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Corporate social responsibility

Business opportunities for inclusive and sustainable development | Part 1 of 2

This year DANIDA (the Danish International Development Agency) celebrated its 50th anniversary, making it one of the oldest international development agencies in the world.  To mark this it held a big pow-wow (sorry, conference) during which a paper entitled “The challenge of, and opportunity for, inclusive and sustainable development‘ (PDF) was presented.

The conference came to the conclusion that global institutions such as the United Nations and G20 had become “ineffective” and that in many countries aid should be phased out in favour of a more commercially orientated partnership approach.  These partnerships should be built with “creative disruptors” including private sector business and finance who are willing to make the difference and tackle the challenges which exist.

Reading through the paper it became more and more obvious to me that there are many, many opportunities out there for a business to become a creative disruptor and ensure that its activities build inclusive and sustainable societies.  These opportunities exist not just for sector specific companies (infrastructure, extractive industries, etc) but for any business which has a stake in inclusive and sustainable development.

However, in order to do this a business also has to face up to the four fundamental challenges the paper presents and look at how its commercial expectations and timescales can be modified to take advantage of the opportunities identified.

So, without any further ado, here are those four challenges and what business can do to turn them into opportunities.

[Read more…] about Business opportunities for inclusive and sustainable development | Part 1 of 2

10 things a sustainability website should show | Part 1 of 2

I’m not a betting man .. I get far too emotionally involved in things to be able to be objective enough.  For example: Oxford will *always* win the University Boat Race.  Always.  This is everything to do with me being brought up in Oxfordshire and nothing to do with anything else.

However, if I were a betting man I would put a small wager down that you’ve never heard of the Network for Sustainable Business (NSB).  They’re a small Canadian non-profit which produces and promotes academic research for sustainable business, with a whole slew of PhD types producing content on topics as varied as supply chains, climate change, consumerism and organisational culture.

NSB recently produced a neat four page document entitled “10 things new sustainability managers need to know“.  With a little bit of massage this can easily be morphed into “10 things a sustainability website should show”.  After all, and in the interests of transparency, if a sustainability manager knows these things then surely the company should communicate them?

[Read more…] about 10 things a sustainability website should show | Part 1 of 2

Saudi Arabia’s unique direction | CSR Around The World

Think Saudi Arabia: think oil.

Which isn’t surprising.  The country’s home to Al-Ghawar, the world’s largest oil field which pumps out a stonking 5 million barrels of crude oil per day.  Ironically (or perhaps fortunately?) it lies under the world’s largest single stretch of sand, the Rub’ al-Khali or “Empty Quarter” which covers over a quarter of the country.

The country has some other more surprising “world’s largest” facts: it’s the world’s second largest country without any major permanent water sources and the world’s twelfth largest country overall.

All of which gives me pause for thought.  Part of CSR and the business sustainability agenda is to create robust and socially inclusive economies.  Saudi Arabia’s economy is pretty well single industry and, to put it delicately, it’s not renowned for being particularly socially inclusive.

So when I “met” Bushra Azhar on Twitter, founder of Middle Eastern business sustainability consultancy Good Business Sense and based in Saudi Arabia … well, I just had to get hold of her and ask her all about it!

[Read more…] about Saudi Arabia’s unique direction | CSR Around The World

One plus one can be greater than two: the power of We

wooden word we‘We’ can mean something different every time you say it.

For a business, apart from being self-referential (‘we do this’), ‘we’ usually means business + stakeholder.

Here are six types of ‘we’ where working together on responsibility activities creates more than working alone:

  1. Where ‘we’ = business + customer

    There have been a number of initiatives where businesses and customers have combined their efforts on particular corporate responsibility projects. Many of these are in the retail sector, such as:

    • Tesco’s Buy One Give One Free (buy an item of school uniform; Tesco will give an entire school uniform to a child in Kenya, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka)
    • The Big Bra Hunt initiated by Oxfam but also part of the Oxfam/Marks & Spencer Clothes Exchange. Uniqlo also operate a clothing-recycling CSR strategy with UNHCR. These projects support the reuse aspect of reduce-reuse-recycle by asking customers to return the clothes they’ve finished with for reuse elsewhere.

    There are also examples where companies work together to help customers improve their energy efficiency, such as utility companies working with OPower to communicate with customers about their electricity usage using gamification ideas and providing information on how to make savings. When provided with this information, consumers typically respond by reducing their bills by 2.5-4% a month, and the OPower website reports savings of over 1,520,000,000KW so far…

  2. Where ‘we’ = business + NGOs

    There are many, many examples of companies working with NGOs to combine skills for the greater good. Here is just one of the many:

    HSBC is working with three NGOs (Earthwatch, Wateraid and WWF) on a Water Programme. Together, by combining financial strength, scale and expertise in the issues involved, they will tackle problems of water supply and sanitation in river basins in order to benefit communities in need and enable economies to prosper. Over 100,000 HSBC employees will be involved…

  3. Where ‘we’ = business + business

    Businesses working together on CSR projects or initiatives include:

    • companies related by supply chain. An example of collaboration here is Sedex which enables the secure exchange of sustainability information between suppliers and their customers. By working together, it reduces the burden of multiple audits on suppliers, while supporting buyers in managing ethical and responsible practices in their supply chain.
    • competitors collaborating in consortia, such as the Sustainability Consortium which involves companies within a sector working together to develop standards and tools to measure sustainability.
  4. Where ‘we’ = business + employees

    This is perhaps both more commonplace and more difficult to pin down. The usual style of interaction is of the business asking employees which charities they’d like the business to support, or of the business match-funding employees’ fund-raising activities, or of the business supporting employees to work on community projects during work-time. These are at the simpler end of ‘we’.

    A slightly more complex angle is that of businesses supporting employees to change their energy-related choices in their private lives. One example is SwissRe. Their COYou2 Reduce and Gain programme enables employees to claim subsidies from the company for a range of emissions-cutting investments, such as groundwater heat pumps, solar panels or hybrid cars.

  5. Where ‘we’ = business + crowd

    Examples here include companies that have asked ‘the crowd’ to come up with sustainability ideas or to nominate and vote for causes to be supported:

  6. Where ‘we’ = business + academia

    And companies work with academics to move sustainability forward in a variety of different ways. For example:

    • Shell developed the Hearts and Minds safety toolkit, based on 20 years of university research. Profits from the sale of this kit to other companies fund research and development to help companies improve their HSE performance.
    • BT is working with the University of Cambridge’s Engineering and Design Centre on a toolkit for “Designing our Tomorrow“, which is scheduled to be launched next year. The toolkit will allow companies to evaluate the costs and benefits, and the environmental impact, of using different materials or of changing their approach.
    • Nestle worked with Swiss College of Agriculture to develop the RISE system for the dairy sector to assess sustainability across multiple dimensions

There you have it: 6 ways in which businesses are grouping and regrouping in different ‘we’ formations to work towards a more responsible future.

This post is part of Blog Action Day, which this year is discussing “the power of we”.

Previous contributions to Blog Action Day have been:
2011: Lessons From Food Security: Telling Us What Matters
2010: Mixing Oil and Water
2009: Climate change and the corporate site
2008: Celebrating the FTSE 100: action on the breadline
2007: Enticing the green investor

Un-Stalling CSR with the Value Creation Framework | Part 2/2

(This is part two of this article, inspired in part by Forbes’ Why has Corporate Social Responsibility stalled? and looking at EABIS’ Value Creation Network (PDF). Part one can be read here).

Restarting CSR

The key to keeping the CSR agenda going lies in the SME businesses.  This is both acknowledged and discarded by the Forbes article:

Paul Klein: The vast majority of economic value is created by small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have the knowledge or resources to operationalize CSR. Is there an opportunity to engage small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in CSR and deliver social results on a scale that dwarfs what we’re seeing now?

Aron Cramer: I think that SMEs have a huge role to play …  Although SMEs don’t always have the resources to formalize sustainability, every business has employees, and thinking about how they are treated is crucially important. Every SME depends on having access to water and energy that is sustainable and clean so this is an issue of importance everywhere and also a big opportunity.

If CSR is ever going to have any impact, it has to engage SMEs: in reality, the big business version which is talked about is simply the hothouse development of what has to become business norms no matter what size the business. [Read more…] about Un-Stalling CSR with the Value Creation Framework | Part 2/2

Un-Stalling CSR with the Value Creation Framework | Part 1/2

A few days ago a Forbes blog entitled Why has Corporate Social Responsibility stalled? did the rounds.  It’s an interesting read and I’m not out to criticise.  However it did bring to mind some research from a few years ago.

Back in 2008, before Lehman Brothers fell flat on its face, the European Academy of Business in Society (EABIS) launched a project entitled Measuring the financial and non-financial performance of the firm.

This took the form of an extensive dialogue between businesses, academics, regulators and investors with the objective of exploring the link between ESG performance and a company’s financial success.

You can see some of the headline conclusions on the Investor Value website and download the full report Sustainable Value (PDF) from the same website.

A major part of the report is the Value Creation Framework, produced by researchers from University Bocconi.  They described it as CSR .. The ‘C’ stands for Complex.  Looking at the Value Creation Framework model above, you can understand why!

[Read more…] about Un-Stalling CSR with the Value Creation Framework | Part 1/2