Aptiv’s common values underpin our success. For a global organization like ours, having a core set of values bridges cultural differences and keeps everyone moving toward the same goals on a massive scale, which was critical last year.
As we responded to the pandemic in 2020, our values of “acting with urgency” and “working as one team” allowed Aptiv to make important decisions quickly, and our value of “thinking and acting like owners” meant everyone on the front line did the right thing to keep our people and our communities safe. This was an enormous undertaking, and I could not be prouder of the way our team met the challenges.
Our response to the pandemic demonstrated what we can accomplish when we have that sense of urgency, that single purpose and that understanding of priorities throughout the organization. It is a powerful lesson.
At Aptiv, applying that lesson starts with our mission to enable a safer, greener and more connected future of mobility. Following our mission, our products help transform society by saving lives, reducing carbon emissions and connecting people in new ways. Knowing that our products can have that impact is a significant motivator for our people, and it brings focus to everything we do.
But even as our mission promises sustainability through our products, we also apply it to the way we operate, pushing ourselves to achieve sustainable operations with the same level of passion.
Carbon-neutral by 2040
Critical to this effort is Aptiv’s ambitious plan to become carbon-neutral by 2040 while better serving our customers’ needs. As with the pandemic response, we fully understand that reaching this goal will take a comprehensive strategy, intense coordination and execution by many people over a sustained period. The goal builds on the commitments we set out in last year’s sustainability report: to decrease CO2 emissions by 25 percent by 2025 while increasing our recycling of waste, conserving water and sourcing responsibly.
To meet those commitments, we will need to have the right people in place. For Aptiv, diversity and inclusion are not just checkboxes. We understand that they are vital for the success of our organization. Our pandemic response drew on the strengths of people from vastly different backgrounds, from all over the world, and those people were diverse in experience, as well as gender and ethnicity. Diversity gives us resilience, and inclusion gives us strength. These factors will be instrumental as we continue to move technology forward in a sustainable way.
At Aptiv, sustainability starts with our products, our purpose and our mission. But we realize that the only way to hit targets is to have a plan, and then focus on executing against that plan. We track our sustainability progress every month, at every step. We assign sustainability objectives to the heads of our business units, and they cascade those throughout our organizations.
In all of these efforts, our values continue to anchor us, especially the most important value of all: “Always do the right thing, the right way.” Recognized by Ethisphere Magazine as one of the World’s Most Ethical Companies for the ninth year in a row, Aptiv understands that how we do things matters as much as what we do.
This is how change happens. This is how we build for the future. The pandemic tested us, it tested our values. We not only overcame the challenge, it made us stronger.
Learn more about Aptiv’s sustainability strategy and progress in our annual Sustainability Report.
