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How do you implement Social Responsibility initiatives without losing sight of your goals as a business?

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Peter Burgess

CSRwire, The Corporate Social Responsibility Newswire 8,693 members Member Sharon Young, LEED Green Associate Follow Sharon How do you implement Social Responsibility initiatives without losing sight of your goals as a business? Sharon Young, LEED Green Associate Director of Sustainability at Emerald Brand Sometimes Corporate Social Responsibility Means Putting Profit First impaktcorp.com Businesses often find their social impact is greater when they concentrate on their strengths. Like Comment (2) Follow Reply Privately1 day ago Comments 2 comments

Christine Haskell Christine Christine Haskell Leadership Consultant

Hi Sharon,

This question interested me so much, I studied it for two years--with some frustration. I did some cursory research on compliance to GRI initiatives in this paper: https://saybrook.academia.edu/ChristineHaskell

My conclusion about sustainability is too hard to define for people to really impart any sort of compliance outside of GRI guidelines. I think the unspoken secret to these initiatives is to actually live them. That means the company needs to fully integrate them in everything they do. Natural Step and Nike are good examples of companies that really pivoted on sustainability and deepened their brand as a result. That way, CSR and sustainability are no longer separate to your core business. How integrated these get is truly a leadership issue.

I believe that the most common failure of organizations that adopt CSR or sustainability initiatives is that they are 'bolted on to' a business. As such individuals in these departments are often not included in critical planning sessions, have separate success metrics from the rest of the business, and can be thought of as a distraction. This relegates them to marketing and PR. The irony is that most of the organization if given a choice, would want to work in this department and customers like the added benefits of green initiatives.

In my opinion, the opportunity that businesses have is to educate people on the benefits of profit /and/ sustainability. For instance, I was in a bagel shop the other day when a customer was urging the owner to go 100% organic. He said, 'ok, i already use organic flower but your bagels would be $9.50' whether that price is accurate is not important. Customers don't even really know what sustainable means, and have yet to experience true costs for things they are purchasing. Businesses benefit from certain materials that are not 100% organic, that still do not ruin the planet. Businesses can own the message of what is best produced at scale with minimum impact to the masses and environment, and what makes sense to be 100% sustainable.

Looking at your brand, sustainability seems to be a core value. My questions to consider are: * aspects of your business are not adopting sustainability or require influence to do so? -what success measures indicate that adopting sustainability requires a trade off with profit? and, if the answer relates to the cost of your product going up in order to comply with sustainable standards....what dilemma does that bring about, how might that evolve your messaging?

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Stephanie Philbrick Stephanie Stephanie Philbrick Communications, writing and research: Helping people tell their stories

This is so interesting to me and relates to what I'm working on at the moment: what does sustainability mean. There's a lot of talk about it, training for reporting and encouragement for companies to adopt sustainable practices but there doesn't seem to be an accepted definition of what this is. Even GRI is vague about - leaving it up to the company to define what it means for them. I think this is why customers don't know what it means. Does it mean green? Does it mean healthy? Does it mean minimizing risk so that a company can sustain its' operating model? I think we're operating under many different ideas of what sustainability means for business and that sometimes it really is just marketing. Can sustainability have teeth with a clear and accepted definition? Like Reply privately Flag as inappropriate 6 hours ago

Peter Burgess Peter Burgess Founder/CEO at TrueValueMetrics developing Multi Dimension Impact Accounting

Sharon / Christine / Stephanie

The idea that business has to choose between 'right' and 'more right' should not come as a surprise because business is complex and operates in a complex society, a complex economy and on top of a complex ecosystem. The core problem as I see it is that most of the analysis is based on rather simplistic ideas that are not suited to figuring out what would be optimum in the complex situation that is the real world.

The problem is compounded by the ideology that more and more profit is a good thing. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it is not. Profit delivers benefit to owners of business which is good, but often does it by having unacceptable employee remuneration and workplace conditions which is bad. Conventional accounting has done a very good job of helping business manage itself for the profit goal, but is complete out of touch when it comes to accounting for impact on society and the environment.

I argue that the purpose of all economic activity is to provide goods and services that people need to maintain and improve quality of life and standard of living while doing the least damage to the natural environment. We do not have efficient measures and analytical techniques for this, though a good number of initiatives are working in this direction. None of these seems to have reached the stage where it is good enough for the job at hand ... though this might well change soon.

It is very likely that some companies that are highly profitable using conventional accounting measures will prove to be doing an unacceptable level of damage to society and the environment when we start to measures these things with rigor. Until we have reliable meaningful measures these companies will continue on their merry way, while society and the environment degrade.

Peter Burgess - TrueValueMetrics Multi Dimension Impact Accounting

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