The latest creative strategies and tools helping organizations to engage their teams in building market-leading, purpose-driven brands.
Cross-Posted from Marketing and Comms. If the perception of your brand’s green efforts is falling short of reality, then it’s time to stop and re-examine all aspects of the social impact of your outreach. Gone are the days when consumers would buy “green” for green’s sake; they want to see for themselves how a brand is actually making a difference. And it’s in your best interest to inform and educate them.
Buying organic tomatoes may not be a big deal. They taste better and they’re better for both your health and the planet; enough reasons to justify paying a price premium. No wonder organic food is leading the growth of sustainable consumption.But it isn’t always that easy to make the more sustainable lifestyle choice. You may have found yourself feeling bad for using your car instead of public transportation. While staring at an organic cotton T-shirt, you may have wondered if you should buy it or go for the cheaper standard cotton version a couple racks away. It's often an uncomfortable struggle between collective and private benefits: the planet versus your wallet.
Nestlé has announced a commitment to create 20,000 positions for young people across Europe over the next three years.The Nestlé needs YOUth Initiative will offer jobs to 10,000 people under the age of 30 and create 10,000 apprentice positions and traineeships by 2016."Today, one in four young people in Europe does not have a job," said Laurent Freixe, Nestlé Executive Vice-President and Zone Director for Europe, speaking at the Nestlé needs YOUth launch event in Athens, Greece, where more than half of those under the age of 25 are unemployed.
Only one in five companies has fully integrated sustainability into business, according to the BSR/GlobeScan State of Sustainable Business Survey 2013, which received responses from more than 700 corporate sustainability executives — the largest pool to date.In this year’s survey, respondents were asked for the first time to indicate the extent to which sustainability is integrated into the core of their business. Only 21 percent of respondents reported that their company is close to full integration. A majority say that their company is either about halfway to integration (51 percent), or is just getting started (22 percent).
Cross-Posted from Behavior Change. Many organisations are grappling with the same question: How do we create an employee reward and recognition programme designed to deliver widely adopted and sustained pro-environmental behaviours?
There is no simple way to identify a leading company in sustainability. Given the proliferation of ratings, rankings, blogs and indices, there is no shortage of opinions, and often these are in direct conflict with one another. The methodologies used to calculate performance are often very opaque, or nonexistent. Even highly reputable organizations, based on a good core of data, often produce wildly divergent results from one another. And once the pundits get a hold of any ranking, they usually tear it to pieces, bringing their own criteria, opinions and biases to bear and further muddying the waters. While the debates are often fierce, no one can really agree on what sustainability itself really means.
Smart business leaders believe that an active corporate social responsibility program is an asset when it comes to attracting top talent. The data agrees. A recent study from Net Impact showed that 35% of American employees would take a 15% pay cut to work for a company committed to CSR, and that 45% would do so for a job that makes a social or environmental impact.
A majority of Americans (69 percent) would not take a job with a company that had a bad reputation, even if they were unemployed, according to an annual corporate reputation survey released by Corporate Responsibility (CR) magazine and Allegis Group Services. This is a six percent decrease from 2012.CR says it polled more than 1,000 employed and unemployed Americans to gain insights into how both corporate reputation and transparency can impact job decisions.More than half (62 percent) of those currently employed said they would take a job with a company that had a bad reputation if they were offered more money. This number has increased by four percent year-over-year, the magazine says.
Imagine walking into your office one morning to find a business card on your chair — with a different title. It might just give you pause.
Organizations that hope to address perpetually mounting competitive pressures need workers who bring passion to their jobs to navigate challenges and accelerate performance improvement, according to new research from Deloitte’s Center for the Edge.Unlocking Passion of the Explorer found that only 11 percent of U.S. workers are passionate and possess the attributes needed for sustained extreme performance improvement.
At Saatchi & Saatchi S we believe that employees are not only the heart and soul of a company, they are a company’s greatest asset in propelling and achieving its sustainability vision. At its most inspirational, employee engagement is also about magnifying the power of individual actions to effect large-scale change.
Cross-Posted from Marketing and Comms. In the past decade, corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs have come a long way, with companies putting real money and staff into the efforts. Increasingly, companies have appointed top executives to be held accountable in these areas, and just about every big firm issues some kind of sustainability or CSR report.But despite the continued focus, progress remains slower than hoped. Why? After all, studies continue to show that CEOs rank sustainability as one of the most critical business drivers that will affect their company’s success — and financial performance — in the years to come.
What single success driver do branding, design, innovation, sustainability, public policy, product development, sales, social sector program management and organizational change have in common? The answer is simple: engagement. Whenever we do something for people or involving people, engagement must be at the center. If we leave out engagement we’ll quickly become cut off from the very people whose benefit we are working for, and separated from the people we need to help forward our objectives. Then we’ll be left wondering what went wrong.
The hiring process can be a grueling one — weeding through all those prospects can be a bit like looking for a needle in a haystack. It can be frustrating, and it also presents a lot of opportunity for self-doubt.
Welcome back! Are you ready to leave excellence behind, with all its unsustainable feeders and costs? Ready to make the move to the entirely different and sustainable condition of mastery?You’ve been patient for long enough, so let’s get started. First up: what not to do, followed by the surprise ending where we find the proven path to sustainable mastery.How Not to Attain Sustainable MasteryThe Failed Alternatives
In Part I of this series we introduced the Excellence Trap, and diagnosed its drivers and shortcomings. Here in Part II, we’ll take a close look at the costs we incur when we’re in the Excellence Trap, in order to see clearly what unsustainable people and organizations suffer. Then we’ll turn to the solution, introduce mastery and five shifts we must make to become sustainable. And in Part III we’ll discuss the way to get there, as well as the way not to.
The triple bottom line that inspires us is about planet, people and profits. Most of the time, we find ourselves talking about planet and profit, and all their complexities. When we talk about people it is usually about either 1. making sure they have a sustainable planet to enjoy, or 2. working to awaken a concern for planetary sustainability.But what about sustainable people? What about people who are themselves sustainable? What about people who can flourish when challenged, keep delivering over time, bring their best, stay inspired, live and work from integrity, and not burn out? And what about building and sustaining organizations populated by those kind of people?
In the afterglow of the Sustainable Brands 2013 conference, many companies found themselves inspired to bring positive change back to their business and local communities. At DMV.org, we recognized a huge opportunity to reach a vast network of people and drive actionable change both through our online services and our local community.As first-time attendees to the conference, the entire team walked away inspired, hopeful and committed to becoming change-makers within our company, community and planet. But what can a company that simplifies DMV information online bring to the sustainability table?As it turns out, quite a bit.What We’re Doing
This is the fourth in a series of posts on things Kevin Hagen learned while leading Corporate Social Responsibility at REI for the past seven years (read parts one,
This is the third in a series of posts on things I learned while leading Corporate Social Responsibility at REI for the past seven years (read parts one and two).I’m often asked if incremental improvements can really lead to sustainable business outcomes. In my experience leading sustainability and corporate social responsibility efforts at REI the answer is: yes and no. It all depends on what happens next.