"Corporate citizenship guides everything we do"

How did the idea of Corporate Social Responsibility come about at Caesars?

Responsible business and being a good corporate citizen drives Caesars Entertainment in its mission to “inspire grown-ups to play.” We call our CSR efforts “corporate citizenship” because we are aware of our role as members of the communities in which we operate, and believe we are responsible for taking an active role to make the world a better place.
Caesars Entertainment formalized these principles in 2000 and introduced the Code of Commitment, our public promise to conduct ourselves with both integrity and concern for our stakeholders. The Code of Commitment is core to employee training and development, it guides corporate conduct and policy, and it is consistent across every Caesars brand and property. Our corporate citizenship work reflects the four commitment areas outlined in the Code of Commitment: enriching the experiences of our guests, the lives of our employees, the vitality of our communities, and reducing our impact on the environment.
When it comes to our commitment to environmental sustainability, our employees were the early drivers of CodeGreen, our multi-year strategy to identify, monitor, assess, and reduce our material impacts on the environment. Launched in 2010 and active throughout the organization, we are extremely proud that employees continue to lead many of our innovative environmental programs.

How do you create shared value for business and society?

For each commitment area, we have established programs, policies and goals to ensure we are distributing value wherever we operate. We track our progress in key areas such as community investment performance, responsible gaming, employee wellness & development, and environmental stewardship.
Last year, we exceeded our aggressive environmental-sustainability goals to reduce energy and carbon emissions and also surpassed our waste-diversion goal. Caesars also made significant strides in the reduction of water use and continued community giving. Caesars Foundation has granted more than $3.6 million to community partners in the previous year and has donated more than $66 million to date. In 2014, employees in our HERO volunteer program contributed nearly 200,000 service hours to more than 600 social and environmental events.

Caesars has a legacy of leading the industry in pioneering Responsible Gaming programs, training over 43,000 employees annually and continuing to innovate tools and resources to help promote Responsible Gaming at all our properties. We help local communities flourish through economic contributions by taxes we pay, the jobs we create, and the suppliers with whom we engage. We prioritize diversity in our workforce and supply chain. For example, we have hired more than 600 veterans since the start of our Enlisting Heroes initiative in 2013, and have helped grow the businesses of some of our small minority-owned or women-owned suppliers by more than 200 percent.

Is CSR at the core of your daily business operations? How do you benefit from these efforts?

Caesars has a multitude of CSR programs in place that touch employees, guests and our operations daily. Whether it’s rallying employees to build a vegetable garden for a local school, working with city officials to boost tourism goals, integrating the latest energy saving technologies in our buildings, or hosting a networking event for our small business vendors, corporate citizenship guides everything we do.

The happier and more supported our employees feel, the better our team is able to provide an exceptional level of service for our guests. The correlation between engaged employees and satisfied guests is consistently proven through input from the 200k to 475k customer surveys we receive each year. Our values are also felt in the services and experiences we offer our guests. In proof, last year, the popular Travel + Leisure magazine named Caesars as one of the 22 best travel & hospitality companies that support the LGBT community.

What does your company do in order to promote CSR?

As a company, Caesars empowers employees to practice what we preach in sustainability and other corporate citizenship areas. As a part of our CodeGreen At Home program, we reward employees with Total Return credits that are redeemable for travel, events, and merchandise. The program emphasizes long-term behavior changes to reduce the carbon footprint and make a positive environmental impact. One-time actions like replacing inefficient appliances are rewarded, but even more credits are awarded for changes like continued recycling, composting, and carpooling. We also encourage employees to take an active role in their communities and our HERO volunteer teams at each of our resorts volunteer their time, expertise, creativity and passion to initiatives that improve people's lives.
External communications is an important piece of sustainability and our CSR work because many of these challenges are really tough and often require people to change behavior. We have found that the more we can tackle difficult issues head on and talk about them openly and intelligently, the more our efforts will gain trust and respect. Each year we publish a Corporate Citizenship Report to address our standards and inform our key stakeholders in government and in the community about who we are and how we perform.

CSR is important for people but also vital for business success. Why?

We believe that outstanding corporate citizenship is strongly connected to business growth and financial performance. In fact, a 2013 Harvard study in which Caesars participated proved the positive correlation between the CodeGreen program and the service profit chain, further supporting the results of our surveys, which consistently show that happy employees drive the satisfaction and loyalty of our customers.

In providing sustainable options such as environmentally-friendly business events through our Responsible Meetings program, expanding our network of 50 electric vehicle charging stations, and recycling hotel toiletries to be donated to impoverished communities around the world, our guests feel good about choosing a Caesars casino-resort.
By considering how to engage guests in environmental and social issues, Caesars has become an early leader across not only hospitality, but all industries.

Responsible businesses may not necessarily be able to measure the positive impact their behavior has on their performance; however, irresponsible businesses are likely to notice the negative impact their decisions have on their bottom line. How does CSR impact the company?

Caesars Corporate Citizenship has allowed us to retain and attract our workforce talent, create more satisfying guest experiences, and elevate the public’s view of our place in their communities.

We’ve been recognized in the industry for our sustainability efforts, including the Environmental Protection Agency’s 2014 Climate Leadership Award for Excellence in Greenhouse Gas Management and Green Key Eco-certifications for all our U.S. properties, the most of any gaming company in the U.S. In 2014, Points of Light recognized Caesars Entertainment as one of America’s most community-minded companies in the prestigious Civic 50, and Caesars has received a 100% perfect score in the Human Rights Campaign Corporate Equality Index for eight consecutive years, the longest running in the industry.