Creating Employee Champions

How to Drive Business Success through Sustainability Engagement Training

Joanna Sullivan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351274586
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Disengaged employees cost companies billions in lost productivity and high turnover rates. Integrating sustainability into the soul of your business can unleash an "upward spiral" of engagement, and turn your employees into sustainability champions.Making business sustainability part of the job description drives employees towards collaboration, community and commitment. It transforms employees into authentic brand ambassadors and companies into movements. In addition, companies that embed sustainability are better positioned to anticipate and adapt to changing market conditions.Creating Employee Champions offers a three-step method for sustainability engagement training, and a paradigm shift in employee engagement and business sustainability. Use it to transplant NGO DNA into business DNA, so you can inspire hearts and minds, engage employees, foster dynamic commitment to meet sustainability goals and equip employees to engage with external stakeholders.

CHAPTER 1
Putting Social Responsibility at the Heart of Business Strategy: What is a Sustainable Business?

1.1 The big issues: What's driving sustainability?

SEVERAL MAJOR UNPRECEDENTED CHALLENGES are facing business leaders today. Resource scarcity is creating price volatility, climate change is resulting in mass migration, globalisation is forcing radical transparency, and the availability of big data is compelling business leaders to think and act like sustainability champions.

Resource scarcity The world’s population is projected to reach more than 9 billion people by 2050. Rising living standards will expand markets for goods and services but place unprecedented demands on the planet’s natural resources. Many of the resources once considered renewable – like forests and fresh water – have become finite since human demands are growing more quickly than the ability of the natural world to replenish them. Natural resource shortages will increasingly pose significant risks to the economic and social stability of entire regions. Deforestation, water shortages and energy shortages are all significant challenges.

Price volatility The risk that the world might enter a new era of high and volatile prices over the next two decades is significant. Up to three billion people could join the middle class, boosting demand just when obtaining new resources is difficult and costly. Price shocks from environmental deterioration or climate change will lead to food shortages and price hikes.

Climate change Current estimates suggest that the average global temperature is set to increase by up to 2°C. The impacts will be catastrophic. Extreme weather, rising sea levels, floods and water shortages will impact not just agriculture and fisheries, but also infrastructure and transport. Planning for a policy environment increasingly hostile toward carbon emissions and adapting to climate change require foresight.

Demographic change With explosive population growth in some countries and decline in others, people’s goals and aspirations will change. Many of those displaced by climate change will abandon the countryside and become part of the urban sprawl. Half of the world’s population now lives in cities. The growing gap between rich and poor will exacerbate social instability. Worker availability, experience and skills will require businesses to fast track knowledge about training, multi-lingual work environments and migration issues. Diversity policies come to the fore.

The global economy The integration of national economies into the global economy has brought substantial opportunities for business, but also significant risks. More and more companies operate in or source from multiple countries with wide differences in environmental and social regulation. Whatever the local practice, stakeholder groups expect companies to respect home standards for social acceptability, human rights, transparency and environmental justice in their business operations globally. Consumers expect their products to be sourced without harm.

Radical transparency Advances in communication technology have reduced not only the time it takes to build a reputation, but also the time it takes to destroy one. It’s a world of many-to-many communication, open, uncontrolled, mass media, where everyone has a potential stake in every issue and every business. One quarter of the world population use a smartphone at least monthly, and the same number use Facebook, with 24/7 opportunity for engagement. Twitter counts 240 million monthly active users: 300 billion tweets have been sent since 2006. It’s easy for NGOs and individuals to track a company’s sustainability performance and to widely disseminate negative opinions. Everyone is a journalist.

Big data Big data’s potential impact on sustainability is driven by the desire to understand interactions between business and nature; interactions of business with consumers, suppliers and markets; and nature’s own interactions, ecosystems, climate change and lifecycles. Getting a grip of the big picture from big data is now possible due to technology. Business can now understand the impact of their entire value chain, including raw materials, suppliers, customers’ product use, how waste is dealt with, and investments. It means having the possibility – or obligation – to take targeted and measurable sustainability action.

According to survey opinion CEOs appear to worry most about resource scarcity, climate change, urbanisation and demographic changes as the top megatrends set to transform business.⁵

Sustainability is driving innovation

People are being forced to think outside the box as the challenges are so overwhelming, demanding thinking and skills way beyond those required of CEOs in the last century. Companies are expected to be profitable, green and socially minded. They are expected to know what’s happening at every stage of their supply chain, contribute to the UN development goals, empower women, solve problems of illiteracy, support democracy and civil society and have opinions on human issues of civil rights, gay rights, parenting and education. Companies should sound and act like they have a conscience. Like nothing before, sustainability is driving innovation within business, in communication, energy efficiency, community and employee engagement.

According to the Harvard Business Review:⁶

We’ve been studying the sustainability initiatives of 30 large corporations for some time. Our research shows that sustainability is a mother lode of organisational and technological innovations that yield both bottom-line and top-line returns. Becoming environment-friendly lowers costs because companies end up reducing the inputs they use. In addition, the process generates additional revenues from better products or enables companies to create new businesses. In fact, because those are the goals of corporate innovation, we find that smart companies now treat sustainability as innovation’s new frontier.

Sustainability is creating a paradigm shift in business thinking

One significant way companies are starting to innovate for sustainability is by reassessing the economic model in which they operate. Not only are some companies bold enough to report less often than the usual quarterly, thus allowing for longer-term thinking, others are starting to see their operations as circular as opposed to linear.

The circular economy logic is based upon the dramatic reality of resource scarcity, a massive driver to sustainability innovation, and how to make the transition from the traditional linear mode – of production and consumption, inputs in, waste out – to a circular model, based on reusing resources, regenerating natural capital and designing for reuse.

The circular economy provides a coherent framework for systems level re-design and as such offers an opportunity to harness innovation and creativity to enable a positive, restorative economy.⁷

The evolution of the global economy from an increasingly resource-constrained ‘take-make-dispose’ model towards one that is circular and regenerative by intention poses a huge opportunity for business innovation.

Two years ago, we decided to embed circular-economy thinking in our strategic vision and mission, both as a competitive necessity and with the conviction that companies solving the problem of resource constraints will have an advantage. We believe that customers will increasingly consider natural resources in their buying decisions and will give preference to companies that show responsible behavior. . . Designing products and services for a circular economy can also bring savings to a company. The first impression people always have is that it adds costs, but that’s not true. We find that it drives breakthrough thinking and can generate superior margins. PHILIPS CEO, FRANS VAN HOUTEN⁸

Several chief executives in Davos 2014 were keen to show that the circular economy is not just about corporate social responsibility, but about sound business sense. Scarcity of raw materials combined with a rapidly growing global middle class has put enormous pressure on the current linear model of business as usual.

1.2 Defining the pathway: Responsibility or sustainability?

As far back as the mid-1980s the Brundtland Commission’s report defined sustainable development as ‘development which meets the needs of current generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’.

For the European Commission, corporate social responsibility is ‘the responsibility of enterprises for their impacts on society’.

To fully meet their social responsibility, enterprises should have in place a process to integrate social, environmental, ethical human rights and consumer concerns into their business operations and core strategy in close collaboration with their stakeholders.⁹

Sustainability is the solution as framed by governments and NGOs, while corporate social responsibility (CSR) is the business frame. The two terms are interchangeable for the purposes of this book. And the frame is constantly expanding as more is known about the challenges facing humanity, and as technology raises the communications bar.

Increasing circles of responsibility

Companies are today responsible beyond their business success: for their supply chains, biodiversity protection, even reducing social inequity. Many are just starting to digest the big data about their business footprint, and the global challenges facing their business future, developing strategies that can either sustain or adapt the business model to the new realities.

In today’s interconnected world, responsible business conduct matters more than ever before. The 2013 Rana Plaza tragedy in Bangladesh demonstrated this. But not only the textile sector, also the extractives, agriculture and finance sectors continue to face major criticism for their perceived lack of global social responsibility. These sectors continue to act in a largely unsustainable way.

Citizens increasingly integrate their own ethics into the sustainability conversation, with animal welfare gaining as much Facebook time as worker welfare, and tax avoidance, bashing big business and brand desecration as popular as human survival. The sustainability landscape is wide open and constantly being redefined. CEOs who don’t notice that continue at their peril. It is their employees who know better what sustainability means. It’s what they themselves care about and worry about.

Education for sustainability

One of the cross-cutting issues to promote sustainable development is education, highly relevant to business as there is a place for adult education at the workplace. In the Future We Want conclusions of the 2012 Rio20+ Summit, education features prominently:

Full access to quality education at all levels is an essential condition for achieving sustainable development, poverty eradication, gender equality and women’s empowerment, as well as human development.

Education for sustainability is as relevant for school childr...