Dubai Customs announced the release of its fourth annual Corporate Sustainability Report, which represents the department’s efforts and practices towards Corporate Social Responsibility, or CSR, and discusses its approach and achievements towards social, economic, environmental and workplace effects arising from business practices during 2011.

Ahmed Butti Ahmed, executive chairman of Ports, Customs and Free Zone, the director-general of Dubai Customs said that Dubai Customs adherence to social responsibility moves in harmony with the oriented guidelines of the Dubai Government which aims at achieving sustainable development and maintaining excellence and leadership in all areas. These are reported and highlighted in accordance with the guidelines of the Global Reporting Initiative, or GRI, encompassing employees, market place, society and the environment and has contributed to improved performance of Dubai Customs, socially, economically and environmentally to enhance its reputation and image in the region.

He added: “Our publishing of the sustainability report for the fourth consecutive year is our commitment to pursue the institutional work of CSR and its activities, as we seek to sustain our efforts, our standards and our values, and find creative ways to reach better levels of excellence in all areas. Dubai Customs is the first Customs organisation in the world to have a sustainability report in accordance with the guidelines of GRI – G3.1 from Amsterdam, attaining level - A, which is the highest level of accreditation reflecting compliance and transparency on the organisation’s annual achievements.”

The report represents the efforts made by Dubai Customs in seeking to ensure sustainability in areas of human and physical resources, in particular. The organisation is adhered to follow continuity approach and implement best world-practices in all corporate business aspect of activities, including the regular annual study of employees and customers’ satisfaction. The adherence also involves providing training opportunities for distinguished individuals along with the allocation of annual budgeting for the training and development of competencies on yearly basis. It also includes the key performance indicators for the CSR at the organisational level which aims at maintaining the balance between the economic, social and environmental elements.

The report highlights the procedures that are followed by the organisation for the improvement of monitoring and evaluation of results orientation which eventually helps in setting out adequate policies and programs towards achieving Dubai Customs challengeable objectives in-line with Dubai Government strategic guidelines. In this respect, the executive directors at Dubai Customs always seek to motivate employees to exchange their ideas in performance improvement, especially in the areas which lack development. With regard to the workforce initiative, the report highlights Dubai Customs adherence to improve rate of Emiratisation through recruiting highly qualified skilful and professional nationals and then train them to develop their technical and behavioural competencies. In this regard, the percentage of the Emiratisation , by the end of 2011, has reached to record 79.3 per cent which has been recorded as the highest percentage amongst all competitive Dubai government departments. The report also introduces Dubai Customs ideal workplace environment which extend to involve open availability of opportunities before employees to develop and invest their skills as required. This has ultimately been achieved in 2011 as the year has witnessed a growing numbers of training programs reaching to 362 (internal and external training sessions) against 324 during 2010, with average of 18.7 hours per local employee and 13 hours per expatriate employee. Dubai Customs also launched the initiative of the Best Working Mother’s Award and introduced the approach for electing a representative for employees to ensure enhancement of transparency. The Department also gave due concern to the safety and health initiatives and launched “CADRE” programme for the enhancement of social networking with employees. In terms of market place, the report represents views from the outcomes achieved by customers last year, namely, the launch of an innovative Mobile Service, “My SMART Reports Service” which is meant to serve and provide highest level of customer service and enhance the revenues by 11.7 per cent , besides improving the growing numbers of clients who are registered with Dubai Customs.

The Dubai Customs was also recognised for the second consecutive timeto secure the first place in 2011, receiving the ‘Arabia CSR Award’for the Government Sector category in which more than 110 competitors from different international and Arab world companies and corporation participated.