Toby Webb gives some thoughts on three big sustainable business questions
How can activists engage effectively?
Here’s what campaigners might want to consider when engaging big companies.
1. Your idea about how you notify companies is very different from theirs. Speaking to a mid-level supply chain manager before you launch a campaign is not “engagement” at a high policy level. You cannot legitimately say to companies “we warned you” if the director in charge of external relations didn’t know about your requests.
2. Once you set the conditions, honour them. Don’t engage in success creep where the definition of success changes as the company starts to come around. Go ahead and set a new challenge once the first is met, but honour commitments for achievement of success.
3. Have a session on definitions with a company. Words have different meanings for the business and NGO communities, especially around timing and success criteria.
4. Once a company is at the table there is often no need to beat them up again. Being there means that you have already scored a hit. No need to alienate them further while you both agree you are still at the table.
5. Use other companies as surrogates. If you have a good working relationship with one company solicit its help in getting another company on board. It can make the business-to-business case.
6. If you are told something “off the record”, honour that confidence. If you are planning to breach it, don’t listen in the first place.
7. Give the company a potential victory in negotiations. Let them win a small point or two if you get the big concession.
8. Timelines must be realistic. You might think a company is dragging its heels, but often it just takes a little more time than you offer to get things done.
9. Coordination among campaigners is going to be vital in future. If you want to go from campaigns to scalable solutions you will need to be more organised, nuanced and coordinated.
Can you legitimately ‘do’ sustainability when you are laying people off?
On the surface this is a tough question. Will it look tasteless or lack authenticity? I’d argue communicating around sustainability and ethics is all the more important in difficult times. It’s about how you do it, not if.
All companies express regret when losing people. Why not use that message to ask for suggestions on how the firm can be better run, save money and create further jobs in the future?
Yes, it’s a risk when cutting headcount. But your people will let off steam anyhow. So why not listen, use what you can, and show them their views matter?
A simple and cheap way is to host a senior executive Q&A on the company intranet. Both the rationale for cuts but also the opportunity of savings via sustainability thinking could be part of that conversation.
Do it right and you unleash innovation. It can be done. Tough times are not an excuse for corporate silence.
When your company lacks purpose, what do you do?
A lot of businesses don’t stand for anything. At least, nothing beyond growth and profits, and increasingly that’s not enough. Not enough to attract and retain talent. Not enough to protect reputation in a storm. Not enough to build allies and innovative partnerships. Not enough to encourage product and service innovation.
But solving this problem is really tough. Bolting on “corporate purpose” where none previously existed can’t be done overnight. Doing so creates just another corporate policy to be ignored.
So what do you do if you are big, have no purpose but now recognise that having one might be helpful? I think there are three choices:
1) Wait until your board hires a visionary (or semi-visionary) chief executive who can make this happen through sheer personal energy and belief, over a number of years.
2) Hope your current chief executive has a “road to Damascus” moment like Wal-Mart’s Lee Scott apparently did after Hurricane Katrina. Or see if you can make that moment happen by showing him/her the challenges/opportunities out there.
3) Use your lack of corporate purpose to create a pilot internal engagement campaign asking what employees believe their business should stand for. Demonstrate the value by measuring the resulting motivation changes and then scale them up. Build a champions network for sustainability and purpose. Then feed the results back to the board and try to inspire the existing leadership to listen to their people.
Doing it this last way might not work. But it’s surely a lot better than drifting along without any purpose at all
Toby Webb is founder of Ethical Corporation and Stakeholder Intelligence. He blogs daily at tobywebb.blogspot.co.uk, from where some of the material here is drawn.