Responsible Business

How to Manage a CSR Strategy Successfully

Manfred Pohl, Nick Tolhurst

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780470712429
• eBook ISBN: 9780470662397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Corporate Social Responsibility, Sustainability and Corporate Citizenship are now essential elements of modern business. Responsible Business is a vital "how to" guide providing information on all aspects of the CSR process. This highly accessible book is full of insights from those responsible for implementing CSR strategy inside companies – whether as CSR managers or at top management level – with coverage of all the important aspects of CSR – from what a sustainability manager's job involves, how to handle stakeholder dialogue, supply chain management to auditing, CSR and the law, and communicating CSR.

Divided into bite-size easy-to-read chapters complete with practical checklists or "dos and don'ts", Responsible Business provides perspectives across different industries and sectors from running micro-finance at an international banking group to CSR in small companies as well as personal insights into a CSR manager's role in the automotive sector, the IT sector, the hotel business and many more.

"If CSR is ever to happen in real time, it will be in the corporate trenches, honed by managers driving CSR beyond academic ideal to practical workplace results. This new book from Europe's ICCA has it all in one place. A brilliant display of actual corporate accomplishments, workable tools, and organisational work-around strategies. Real stuff by real professionals."
—William C. Frederick, author of Corporation, Be Good! The Story of Corporate Social Responsibility

"The work of Nick Tolhurst and the ICCA in this publication and beyond is vital to the field of CSR, as well as to the interdisciplinary fields and sectors that it affects in the private sector, public sector and civil society. I suggest this book become required reading for each sector."
—Mark C. Donfried, Director and Founder, Institute for Cultural Diplomacy

1
What does a sustainability manager do?

Jason Leadbitter

In this chapter, the role, aims and activities of a sustainability manager are described, based on the personal experience of the author, who is a sustainability manager for a large chemical company – he offers a step-by-step outline of the goals that are important, how they can be achieved and the challenges that will be faced.

Company Background

I wrote this chapter to provide a personal perspective of what a sustainability manager actually does – in my case, for the INEOS ChlorVinyls chemical company. INEOS is the third largest chemical company in the world, with an extensive chemical portfolio. My responsibilities relate specifically to sustainability within chlorine chemistry and, in particular, to the plastic PVC and other chlorinated products. We are the largest European manufacturer of PVC, with plants in Norway, Sweden, Germany and the UK. In February 2008 my former company, Hydro Polymers (also a PVC producer), was acquired by INEOS. Much of what I have learnt on this personal journey, to which I will refer in this chapter, relates back to my experience with Hydro Polymers, although the opportunities and challenges under new ownership provide renewed vigour and excitement in the pursuit of sustainability.

The Role of a Sustainability Manager

The overall aim is to provide the reader with a clear insight into the practicalities involved in being a sustainability manager. In particular, precisely what does a sustainability manager do? To merely write some kind of job description is important, but this is too prescriptive. It is rather like reading the rules of chess, which is often dull and boring – it is only when you play the game that things become exciting. That said, we do need rules and principles to help guide us in the right direction and to make smart business decisions along the way, i.e. towards sustainability, or, as in the game of chess, to achieve checkmate. I also want to firmly differentiate, as I do in my mind, between two distinct roles in any organisation, namely those of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) manager and the sustainability manager. They may be one and the same person and, if that is the case, please note that there is a wealth of difference between these roles. A CSR manager’s responsibility has to do with how companies engage in societal issues on a voluntary basis, usually in collaboration with stakeholders, with an emphasis on public relations. Conversely, the sustainability manager should be addressing the longer-term strategy of the organisation regarding its core business and commitment to innovation in moving the business towards sustainability. Of course, the two roles are complementary and there is a necessary degree of overlap. However, to address these issues as one individual is a tall order, both from a practicality perspective and in differentiating the roles in your mind.

Down to Business

To be effective as a sustainability manager, a series of essential yet basic criteria must first be met:

• commitment from top management
• an understanding of the core business activities of the organisation
• an understanding of what is meant by sustainable development and sustainability
• an appreciation of where the company is today and where it should be heading
• the skills to influence and motivate the organisation to move in the right direction and thereby execute the right actions.

Commitment from Top Management

There is nothing more frustrating for sustainability managers than recycling their paper clips. The job has to be taken seriously by top management and there needs to be a mechanism whereby the sustainability strategy relates directly to short- and longer-term business plans, i.e. these must be aligned to maximise efficiency and ensure that all elements of the company are rowing in the right direction. The sustainability manager should be playing a key role in any organisation to ensure the long-term sustainability of that business. The commitment needs to go beyond just fine words. Talk is easy – it is the getting down to work that counts.

Core Business and Activities of the Organisation

Sustainability managers need to get under the skin of their organisation. There needs to be a systemic appreciation of what the organisation does or provides. We should not underestimate the sustainability footprint of any organisation – whether social, economic or environmental – and that of its products or the processes used in their manufacture. To make improvements, there is an obvious need to know the basics – this might be related to operational processes as well as the manufactured products or to those services provided by the organisation.

What Is Meant by Sustainable Development and Sustainability?

No doubt you will have heard these terms mentioned many times, but what do they really mean to you? One of the simplest explanations came from Jonathon Porritt, one of the founding directors of the sustainable development charity Forum for the Future, in the UK. Put simply, sustainability could be described as a defined state, i.e. the point at which you could continue indefinitely without serious erosion to mankind or the environment. Conversely, sustainable development is the process that drives us towards sustainability. That said, if you type sustainability into Google, you will get literally hundreds of definitions. What is important is what sustainability really means to you and the organisation you represent.

An Appreciation of Where the Company Is Today and Where It Should Be Heading

An effective sustainability manager should ask three questions that logically follow on from the question in the previous section:

1. 1. Do we have a definition of sustainability?
2. 2. Considering this definition, what is the gap between where we are today and where we are heading?
3. 3. What can we do to bridge this gap?

The Skills to Influence and Motivate the Organisation to Move in the Right Direction and Thereby Execute the Right Actions

Such skills are essential to ensure that a sustainability manager is fully equipped to take on this demanding task. Being a good manager merits a whole section in its own right. There are numerous management books that articulate the essential skills of an effective manager. For me, sustainability managers must demonstrate a belief and passion that they are making a difference to the company. Often they may be working with few, if any, subordinates. Consequently, the business case for sustainability must be compelling, and also pragmatic and sufficient to win the hearts and minds of peers. The sustainability manager must also be prepared to challenge senior management constructively, with good information and clear arguments about the benefits to the business in the long term of taking a more sustainable path. This may, at times, challenge fixed assumptions and ‘sacred cows’, so good relationships and sound arguments are essential.

So How Do We Get Started?

There are many theories about organisational culture that lead to logical engagement in sustainability – either through the transitional stage of companies moving from regulatory compliance to addressing eco-efficiency and then sustainability, or by benchmarking themselves against their competitors. In our case, we were pushed into it courtesy of Greenpeace. Back in the late 1990s, the PVC manufacturing industry was singled out principally because of our use of chlorine chemistry. In Greenpeace’s eyes, God created all the elements but one – chlorine, which was created by the Devil. And since PVC consumed around one-third of total chlorine output, it was seen as a good single-issue target. Towards the end of the 1990s, our industry had to act to prevent po­tential legislation and to stem the major threat that was being created by the Greenpeace campaign. Ironically, it was environmentalists themselves who questioned Greenpeace’s thinking that merely by phasing out PVC, the planet would be saved. Important questions needed to be asked, from a sustainability perspective, about what would replace PVC if its use in pipes, cables and a whole range of other applications was to be phased out (see Leadbitter (2002) for further reading on this process).

Across the industry, a major ‘European voluntary commitment’ was begun, known as Vinyl 2010 (see www.vinyl2010.org for details), whilst a separate, independent process initiated by an international sustainable development charity, The Natural Step, tasked the industry with answering the three questions outlined above. Firstly, did we have a definition of sustainability? This was a simple question to answer at the time: no we did not. Consequently, an investigation was completed using a sustainability model, The Natural Step Framework (see www.naturalstep.org/en/applying-framework for details), the principal outcome of which was the identification of five key sustainability challenges facing the industry if it was to become fully sustainable:

• the industry should move towards becoming carbon-neutral
• the industry should commit towards controlled-loop recycling
• the industry should phase out persistent organic compounds
• the industry should use sustainable additives in PVC
• the industry should engage the whole supply chain in order to address sustainability.

So, in a matter of a few months, not only had we been provided with a definition of sustainability, but we were also provided with details regarding the ‘gap’ between where we were and full sustainability. All that was now needed were the actions required to bridge this gap. This sounds simple, but first of all, let us review the basic criteria highlighted above.

Commitment from Top Management

The threat posed by Greenpeace ensured that top management of all European PVC producers were fully supportive of the actions required to address sustainability, although some serious concerns were being expressed about the cost of achieving this. Speaking of which, to become truly sustainable, the economic element of sustainability is hugely important – no company can aspire to being ‘clean and green’ if it means going out of business! Therefore, a profitable pathway to sustainability is a basic requirement. As we begin to bridge the gap towards sustainability, we must therefore ask ourselves a further set of questions:

• Is the investment that we will be making in a process or product a step towards sustainability, i.e. are we headed in the right direction?
• Are we creating ‘flexible platforms’ with such investment? (We want each step to enable another that leads to our goal, and thus avoid blind alleys.)
• Will the investments that we intend to make bring good enough returns? The returns here include both economic savings and environmental benefits.

An Understanding of the Core Business and Activities of the Organisation the Sustainability Manager Is Representing

Having, as I do, a strong background in industry is an extremely useful qualification when it comes to taking on the role of a sustainability manager. A distinct advantage for me personally was having a professional scientific background, although, beyond any doubt, the greatest driving force is a passion and appetite for such a challenge. There are many experts in most businesses and it is a question of tapping in to this knowledge base and learning the knack of how, where and when to apply it. Clearly, the better prepared you are with a good understanding of the business...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• About the editors
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• 1 What does a sustainability manager do?
• 2 An introduction to stakeholder dialogue
• 3 Who works in CSR? Staffing and recruitment in CSR
• 4 A legal perspective on CSR
• 5 Corporate volunteering as a tool of strategic company development
• 6 CSR assurance in practice: measuring and auditing sustainability
• 7 Sustainability reporting 2.0: from ‘Trojan horse’ to ‘value booster’
• 8 Ten rules for successful CSR communication
• 9 Event project management best practice
• 10 The role of IT in corporate sustainability strategies
• 11 CSR in the hotel industry: the Accor perspective
• 12 Microfinance: helping communities to develop
• 13 Sustainability management in the automotive sector
• 14 Beyond marketing: CSR as a business strategy for SMEs – the Betapharm story
• 15 Sports sponsoring and CSR: lessons from HypoVereinsbank
• 16 Five rules for sustainable supply chain management
• 17 Public private partnerships in corporate responsibility
• 18 CSR in developing countries
• 19 Carbon offsetting as a CSR strategy
• 20 Implementing profitable CSR: the CSR 2.0 business compass
• 21 CSR 2.0: the evolution and revolution of corporate social responsibility
• Further reading
• Index
• End User License Agreement