The sustainability challenge: move away from language and toward experience.

By Emily Drew

Angry Birds and Cinepuzzle. Those are the favorite games of Judah Schiller, CEO of Saatchi & Saatchi S, whose San Francisco office got rid of the board room years ago and replaced it with a game room, complete with Xbox Kinect. “We have our best meetings in the game room,” Schiller and his colleagues told me at Sustainable Brands ’11 this week.

Schiller’s own love for gaming led Saatchi S to a study released this week called, “Engagement Unleashed: Gamification for Business, Brands, and Loyalty.”

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International giving boosts human resources’ return on investment.

Part One of a two-part series.

By Pamela Hawley

Here’s our corporate world situation: your Fortune 500 company is opening eight offices abroad next year. Or perhaps you’ve moved from the U.S. to open up a new office in silicon hotspot Bangalore. Even if you are a domestic company, your employees are increasingly from all over the world. So now your domestic company is global even if you don’t have offices overseas!  

As a socially responsible company, international giving is no longer optional. Your company will need to expand its philanthropy in order to capitalize on increasing new business opportunities, new potential clients and personnel retention. It will supercharge your business life for the better.

First, you want the community you are entering to know you care. This means demonstrating commitment to the local community beyond simply selling your product, as important as that is. And through strategic giving, you can fortify your brand, reach more consumers, impress political officials and gain important buy-in with people on the ground in these new countries.

Secondly, your clientele wants to be allied with a company that is doing well in profits and philanthropy. They want to know you are a good citizen, in ethics, values and investing in the local NGOs in order to help others. Further, it’s part of a good strategy to attract new clients.

Finally, you as a leader, as well as your employees, will learn about a new culture and connect across political and cultural boundaries. And while your headquarter CSR objectives may focus your philanthropy on business-minded objectives such as technology or education, your employees on the ground live in a different reality. What are they seeing? Do they walk by starving children in a slum? Do they see a polluted river running through the city, with people bathing in it and washing their clothes, as I witnessed in Kolkatta? Then most likely, they are going to want your company to be a part of the solution and help feed these children or help clean up this river.

For business as well as humanitarian reasons, we should be responsive to these employees’ “eyes on the ground.” Helping rehabilitate a slum and the children who live there is not only positive brand building for you on the ground, but also a great way to keep your employees engaged, happy and committed to your company.

So with the above factors we have reason enough to give. But wait a minute, says the domestic company. “I don’t have employees abroad, and this doesn’t apply to me.”

Then the tsunami crisis in Asia hits, followed by the floods in Pakistan and now the earthquake and tsunami in Japan. And your employees want to be involved. Whether your company is there or not, the call to give internationally is a personnel imperative. Let your employees know your company cares. 

To be even more strategic, I’d listen to your employees further. Take some time to sit down with your leader of HR and really understand the makeup of your workforce. What percent has emigrated from other countries? Estimates indicate one in 10 U.S. workers and 70% of migrant workers send some form of remittance each year. In 2010, remittances were expected to reach $325 billion, with India, China, and Mexico topping the list of recipients: they took in $55, $51 and $23 billion respectively. For smaller countries, remittances can contribute a staggering amount to GDP: 35% for Tajikistan and 28% for Tonga.

Even further, who in your company is a first generation American with parents from a particular country? Here, ties to family and community are very strong and the desire to give back to one’s roots is ingrained. It’s our instinct to honor our heritage – to connect with where we came from even if we haven’t visited. 

So while giving is to help people, and your motives should be sincere, there is no doubt giving back to your employees’ homelands is part and parcel of a solid, listening HR retention plan.

A final note of encouragement: you’ll be making an extremely significant impact. We’ll cover this more in Part Two, How Your Giving Scales Internationally.

About Pamela Hawley 

Pamela Hawley is Founder and CEO of UniversalGiving, a Web-based marketplace that helps people give and volunteer with the top-performing, vetted projects all over the world. Her blog is Living and Giving.

Talkback Readers: What outstanding examples can you share of global corporate giving? Tell us on Talkback!

Sustainability leaders can influence five to 10 times their budgets.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By CSRwire Contributing Writer Elaine Cohen

Corporate sustainability budgets amount to a small fraction of a percent of sales at the largest companies. But effective sustainability executives control spending five to 10 times greater than their own budget.

A new piece of well-written research published this month by GreenResearch, a research, advisory and consulting firm focused on cleantech, alternative energy and sustainability, maintains sustainability executives have financial clout way beyond what a quick look at corporate sustainability budgets might indicate. I am reminded of a quotation often attributed to Anita Roddick: “If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.” So true! Whilst it may not be appropriate to compare sustainability leaders with mosquitos, whose presence and impact can be rather irritating and not terribly productive, and often gets them swatted out of play, there is a lesson here that sustainability practitioners can learn: mastering the art of influence.

GreenResearch interviewed more than 30 senior sustainability executives at major companies in North America and Europe, aiming to investigate the structure of the sustainability function, purpose of their sustainability strategy, budget for developing and executing strategy, and practices around sustainability reporting. Amongst key research findings is the assertion sustainability budgets are tiny, but often have outsized influence.

“Corporate sustainability budgets amount to a small fraction of a percent of sales, just a few million dollars annually at the largest companies. But effective sustainability executives control spending five to 10 times greater than their own budget through their influence on other departmental budgets.” It follows, then, to achieve their goals, sustainability executives need to master influencing skills.

“Many companies are discovering substantial environmental impacts associated with their businesses occur in their supply chains or with end customers. Sustainability leaders at these companies must marshal the resources and skills necessary to influence suppliers and customers to adopt more sustainable behaviors in production and end use.” Indeed, sustainability leaders must first and foremost influence within their own companies, often the most challenging form of organizational objective.

Sustainability teams are typically small, targeting to have their major influence through their work with other company departments, ultimately impacting the way internal departments interact with all external stakeholders. Sustainability executives may directly control relatively small budgets, but they can have substantial influence over major spending by other departments as an outcome of such indirect influence. The research shows that some companies are in the early stages of developing their sustainability practices and budgets may not yet be fully allocated. “More often, though, companies keep central sustainability teams and expenditures small and depend on their ability to influence spending across the organization. At companies ranging from Bloomberg to Henkel, the sustainability function effectively controls five to 10 times its official budget through initiatives it sponsors and justifies through other departments such as facilities and IT.”

In a study published by the International Society of Sustainability Professionals in 2010, based on the responses of 400 sustainability professionals, communicating with internal stakeholders, problem solving and inspiring and motivating others were listed as the top three skills sustainability professionals should possess. These rather sidestep the issue of direct and indirect influence. Not all communication is influence, and not all inspiration leads to action. However, in the CR Competency Map, published by Business in the Community (BITC) last year, “influencing leadership” is placed squarely at the center of the 16 competencies sustainability practitioners should display. BITC describes the manifestation of the influencing competency when the sustainability practitioner: “gains support for the CR agenda by persuading and convincing others. Understands others and influences them in a way that results in acceptance, agreement or behavior change.” In this map, sustainability leaders, drive change. This change almost inevitably influences budget allocation.

What the study by GreenResearch now articulates is the result of this influence can be quantified as big money. GreenResearch points to facilities spending, supply chain and product development budgets that are impacted by sustainability considerations. I suggest it goes farther than this. I believe sustainability practices, with the appropriate level of “influencing leadership,” impact every single corporate departmental budget because business impacts are generated by every single corporate department.

The Accounting For Sustainability Project (A4S) has a focus on the reporting of performance, but the A4S approach demonstrates well how sustainability impacts can be identified and addressed in all parts of the organization. One such example is the case study of a fictitious company, GRO Foods, in which both costs and benefits are reported in quantitative and qualitative terms with respect to all facets of the company’s sustainability performance required to deliver the business strategy. Whilst sustainability practices must be properly embedded in departmental activities and owned by departmental heads, the sustainability officer has a pivotal role in establishing direction, aligning targets and, most importantly, articulating the business and sustainability imperatives that influence a company’s leadership to change.

How are sustainability leaders mastering this art of influence? The CR Competency Map provides some useful guidance and tools, and the GreenResearch study confirms sustainability leaders use compelling arguments including “existential threats such as dwindling supplies of key natural resources,” demands from customers, expectations of employees, support for employee recruitment, retention and engagement and emphasis on “sustainability as the path to differentiation in a commoditized market.”

Whatever the focus, if you are a sustainability officer, take heart, your impact may well be 10-fold what it seems. Provided, of course, you have mastered the art of influence.

About Elaine Cohen

Elaine Cohen is a Sustainability Consultant and Reporter at Beyond Business and blogger on sustainability reporting and author of CSR for HR: A necessary business partnership to advance responsible business practices.

Talkback Readers: What role does sustainability place in your workplace? Share on Talkback!