Yandex

Yandex is committed to integrating accessible design principles in its products. The company has several features on its food delivery and navigation apps to accommodate users with disabilities. Furthermore, it regularly collects feedback from people with disabilities to improve its services, and partners with organisations focused on accessibility.

Through its platform Yandex.Lyceum, the company provides computer programming training to high school students. Its School of Data Analysis provides technical skills training to university and graduate students in the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Israel aspiring for a career in research and IT. Additionally, the company contributes to school connectivity through Yandex.Textbook, which provides teachers with online educational content. The company also follows best practice by reporting participation metrics for all its programmes.

Yandex discloses responsibility for cybersecurity at a senior level and follows industry norms for monitoring and responding to security incidents. The company also has a group-level privacy policy and publishes a transparency report. Yandex offers content control for its products and services, and it partners with organisations like Internet Watch Foundation to remove child abusive content from the internet and improve its filtering methods.

Yandex supports open innovation through various open source projects. It also supports the SDGs and uses them to measure goals and progress. Furthermore, it discloses the total number of women in technical roles in the company.

Yandex has an opportunity to contribute to digital inclusivity of women and girls. It can also disclose the number of its employees with disabilities and outline steps taken to create an inclusive workplace for them. The company should report how the economic value it generates is distributed among its stakeholders, as well as its taxes paid and employment in the markets where it operates.

Yandex has an opportunity to support initiatives for basic and intermediate digital skills development. It can also conduct third-party impact assessments to better understand the results of its programmes.

Yandex can disclose additional information about its information security. For example, it can make a copy of its information security management certificate publicly available, and can report on data breaches. Further, it can strengthen its group-level privacy policy by going beyond minimum compliance requirements. As a digital company, Yandex should also make a high-level policy commitment to child online protection.

No evidence was found of the company’s activities for supporting tech innovation ecosystems. Yandex has an opportunity to improve in this area by supporting start-ups. It can also disclose the ethical principles it follows in its research and development (R&D) activities.

Yandex commits to respecting all human rights in a publicly available policy statement. However, the company does not have a formal policy commitment to respect the ILO core labour rights. Furthermore, it does not expect its business relationships to commit to respecting the ILO core labour rights. The company has a grievance mechanism accessible to all stakeholders to raise human rights complaints.

Yandex has included human rights issues in its materiality assessment. However, it does not disclose a process to identify, assess and take action on salient human rights risks associated with its own operations and with its business relationships. Moreover, the company describes the stakeholders it engages with on sustainability in general. But it does not specify whether it engages with stakeholders whose human rights could be affected by its activities.

Yandex provides quantitative health and safety information and states that it wants to provide a safe working environment. However, it has no formal policy statement that commits to respecting the health and safety of workers. It also does not place this expectation on its business relationships. The company does not disclose a policy commitment stating that it does not require workers to work more than the regular and overtime hours. It also does not explicitly state that it requires its business relationships to do the same.

Yandex states that it provides its employees with fair renumeration, but it does not disclose whether this is enough to maintain a decent standard of living for the employee and their family. The company also does not publicly commit to gender equality. In relation to workforce diversity, Yandex provides a breakdown of employees in different employee categories by gender. However, it does not disclose against any other indicators of diversity per employee category, such as age group.

Yandex has a policy prohibiting bribery and corruption, and it includes anti-bribery and anti-corruption clauses in contracts with its business relationships. It also has a grievance mechanism for stakeholders to raise concerns and complaints on the topic. Furthermore, Yandex does not disclose a global tax strategy. The company discloses the income taxes it pays under three categories: Russia, the Netherlands and other countries. However, it does not disclose income tax payments in individual tax jurisdictions. Furthermore, Yandex does not disclose a global tax strategy. No relevant information was found in relation to the company’s approach to lobbying and political engagement.  

The below datasheet disaggregates scores within the three core social measurement areas and by specific indicators.