competitiveness is matched by our dedication to run the company with operational excellence, including strong compliance, good governance, and transparency.

GE believes it is even more important to sustain and demonstrate our commitment to operating responsibly in challenging economic times. Our commitments are not conditional — rather, they are entrenched in our core values and our commitment to GE’s culture of integrity, ethics and compliance. They help us to weather the storm and position us for continued growth.

GE has been working on a companywide initiative known as “Regulatory Excellence” since 2007. The initiative emphasizes the role of business leaders for regulatory compliance, and it has established a common process for managing regulatory risk areas across the company.

Underpinning our actions as a company is our strong corporate governance. From an independent board to extensive policies, processes, training and communication, we are committed to transparency and integrity.

Our nonnegotiable expectation of employee integrity is articulated in our policy, The Spirit & The Letter, which requires compliance with law and policy relating to vital issues, such as upholding financial integrity and avoiding conflicts of interest. Available in 31 languages, these integrity policies are provided to all of our employees, holding each person accountable for compliance. Our strong compliance culture reinforces these efforts by requiring employees to raise any compliance concerns and by prohibiting retribution for doing so. To facilitate open and candid communication, we have around 600 designated ombudspersons throughout the company who act as independent resources for reporting integrity or compliance concerns. We hold our directors, consultants, agents, and independent contractors to the same integrity standards.

The company continues to work on productivity, process control, Six Sigma, Lean, and new technologies. GE also continues to invest in its employees, spending more than $1.2 billion on training each year. This dedication to quality and performance strengthens our ability to solve the world’s biggest challenges — and generate long-term business value.

The key to our citizenship performance is, above all, our people — their resourcefulness, expertise and commitment to execution drive our programs. When we combine GE people with our operational expertise, the benefits — both financial and functional — can be considerable. In some cases, the outcomes can exceed even our own aggressive goals.

One example is Developing Futures™ in Education, a corporate citizenship program aimed at improving math and science curricula and management capacity in select school districts throughout the U.S. Our people apply processes such as Six Sigma to improve efficiency, providing training to help ensure long-term success within these districts. In Cincinnati, one of our employees provided expertise in facilities management that saved the school more than $12.5 million beyond the initial grant.

GE continually works to understand and address the social issues that impact our businesses. And in turn, we seek to renew our awareness of how business can impact society. As a company, it is our responsibility to respond to the realities of our world, and as a global citizen, it is an honor to make a difference through our actions.

Our water reduction commitment is one area where a program has directly improved our own performance. To set the parameters of this companywide initiative, we spent two years collecting global consumption data across every GE business. We then matched the sites that consumed the most water with innovative water reduction technologies from our water business.

Our engagement with public policy makers and stakeholders — in combination with our internal human rights and EHS compliance systems — improve our work as a company. Our culture strengthens these improvements even more. By applying the best of our operational processes — human resources, information technology, data gathering, and metrics — to our citizenship initiatives, we respond with a system-wide approach that accelerates and amplifies both business and citizenship impact.

Citizenship activities also present opportunities to innovate our products and technologies. One example is Developing Health Globally™, a corporate citizenship signature program that applies our products, expertise, and employee engagement toward improving developing-world healthcare delivery. The program has generated valuable real-world input, giving us a better understanding of our markets for new product development. We have already applied these lessons, helping to create a value line of healthcare technologies designed specifically for several emerging markets.

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