Invitation: 3rd NATIONAL SUSTAINABILITY CONFERENCE: Future Leaders’ Summit on Sustainability

Embedding sustainability in management processes: How to eat the elephant

Embedding sustainability: How to eat the elephant

By Judy Kuszewski on Feb 25, 2013

A focus on steady progress is central to properly embedding sustainability throughout a company’s functions

A typical corporate responsibility programme may begin in one of many ways. For instance, a successful pilot project. Or a high-profile commitment or target. A well regarded sustainability report may give rise to a carefully executed management initiative.

But as diverse as these examples are, what do they have in common? They can all serve as the basis for a bigger effort at embedding corporate responsibility in your company. Embedding corporate responsibility means knowing you’ve done the work to ensure everything your company does, makes and says is influenced by your goals and values. Embedding is the difference between a successful one-off project and a sustainable company.

Perhaps in a perfect world, we’d all follow a logical and methodical process for pursuing sustainability, probably beginning with identifying material issues, setting targets, developing a roadmap, and so on.

But the truth is, most companies find themselves with a mix of things that respond to different needs and pressures in different geographies or parts of the business. There is often little design evident in the company’s approach beyond the individual programmes and initiatives – which may in themselves be very well conceived but fail to leverage their success and their impact.

Impossible?

Moreover, the whole corporate responsibility and sustainability project can appear very daunting for even the best-prepared team. It can seem as though the scale of the challenge is immense, the problems beyond the ability of a single company to affect. In other words, impossible.

There’s an old saying that may be useful here: how do you eat an elephant? The answer: one bite at a time.

Any unpleasant imagery about snacking on protected species notwithstanding, it’s a useful touchstone for anyone embarking on a complex, long-term and often subtle process of changing attitudes, finding new ways to understand and measure performance, and dealing with stakeholders.

Ethical Corporation’s recent report – How to embed sustainability and corporate responsibility in management processes – provides bite-sized food for thought across the whole process of developing and embedding sustainable business across a company’s operations. It provides hundreds of examples of good practices from real companies, based on dozens of interviews with leaders.

The report looks at a range of embedding practices and a series of corporate functions, to help practitioners see how their efforts can be most effectively scaled across their company, to meet their own unique needs.

Where to start?

So which bite comes first? The simple answer to the question of where to begin the embedding process is to begin where you are.

So if your company has a particular interest in targets, Ethical Corporation’s report provides a foundation to work on target-setting and implementing across a variety of business operations.

On the other hand, if you are particularly focused on the company’s supply chain, the report shows what embedding steps you can take across the whole of that function. This allows multiple entry points for companies of all sizes and stages of familiarity, and gives you the ability to play to your strengths.

Among the many insights we gained in the research for this report, a few high-level lessons stand out.

Sustainability and corporate responsibility needs both champions and cheerleaders. While it’s essential to be able to draw on specialised expertise where available, there also needs to be a shared basic understanding and commitment across the company. If sustainability or corporate responsibility is seen as the job of the “CR department”, you’re in trouble.

Don’t close off your options too early. Often, companies face the temptation to limit the scope of their efforts in a bid to keep things simple. In those cases, you may find yourself with a set of initiatives that won’t address what you really need them to. If you must begin with a limited scope in order to gain early acceptance, you will need to keep in mind the gaps that need to be closed as you go forward.

Help others to see the bigger picture. Use of tools such as road maps can help colleagues understand where the company is going, as well as where it stands today. This is essential to maintaining motivation.

Share the wealth. Sharing stories, building skills and tapping into employees’ latent desire to make a difference in the world. Corporate responsibility can be a powerful motivator and source of enthusiasm, as well as a driver of creative success.

Job done? Think again. Complacency is a great temptation in any endeavour, where a successful roll-out may lull people into believing that the hard work is over. Risks constantly evolve, as do demands through the value chain and relationships with stakeholders.

But at the same time, sources of value and innovation are constantly emerging as well, and sustainability can help unlock this value.

Judy Kuszewski is an independent writer and consultant on sustainable business. She led the research and writing team on the recent Ethical Corporation report “How to embed sustainability and corporate responsibility in management processes”.

How the company of 2020 will operate in a resource-constrained world By Steven Wilding

“…94% of businesses lack an adequate long term strategy to deal with

resource scarcity.”

How the company of 2020 will operate in a resource-constrained world

By Steven Wilding on Feb 18, 2013

Key findings and challenges identified during the recent hour-long webinar

The extract includes some key findings and future challenges identified by our expert speakers and contributions from the audience. Several industry polls took place during the webinar which have also been factored into the selected findings.

The webinar featured the following expert speakers:

• Raji Hattar, Chief Sustainability and Compliance Officer, Aramex
• Nicola Kimm, Corporate Sustainability Director, CSM
• Ioannis Ioannou, Assistant Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship, London Business School

A few of the webinar’s key findings

1. 94% of businesses lack an adequate long term strategy to deal with resource scarcity.
2. Lack of C-suite engagement. Currently there is too much emphasis on so called “super CEOs” such as Paul Polman at Unilever. Most CEOs are not showing enough leadership on the issue of resource scarcity.
3. Sustainable products are only more expensive when a company has failed to innovate sufficiently to create a green and competitively priced product or not invested enough in R&D.
4. Greater competition for resources will lead to price volatility and supply shortage making it essential competing companies operate with suppliers in a collaborative way.
5. Creation of closed loop supply using by-products traditionally classed as waste will become the standard model.
6. Investors are increasingly taking note of resource scarcity as part of ESG assessment. Access to finance is improved for companies adopting a more sustainable business model.
7. Key to delivering a business model adapted to resource scarcity is the creation of a more sustainable supply chain.
8. Promoting sustainable consumption among consumers is of equal importance as engagement with frontline managers and staff.
9. Collaborative industry groups and associations, such as RSPO, are crucial for companies to manage their supply chain in a more resource friendly way.
10. Targets matter to frontline staff. Frontline managers and staff need to identify realistic, manageable and localised goals which will contribute to ambitious long term companywide targets to reduce resource usage.
11. In the Gulf States and the Middle East the attitude is moving away from sustainability as philanthropy and more towards integration of corporate responsibility in business processes especially amongst public shareholding companies.

Whilst the webinar was a solution driven debate and discussion, the challenges to overcome are immense with implementation taking place over the coming years and decades. As such, speakers and participants identified some future challenges to address in order to move towards a resource friendly business model.

Ten challenges for the future

1. Decoupling increased growth and profitability from greater use of resources.
2. Identifying resource scarcity not just as a business threat but an opportunity to develop long term partnerships with suppliers.
3. Adopting a “circular economy, cradle to cradle” approach.
4. Ending artificially cheap oil prices in resource rich states and creating awareness of its finite supply and true value.
5. Innovative development of renewable technology and its integration into mainstream energy generation.
6. Going beyond the niche of “eco labels” and “eco brands” to generate mainstream demand for sustainable products.
7. Teaching consumers which products are sustainable and why they should buy sustainable products.
8. Increasing government involvement to incentivise resource friendly business models and if necessary legislate to ensure it happens.
9. Increasing the pace of change in the Gulf States and Middle East where abandoning a philanthropic attitude to corporate responsibility is slow amongst medium sized and small companies.
10. Convincing companies of the business case for renewable energy in the long term even if the benefits may be limited in the short term.

A recording of the full hour-long webinar is available as a free download here

The discussion going forward…

All of the speakers who took part in the webinar at will be speaking at Ethical Corporation’s flagship Responsible Business Summit, May 7th and 8th in London where resource scarcity will form a key part of the agenda.

Debating resource scarcity on of the opening keynotes will be:

• Barbara J. Krumsiek, Chief Executive Officer and Chair, Calvert Investments
• Gerard Hoetmer, Chief Executive Officer, CSM 

This will be followed up by several roundtable debates looking at different aspects of resource scarcity in-depth. These will be facilitated and moderated by speakers from: Rio Tinto, Rezidor Hotel Group, ING Group, Aramex, CLP Group and First Climate.

For more information about this and all of the sessions download the Summit brochure.