When baseline economics shift, everything changes
When the cost of participation (barrier to entry) drops on practices that used to belong to the few and they become available to the many, the rules of any industry tend to change.
At this time in our climate’s history, recession or otherwise, it is surely legitimate that as citizens we demand that companies – all companies – become accountable to us for their actions on the environment.
Fortunately, innovations on the web are bringing about a structural shift in any company or community’s ability to collaborate towards better ends, and they lend themselves to such purposes, creating opportunities to:
- Change the way in which companies are able to develop authentic initiatives towards organisation-wide sustainability
- Open existing sustainability-reporting practices to more widespread scrutiny to lift overall levels of transparency and accountability
- To use the changes as levers to deliver greater inventiveness in the creation of new generations of products and services.
Firsthand experience and research conducted among those responsible for sustainability reporting at top companies in Australia informs us that herein lies an opportunity for sweeping innovation and change. That scope lies in the following gaps in current practice.
Shortcoming 1: If a sustainability reporting initiative isn’t driven from the top, it’s meaningless
I first became acquainted with sustainability reporting came when I was commissioned to help out on a on a sustainability report by a major international PR company. The consultancy had been embarrassed when it had put up someone who didn't understand the issues of sustainability to write a report for its multinational electronics client. It needed to find a way to save its business. In my first meeting, I asked where the initiative to create this report came from: did it come from the heart and soul of the chief executive? No, I was told: the company would simply have no chance of getting on a government tender list if it didn’t match its competitor’s report.
Inauthenticity is a very bad start in building reporting credibility.
Shortcoming 2: Authenticity means sustainability reporting must be strategic and both a driver of and driven by change
Once committed to reporting, it looks poor for any company to stop, and year on year it must keep on reporting improvements in its metrics - even if sometimes it is more credible if it makes no advances. (Yet few, we can safely surmise, are the companies which would want to let the world know of a bad result.)
But, if it is going to achieve real change - that is, if it is to trigger movement along the Dunphy scale - the reporting must both reflect and feed back on organisational processes to become both a catalyst for continuous environmental improvement and, ultimately, a platform for the innovation that is reliably going to bring it about. It will work like this.
Where this isn’t the case, however, sustainability reporting becomes little more than a stick-on PR exercise, like so many others, and essentially meaningless.
Shortcoming 3: A failed process rife with potential for manipulation
In none of the companies I’ve interviewed is sustainability management or reporting a collaborative process. Typically, a handful of executives will gather data from their part of the operation and pass this up the line to someone responsible for collating it and “massaging” it into a report – and yes, disappointingly, one representative of a major telco even used that precise expression. We should not underestimate the temptation for window dressing.
Shortcoming 4: Little effort at reader engagement
It would seem we’ve moved on from the point at which the majority of sustainability reports and annual accounts are distributed on glossy printed stock by mail. Most, however, remain annual productions and mostly buried along with shareholder information as a pdf on a web site, released at the same time as the financial accounts. Does that give you the impression they are supposed to be read?
Shortcoming 5: Out of step with media advances and audience expectations
Companies are happy to crow in regular press releases about their new-product achievements, so why, if their environmental and people-management practices are also making market-advancing breakthroughs, shouldn’t we expect a similar frequency of announcements on breakthroughs in environmental stewardship? There's a ready space for companies blogging or twittering about the incremental advances they are making. Isn't it time?
Shortcoming 6: A failed process mired in hierarchy, not participation
Too few people at the workplace coalface are engaged in change. I’ll paraphrase if not quote exactly from widely regarded United States management academic Gary Hamel here in stating that only 20 per cent of workers go to work committed to making a difference; the rest are just serving their time in return for a pay cheque. In matters of corporate advancement, people are not engaged and their ideas are not solicited. Management is as often a bottleneck to change as it is an enabler.
Companies that routinely make a success of delivering new products and services also make sure that idea generation is a consistent and managed process: without enough ideas and a proper system for developing them, you can’t possibly deliver new products and services without dramatically increasing the risk of failure. Shouldn’t we be cultivating the same attitudes in our workplace management of climate change and the environment?
Those at the coalface who witness the damage and wastage their organisations cause and that those higher up the hierarchy will never see. They want to see and be engaged in initiatives that stimulate worthwhile change. Without the entire workforces engaged on delivering the ideas that will lead not only to waste and energy minimisation but also inspire new and creative bases from which to deliver new environmentally benign products and processes, the environment can only suffer. While as Hamel says, we can not afford to waste a single iota of workplace intelligence, yet this is what companies do routinely, every day.
Technology is liberating the flow of ideas that can improve any company’s accomplishments, and the internet is one of key transforming business opportunities of our time. We must drive its opportunity in our work on issues that affect us all.
Shortcoming 7: Sustainability reporting is in the wrong hands
Reporting will have no teeth as long as those who are responsible have no authority, and at present the job is often in the hands of corporate social responsibility departments. Worthwhile as these efforts are, this is not yet core business. Sustainability officers, being few in number are also likely quite happy to keep the jobs they have and unlikely to agitate for change, which is why we’re unlikely to see much of it from them.
But reporting will be meaningless to anyone other than those who are paid to read such things until its processes can deliver demonstrable evidence of organisational development and innovation. This is the great sustainability opportunity of our immediate future.
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