The latest creative strategies and tools helping organizations to engage their teams in building market-leading, purpose-driven brands.
Only 30% of employees are engaged, costing $450 to $550 billion every year in lost productivity. Yet research shows that companies with strong sustainability and social responsibility programs have much higher engagement rates.
By creating an enabling environment to establish novel internal-management systems, Solidaridad's Better Mill Initiative has equipped textile-factory managers and workers to improve working conditions and livelihoods, and reduce the environmental impact of the factories.
Last month we held our fifth annual Sedex conference in Shanghai. With tickets sold-out weeks before the event it was our biggest China conference yet, filling the room with over 200 delegates from businesses across China and further afield. But what struck me about the conference wasn’t the size of it, but the way conversations about workers are changing.
I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what we need from business leaders. And by business leaders, I mean everyone who is actively making (or influencing) business decisions. We know there are myriad problems that we need to deal with and that we have a limited amount of time with which to right the ship. As such, we have to rethink the way we do business, but I think there’s a growing cabal of folks who can help get us where we need to go. I call them Radical Intrapreneurs.I know the word “radical” tends to make folks fret, so let’s try to uncoil that reaction with a few definitions.
Symantec, one of the world's largest security software companies, has announced the launch of a first-of-its-kind program, the Symantec Cyber Career Connection (SC3), to address the global workforce gap in cybersecurity and provide new career opportunities for young adults who may not be college-bound. The program was announced as a Commitment to Action at the Clinton Global Initiative America meeting by Secretary Hillary Rodham Clinton and Symantec’s executive director of the program, Aled Miles.
What if 100 percent of your employees were engaged in your business? According to Gallup, that would translate to an increase of anywhere from $450-550B in increased revenue for US companies alone. Those are daunting numbers in the macro. But what matters is how it translates to your business. Even if it were only 1 percent of your revenue, wouldn’t you want to know?
Environmental not-for-profit Canopy is today heralding North American printing giant RR Donnelley for unveiling its paper purchasing sustainability practices on its corporate website.Canopy, which has been working with the printing sector for 10 years, says the public unveiling of RR Donnelley’s sustainable purchasing principles provides further transparency into the company’s ongoing efforts to support its customers’ initiatives to eliminate unwanted or contentious fibers from its supply chain.
McDonald’s Canada has announced that 100 percent of the fish it serves in its Filet-O-Fish sandwich is now certified as sustainable by the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC). The Canadian arm of the fast food chain is following in the footsteps of its US counterpart, which committed to serving only MSC-certified fish in January 2013.McDonald’s Canada has purchased fish from MSC-certified fisheries for nearly a decade and recently completed MSC’s third-party Chain of Custody process to further solidify the company’s commitment to maintaining the health of the world’s oceans by supporting sustainable fishing practices.
WeSpire, the cloud-based engagement platform for engaging employees in environmental, social and other positive corporate initiatives, has released survey results regarding employee engagement trends in sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).
Campbell Soup Company has announced that it is re-evaluating its production processes in order to reduce by 50 percent of its operational water use per ton of food produced by 2020.The company says it has achieved a 20.7 percent reduction in operational water use in 2013, against a 2008 baseline. Last year Campbell’s reduced water use by 2.6 percent per ton of food produced, and since 2008, total cumulative water savings have been around 4.8 billion gallons.Campbell’s says it wants to continue making progress by standardizing its most water-intensive operations, primarily those facilities that produce soup, sauce and juice products, making them more energy-efficient in the process.
There has been much talk lately about the need to find a replacement for the term “sustainability.” Critics claim it’s too vague and takes attention away from what should be a more forward-thinking message focused on good business. Others argue that eliminating the term would cause some to miss the point because it has yet to become engrained enough in the dominant business culture. Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard argues that “responsible” is a more accurate term since there is no such thing as a truly “sustainable” company. Other companies have embraced the term “corporate social responsibility” (CSR).
This week, McDonald’s unveiled its first Corporate Social Responsibility & Sustainability Framework. The fast-food giant says the goal of the plan is to position the company for the future, while generating measurable, positive impacts for society.McDonald’s released the framework in conjunction with its 2012-2013 CSR & Sustainability Report, “Our Journey Together. For Good.”Among the company’s 2020 goals:
Darren Beck is Director of Environmental Initiatives at Sprint. Sprint is widely recognized as a sustainability leader in the mobile phone industry, spearheading energy-efficiency programs, removing legacy towers, and ensuring record amounts of electronic waste (particularly mobile phones) are reused, recycled or disposed of properly. We spoke with Darren about how his role at Sprint has evolved, his experience as an intrapreneur, and his thirst for work that is professionally and personally fulfilling.SB: Darren, we are big fans of your job title. Could you share the reasoning behind it? What range of responsibilities does it cover? How did it evolve?
Current environmental and social crises represent both threats and opportunities for business, which has the capacity, innovation and duty to carve a new path toward sustainability, according to a new white paper by the Network for Business Innovation and Sustainability (NBIS) released Wednesday at the 2014 GoGreen Seattle Conference.
Today, Walmart joined forces with CEOs from more than a dozen global companies — including Kellogg, P&G, Monsanto, Campbell Soup, PepsiCo, General Mills and the Dairy Farmers of America — to sign new commitments that accelerate innovation in sustainable agriculture and recycling. The pledges kicked off Walmart’s inaugural Sustainable Product Expo, a three-day collaboration to expand the availability of products that sustain people and the environment. Together, the participating suppliers represent more than $100 billion in sales at Walmart.
A year ago today, over 1,100 Bangladeshi garment workers lost their lives when, despite prior warnings, the building in which they were working collapsed. Over 2,500 more were injured in the disaster, some crippled for life.The victims of the Rana Plaza factory collapse, most of them young women, were part of a global supply chain that brings affordable garments to markets around the world. This was not the first event of its kind in Bangladesh, and Bangladesh is not the only country where industrial disasters have occurred.
HP announced this week that thousands of entrepreneurs around the world have already received microloans from its employees since the launch of Matter to a Million, the Hewlett-Packard Company Foundation’s partnership with Kiva, in February. In announcing the partnership, HP said it is called “Matter to a Million” because the goal is to help one million entrepreneurs achieve their dreams.
Practically Green, the engagement platform for sustainability and responsibility programs, this week announced it is rebranding as WeSpire. The company also debuted its proprietary ROI calculator, which will allow customers to more accurately measure the impact and savings of each individual project deployed.WeSpire helps companies engage people in sustainability and responsibility initiatives with persuasive technology that builds awareness, drives behavior change and now more accurately measures business results. Practically Green’s evolution to WeSpire reflects the growing scope of sustainability and as a result, the growing scope of its technology.
Terracycle has been making it easy for people and businesses throughout North America to reduce consumer product waste through its dozens of “Brigades” that collect previously non-recyclable or hard to recycle waste — everything from Brita filters and CLIF bar wrappers to binders, cell phones and shoes — since 2007. Now the company’s new Zero Waste boxes are helping tackle miscellaneous discarded items in factories, such as earplugs and hairnets.
Christine Bader, author of The Evolution of a Corporate Idealist: When Girl Meets Oil (Bibliomotion, March 2014), worked for BP for nearly a decade managing the social impacts of some of the company’s largest projects in the developing world. We asked her about the complexities of being a corporate change agent and other challenges surrounding corporate idealism. Anna Lui: Who was this book primarily written for? Did you have a corporate management audience in mind, or the increasingly skeptical/cynical American public?