Our CSR commitments

The most important impact of a publisher like Bayard lies in its power to raise awareness and build new imaginations, which contribute to the emergence of a desirable and possible future.

Committed to the common good, concerned about nature and future generations, we believe in the liberating power of accurate information, imagination and creation that nourish the soul and life. In spite of the hard times, we believe with lucidity and hope that a better life together is possible. We believe that we can contribute to this through the production of stories and information that provide the keys to understanding and the resources to act, at every age of life.

Through all our offers, paper or digital, services or events, printed or audiovisual… we offer an open view of the news and a positive vision of life.

However, our activities have a very physical reality, materialized by our environmental footprint and, as a company, we have a social and economic responsibility towards all our stakeholders. Thus, while ensuring our economic sustainability, we must be able to meet this fourfold impact objective: social, societal, economic and environmental, without opposing the concepts or ranking them in order of importance, and without one of them relieving us of the need to act in favor of the other.

In a world in transition, this imperative confronts us with dilemmas and cannot be conceived without renunciation. However, at Bayard, we believe that constraint creates innovation, that fragility is a strength and that other forms of progress and development can be born from bifurcations.

Guided by its corporate mission, Bayard has been building an ambitious CSR approach for many years, notably by equipping itself with steering tools (materiality matrix, risk analysis and carbon footprint of its activities). However, the creation of a CSR department in May 2021 underlines the group’s desire to go beyond its corrective action by including, at the heart of its strategy, the consideration of their social and environmental impacts at the time projects are designed and decided.

For Bayard, this new impetus marks the transition from a prescriptive approach to a strategic and more ambitious approach than the law requires. This orientation broadens the scope of responsibility of managers and teams.

To carry out its mission successfully, the company’s CSR foundation must be solid and structured. We have therefore identified a number of major priority projects to be implemented in the medium term, in line with the group’s main strategic orientations. Each of these major projects is broken down into action plans and supported by an operational roadmap based on the fiscal year, with objectives linked to the economic targets.

These projects are of all kinds, environmental, societal or social, and define and guide the CSR strategy. For each of them, action levers have been identified, a methodology shared, an action plan activated and financial and human resources mobilized.

The approach is supported by an ambitious training program for the entire group: editorial and support functions, at all levels of responsibility.

The CSR Department reports to the Group’s Management Board and is a member of the Management Committee and the Executive Committee.

To inform, educate, and awaken awareness by creating links that give everyone the ability to act and reveal themselves

The main orientations of the editorial lines of our press titles, our books and our digital and audiovisual productions:

• Produce information, narratives and imaginaries that provide the keys to understanding and the resources to act.
• Share reasons not to despair and fight against a feeling of powerlessness.
• To bring nuance in a complex world and a continuous information landscape that favors artificial cleavages and extreme positions.
• To take special care to bring our readers into the subjects, whatever their initial knowledge, without simplifying or affirming.
• To help readers understand how information is created, how to access it and how to decipher it, to make media education an essential issue of democracy for all generations.

• Provoke joy through discovery, understanding, humor and surprise.
• Reinforce skills, creativity, and develop imaginations throughout life.
• To give each child the opportunity to construct his or her own story of the world by linking past, present and future.
• To accompany children so that they grow up with confidence, to help them know and defend their rights, to find their place in the world of tomorrow.

• Learn to know oneself better, understand others better and open up to the world around us.
• Cultivate one’s interiority to better live with others, to recharge one’s batteries and to nourish one’s reflection.
• To encourage the blossoming of all the promises that each of us carries within.
• To welcome all the surprising, sometimes difficult, always essential questions about life, the world and God.
• To try not to bring definitive answers, but to try to give avenues for reflection, to pursue questions and to encourage their deepening.

• To accompany the public debate by dialoguing with everyone: to go into the field before making decisions, to listen before judging, to tell stories before concluding.
• To allow our readers to cross paths with lives other than their own, and to contribute to the development of a society of lifelong links and dialogue.
• To consider our vulnerabilities as strengths and promises.
• To encourage discoveries, dialogues and encounters between cultures, religions, generations, territories and identities, by learning to overcome our fears and to be nourished by our differences.

• To tell the world as it is with lucidity and confidence, to show what is going on and what can be done.
• Produce information, stories and imaginary worlds that provide the keys to understanding and the resources to act.
• To raise awareness of the challenges of transitions regardless of the age, ideas and level of knowledge of our readers; to adapt our tone and discourse to each of our audiences.

In the image of the Pope’s encyclical “Laudato si'”, we defend an integral ecology where human dignity, social justice and care for the Earth are inseparable, where social and societal issues are as important as environmental issues.

Our corporate commitment: to do our part, to act consistently with our editorial line, to build the tools to guide our choices and achieve our goals; to act consistently with our editorial line that shapes our societal impact.

We are committed to ensuring symmetry between the attention we pay to what we write in our publications and the way they are produced.

Our company, by virtue of its history and its project, must bear this dual responsibility through concrete and exemplary actions, but also with great humility, since the issues at stake are complex, interdependent and create dilemmas.

It would be complicated to define the starting point of our ecological commitment in terms of production: even if the preservation of resources and the duty of vigilance towards our suppliers have always been a basic line, the search for quality at the lowest cost has long guided our industrial choices.

Like many others, we started with actions within Bayard itself and put in place a whole series of eco-gestures and good practices for living and working together, in line with our editorial commitment. These are essential first steps towards a broader, systemic commitment.

Later, and to go further, we carried out a first carbon footprint® of our youth activities in 2008. This initiative and the actions that followed laid the groundwork for a movement that has grown over time, concomitant with society’s growing awareness of the ecological challenges we face.

In 2018, the preparation of a materiality analysis, supplemented by a carbon assessment® of all our activities in France (scopes 1, 2 and 3) carried out with the firm Carbone 4, enabled us to identify the major challenges for the group and to draw up an ambitious environmental action plan.

That same year, we drew up a responsible purchasing charter, aware of the special role played by our purchases and our supply chain in the environmental impact of our activities. We also chose to join Ecovadis, a platform for evaluating CSR performance and responsible purchasing, and the Book Chain Project, an organization dedicated to books, which sources the origin of paper and pulp and the use of materials and products.

In 2020, we built a tool to measure our carbon footprint that sheds light on our industrial choices by calculating the CO2 emissions linked to the different solutions for sourcing or manufacturing our press titles, from paper production to magazine delivery (paper purchase, production location, printing, etc.). This calculator allows us to arbitrate between cost-saving choices and choices to reduce our CO2 emissions. Sometimes the price differences are small between two identical solutions and the choice of the solution that emits the least CO2 is easy to make. Things become more complicated when a more virtuous solution is much more expensive and we are faced with a difficult choice. To face this type of dilemma, we have chosen to dedicate a specific investment budget, by setting a price of 100 € for a ton of carbon emitted, which allows us to finance the extra cost of the more ecologically virtuous choices, but more expensive economically. This calculator allows the objective calculation of the CO2 emissions of an industrial scenario of newsprint production. We are currently building the same tool for the production of our books.

In 2021, we updated our carbon footprint® on areas of our activity where decarbonization issues were important and in 2022, we carried out a specific carbon footprint® of our digital activities. Indeed, as editorial productions and uses become digitalized and knowing that their impact is far from immaterial, it seemed important to us to establish this assessment, to define levers and action plans in order to be able to steer our digital development strategy in a logic of eco-responsibility and sobriety.

This approach, which we must constantly pursue and update, has required us to revisit all of the life cycles of our productions in order to reduce their environmental impact, and more specifically CO2 emissions.

Thus, we have set a trajectory for reducing our CO2 emissions by 50% by 2030 in line with the Paris Agreements. We know how difficult this objective will be to achieve, and that it will not be possible to achieve it without giving up or making major changes. However, even if we are driven by the urgency to act and to do our part, let us never forget that the dissemination of information and stories, the circulation of ideas and imaginaries are the cornerstone of any democratic society and that they contribute to changing the world. Thus, we must reconcile these two imperatives: to pursue the decarbonization of our activity and the preservation of resources and life without endangering creation.

With this in mind, we make sure to :

• weigh each of our decisions against this dual imperative while accepting our dilemmas, constantly seeking solutions and inventing new mediations;
• to integrate our stakeholders (suppliers, partners, etc.) at every stage of our thinking, in order to imagine with them new, possible and constructive solutions for everyone;
• to take into account the point of view of our readers-clients who question us on these issues, pushing us to go further and to keep our project coherent.

In the same movement of coherence between the words we address to our readers and the production choices we make, we pay particular attention to the links we maintain with our collaborators, our suppliers and our partners.

Generally speaking, our social, societal and environmental responsibility can only be achieved through cooperation and dialogue with all our stakeholders: readers, employees, contributors, partners from all walks of life and suppliers. It is in the crossroads of talents, professions, contributions of each and every one and the convictions of the company that change is forged.
Our founding shareholder has chosen not to receive a dividend and has set a reasonable profitability requirement for the company. It must be sufficient to ensure our independence, guaranteeing a reliable and credible voice for our audiences, and allow us to continue investing. Thus, every year, every euro earned is reinvested in creation.

The issues of professional equality (remuneration, career development and respect for individuals), transparency and fairness; but also the importance of maintaining a quality social dialogue; cooperation and solidarity; and finally, management (exemplarity, trust, responsibility, delegation and subsidiarity) constitute the basis of our social pact.

Today, not everything is perfect. Certain challenges, such as diversity within the Group, still need to be met or accelerated, and we still need to stay the course where we have acquired a certain maturity that sets us apart.

We have a very strong principle of solidarity between the company’s sectors, taking care to treat the sectors in difficulty as carefully as the most flourishing ones, so that employees, wherever they work, feel equally valued. We also constantly seek to raise awareness of the interdependence between sectors and professions.

Bayard’s Human Resources program deployed in 2018 by endorsing the abolition of individual assessment interviews in favor of more regular and fruitful individual and group interviews, marks the desire to continuously support each of us in our professional development while:

• valuing and facilitating teamwork;
• creating the right conditions for constructive exchanges throughout the year;
• taking into account the transversal and collective dimensions of our activities or projects.

The remuneration policy must be consistent with this dimension of solidarity and the collective. Thus, at Bayard, there is little variable compensation. When they do exist, they are based on the results of the company as a whole, not on those of the sector to which they belong.

The increase policy gives a significant place to collective increases negotiated with the trade unions. This emphasis on equal recognition, even in difficult economic times, contrasts with the highly individualized pay policy of some companies. Particular attention and effort is paid to the lowest salaries each year. In the framework of company agreements on mandatory annual negotiations, the largest increases are reserved for the lowest salaries, as well as the re-evaluation of the minimum hiring salary and the minimum freelance salary scale.

Finally, we are committed to limiting pay differentials: between the 10 highest and 10 lowest, the multiplier coefficient is 7.3, which is relatively low compared to general business practice.

The quest for quality in social dialogue with the trade unions is a cornerstone of our social policy. Even if, on the part of both management and the unions, we do not always succeed in removing all opposition and in abandoning our entrenched positions, at Bayard we sign many company agreements and we put all our energy, on both sides, into maintaining constructive and quality relations.

At a time of ecological challenges and the responsibility and duty of care that we have towards our suppliers, it is more crucial than ever to maintain the relationships of trust that we have built up with them over the years and to accelerate the cooperation that will enable us to find new solutions together for a successful transition.

Our Responsible Purchasing Charter guides us and obliges us to ensure that our suppliers and service providers follow good working practices and conditions, and that actions are taken to improve the protection of their employees and to limit their vulnerability.

We are particularly vigilant when it comes to subcontracting services.

We are committed to selecting our suppliers and partners impartially, on the basis of transparent and precise criteria set out in our selection grids for each purchasing category. We also undertake to avoid any economic dependence with our suppliers.

The requirements of the law of December 9, 2016, known as the “Sapin 2 Law” on transparency, the fight against corruption and the modernization of economic life, are an opportunity to formalize rules that have been applied for years in the conduct of the group’s business.
Article 17 of the Sapin 2 Law requires medium-sized companies – of which Bayard is one – to implement internal preventive anti-corruption measures. Thus, in order to define and identify the different types of behavior to be proscribed, a Code of Good Conduct established in 2018, specific to Bayard, specifically sets out the group’s approach to preventing and detecting corruption.
This tool is supplemented by a Purchasing Code of Conduct, which sets out the professional and personal rules of conduct to be respected to ensure the conditions for fair competition and a fair selection process for our suppliers and partners. It contains specific provisions relating to conflicts of interest, gifts and invitations.

We attach particular importance to the observance of international human rights standards, especially labor rights, at our suppliers and partners. In this context, compliance with the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights is a prerequisite for all collaboration.

These principles clarify how the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (issued by the UN in 1948) and the conventions of the International Labor Organization (ILO) are to be respected, regardless of the countries in which suppliers operate, including forced labor, worker health and safety, discrimination, employee representation and social dialogue, disciplinary practices, hours worked and compensation.

In addition, our relationships with our ecosystem are balanced to ensure maximum benefits for each stakeholder. This balance is based on a transparent, permanent and pragmatic discussion with our partners and suppliers, based obviously on economic issues, but also on social and environmental issues.