Search

Daniel Jones, sustainability consultant at Radley Yeldar, shares some of the insight gained through the company’s How Does It Stack Up?  publication, exploring best practice reporting across Europe

With a number of corporate scandals hitting the headlines in 2012, the function of the sustainability report is increasingly being put to the test. As critics point towards a disconnect between rhetoric and action, how can we avoid sustainability reporting being discredited as greenwash in the wake of public scrutiny?

Whether involved in a breach of ethics, tax avoidance, or a lack of transparency surrounding business operations, corporate malpractice dominated the news in 2012. As a result, large organisations are increasingly being treated with suspicion by the public.

As corporate scepticism grows, so does the demand for greater transparency and accountability – a function historically performed by a company’s reporting suite. However, with sustainability reports failing to discuss information relating to controversial practices later unveiled by the press, its credibility has taken a knock.

The real challenge lies in sensitively describing performance openly and honestly, in a way that enhances (rather than damages) credibility.

To avoid criticism, reports need to move from a defensive stance to present a truly transparent overview of performance. This means presenting an accurate reflection a company’s culture, behaviour and genuine efforts at becoming a more responsible organisation. Here’s how:

•    Show the good, the bad and the ugly
•    Take on your leadership and legal teams to produce a report that’s as open as possible. Discussing challenges, exposing cultural failings and recording lessons learned is vital in rebuilding trust.
•    Tell it like it is
•    If you don’t back claims with evidence you’re asking to be scrutinised. Make sure the numbers tell as clear a story as the narrative.
•    Let others have their say
•    Featuring third-party commentary is an approach we like. Often reports can be corporate monologue, when a more credible picture could be painted by those outside your business.
•    Tell a clear story
•    Even with the most comprehensive data disclosures, transparency will be overlooked if data isn’t presented in a way that’s easy to understand. Pull it all together by uniting content with a clear over arching message
•    Aim for the spirit, not the letter
•    With standards like GRI becoming more commonplace, the shape and structure of reporting is looking more familiar. Don’t let a dogmatic approach to meeting requirements get in the way of producing a report that shows your uniqueness.

To request a copy of the full research or to find out about Radley Yeldar’s report benchmarking service, visit: www.ry.com

Airbnb is the de-facto archetype of the sharing economy - an easy-to-use service that lets you rent your home, or a spare bedroom, to weary travelers.  No sharing economy company has generated quite as much press or controversy over the years. Airbnb has enabled millions of travelers to find comfortable lodging for a bargain - with the interesting customization and neighborhood connections only a personal host could provide.  In fact, Airbnb claims they pump millions into local economies that would otherwise go to national chains.

However, with Airbnb's tremendous popularity have come accusations that it worsens apartment scarcity in places like San Francisco and New York because landlords may be keen to turn an apartment into a revolving hotel rather than rent it out long term. Are such claims against Airbnb merely coming from folks with chips on their shoulders who don't really understand the sharing economy?  Or is there truth to the claim that Airbnb is making a tight market worse?

It would be impossible to argue that Airbnb has zero effect on available rental properties. The question is just how much of an effect is it?  San Francisco has always been a very difficult place to find an apartment and its current economic boom is certainly keeping it that way.  The issue becomes a bit clearer when you look at some data and break Airbnb hosts into three different categories:

The data I'm using comes from surveys conducted by Airbnb and HR&A as part of their economic impact study in San Francisco.  You can download the whole PDF here. Airbnb does not publish the number of hosts in the city, but a search today showed about 3000 active listings in San Francisco of all types.

1) Type 1: The person who rents out their flat when they're out of town.

The largest group (46 percent) of Airbnb hosts are folks who rent out their entire home when they're out of town. I'd argue these people are the most classic embodiment of the sharing economy because they are putting to use a resource that would otherwise go wasted - an empty home. It's not possible to suggest that these people have any impact on apartment space in San Francisco because their homes wouldn't be available to renters anyway.

So that knocks off about half of Airbnb's potential impact on the rental market.

2) Type 2: The person with a spare room in their flat who rents it out from time to time.

A nearly equal number (44 percent) of Airbnb hosts rent only a portion of their home, typically a spare room, while they continue to live there. This type of arrangement is where things start to get interesting - see the infamous case of Nigel Warren who regularly rented a spare bedroom in his apartment until he was charged with a litany of fines and got into deep legal trouble. This group is even more complex because some are owners of the spare room and some (like Nigel) are renters themselves. Airbnb doesn't yet have the data on how this breaks down (though a new report is forthcoming).

An owner of an apartment has no obligation (legal or otherwise) to rent out her spare bedrooms to anyone, and if they do it on Airbnb, it's arguably creating space, not taking it away. So it's not likely this type of host is hurting the market much. However, a renter who choses to rent a spare room on Airbnb instead of to another full time roommate might conceivably begin to impact the market - not to mention they might be violating their lease. But even then, we have no idea whether this is something someone chooses to do once in a while or on a constant rotating basis - I'd love to see the numbers.

3) Type 3: The person who doesn't occupy the flat at all and runs it as a full-time Airbnb property. 

Accounting for about 10 percent of Airbnb hosts, this group is really the only group that gets far enough into the "gray zone" that they might impact the availability of apartments in San Francisco. These hosts, some of whom own multiple units, are also likely the hosts for whom a hotel tax might be appropriate, among other possible legal ramifications (but that's another story I'll get into later).

So where does that leave us?

San Francisco has never been an easy place to find an apartment. I remember having friends "live" on my couch for months in the late 1990s, unable to find something affordable while the dot-com boom raged on. There was no Airbnb then. Today, with San Francisco booming as much as ever, with cranes constructing new units as far as the eye can see, the apartment search is still a quagmire for would-be new residents, monied and otherwise.

Does Airbnb make it worse?  Perhaps a little.  But probably about 90 percent less than the naysayers claim.

Image credit: Unsplash

By Jeff and Liz Helfrich

By now, you’ve probably heard about crowdfunding and some of its more wild successes such as the Veronica Mars Movie (which has raised $4.1 million and counting), The Pebble ($10.2 million), or the OUYA Video Game Console ($8.5 million).  It is clear from these and many others that certain types of projects including games, tech gizmos (especially iPod accessories), and movies can do amazingly well on Kickstarter and other crowdfunding platforms.  We believe some of the success in these groups stems from the fact that there are already large communities familiar with crowdfunding that get behind these particular types of projects.  Our question is: How do we build equally fervent communities supporting triple bottom line ventures?

There have been a number of notable successes for sustainable ventures on various crowdfunding platforms.  Excellent examples include the NanoLight (since renamed the NanoLeaf) ($273,000), the Home Aquaponics Kit by Back to the Roots ($248,000), and most recently the Beez Kneez Bee House ($36,000 and counting).  So sustainable ventures can and do succeed on crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter.  However, as a couple running a Kickstarter campaign to launch a sustainable venture, we have found that many people interested in sustainable ventures don’t know about crowdfunding the way gamers, movie fans, and early tech adopters do.  Basically, as a sustainable project on Kickstarter, you often have to educate your base of potential backers about both your project and crowdfunding.  So how do we change this dynamic?

One approach is to build separate crowdfunding platforms for sustainable ventures.  Some examples of this already exist, including Green Unite and Start Some Good.  These platforms definitely had some appeal as potential crowdfunding venues for our triple bottom line venture because their audiences should be receptive to a project like ours.  However, the question for us was, “Do they have a big enough community to fully fund our project?”  The most successful project on Start Some Good, the Do Good Bus, raised just over $100,000 from 680 backers.  As we need to raise $75,000 for our project, and anticipate that means gaining support from more than 3,000 backers, we would have to be one of the most successful projects in the history of these platforms to succeed. Would it be easier to succeed with a very large pool of users who needed to be educated about sustainability, or a small pool of users already committed to green projects?   In the end, because we knew we needed such a large number of backers we decided that going with the largest pool of users was the best bet.  So we settled on Kickstarter.

So if many sustainable entrepreneurs decide they want to go on the “mainstream” crowdfunding platforms, the question remains:  how to we unite the triple bottom line community and get the word out about worthy projects?  GOOD may be showing us the way on this.  They have begun publishing “Push for Good,” a weekly guide to crowdfunding creative progress.  Every Saturday morning they highlight projects from Kickstarter and Indiegogo that do well by doing good.  They also run a GOOD curated Kickstarter page to highlight projects worth funding.  If other triple bottom line focused blogs and magazines do the same perhaps we can unite our community this way.  Gadget blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo certainly have enough sway to make sure that projects they favor get funded and they aren’t shy about promoting them.  Why not Triple Pundit, Treehugger, Inhabitat, and numerous other bloggers who support triple bottom line ventures?  If we all work together to spread the word about worthy ventures, we can makes sure more of them get funded.  There is nothing wrong with that bottom line.

Jeff and Liz Helfrich are the developers of the Solecan an eco-friendly trash/recycle bin.  Their project is currently funding on Kickstarter.  They need your support by Earth Day (April 22, 2013) to succeed.

Submitted by Guest Contributor

By Kye Gbangbola, Founder, Total Eco Management

Recently, the U.K. government pronounced that the British public should prepare for higher energy bills, and breaks in energy supply as seven power stations -- 10 percent of current grid capacity --will be switched off next month.

This places a different complexion on U.K. energy generation for the future, as gas is now set to account for about 60 percent of U.K. power station needs instead of 30 percent today. Consumers are expected to see energy cost increases of 400 percent by 2020. Fuel poverty and child poverty will increase at the same time as welfare state benefits are being cut. Multinationals and their supply chains foresee interruptions in production – of which 70 percent are already experiencing through climatic change droughts and floods.

The Greenest Government Ever?

When elected in 2010, the government claimed to be the greenest government ever. Nearly three years on, most of its policies have failed to deliver. Industry has called for clear, consistent, predictable and strategic policy initiatives that galvanize the resources of government and industry to drive change and tackle our energy problems.

So what has happened to place the U.K. in such a perilous position for its population?

Essentially it is the story of failing policy. There is a concern that the 2007 warnings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are no longer guiding the hands of our policy makers.  In recent times, Decarbonisation Targets were deferred to 2016 and feed-in tariff levels were slashed to a fraction of their original figure (households and business were paid a tariff to generate renewable energy), which resulted in law suits against the government, unemployment, and insolvent companies with shattered projects that were no longer deliverable.

Carbon Reduction Commitments Watered Down

In addition, carbon trading through the Carbon Reduction Commitment has been watered down, resulting in reduced incentives to lower emissions. 

There have been delays in implementing energy efficiency of buildings legislation for both Green Deal and Energy Company Obligation. These provide for property energy efficiency improvements at no up-front cost to the occupier, the result being large scale withdrawal of support from industry and institutions.  

There has also been a nearly three year delay for a definition of Zero Carbon, which drives U.K. Building Regulations, a failure to deliver on Carbon Capture and Storage, and the removal and reduction of subsidies for large scale renewables especially wind.

U.K. Business Loses Confidence In The Green Economy

The result is that business has lost confidence in the green economy to invest, innovate, create jobs, and develop new technologies. However, funding for fossil fuels, including shale gas exploration, has never had it so good. Ironically, U.K. emissions might go down as people are unable to afford heat and light.

But there are better ways of reducing emissions.

In contrast, across the globe the green economy is worth $3.4 billion a year and is growing at 4.3 percent whilst the U.K. is slipping down the league table of green investors. In the meantime, President Obama is delivering rapid growth in the green economy, as are China, Rwanda, Germany, Norway, Denmark, and many more.

Short-term thinking has resulted in the country being left exposed to insufficient power. It is not difficult to see how this can even lead to the loss of lives, given the poverty that will be generated.  The emerging problems in the U.K. have been evident for the last two years, professionals have been talking of their frustrations with a government that says one thing and does another. To respond to our 21st century problems, government must galvanize industry and society to drive change. 

No Conflict Between Resource Conservation And Profit

The U.K. government argues that renewables cannot fill the grid energy gap now or in the future.  This is true if there is no commitment to sustainable development. There needs to be greater balance to avoid the shift towards shale and nuclear, which is now being argued as the way forward.

To fill the gap and achieve energy security, the government has had to go shopping at a time when demand and gas prices are high. Serving to emphasize the fuel security problem; an expected gas supply agreement from the Russian Shtokman field was withdrawn. U.K. energy reserves are projected to fall to 5 percent from the current 15 percent, further endangering the country's energy supply.

Ironically Paul Golby, CEO of power generator Eon, said last month “the wasting of energy should be made a crime.” This may be what the future holds because we did not invest soon enough and now are at an energy cliff. 

According to CDP’s recent annual supply chain survey, 73 percent of multinationals cutting emissions reported associated cost savings. They have learned there is no conflict between resource conservation and profit.

Downgrades, Reporting and the Triple Bottom Line

Globally when governments fail to align with the global imperative to tackle climate change, complex and unforeseen problems can ensue. How we power our economies can serve to heighten, or reduce social tensions. Local and national economies, business confidence, and international credit rating agency downgrades can also suggest to observers that a country’s economy is losing power. 

Stakeholders Betrayed

When the new government was elected in the U.K. in 2010, they inherited many green policies, Climate Change Committees and associated Low Carbon Action Plans.  The hard part -- the structures -- had been set and agreed.  As such anybody could deliver the project design.  

But if the structures for delivery are removed, it should not be a surprise that decline will follow.  In the last year, the claim of being the Greenest Government ever has died and is rarely mentioned. 

Stakeholder engagement has been a key failure. Stakeholders in industry, society and politics that are consulted are largely ignored. Such attitudes to stakeholders erode trust and credibility with decision makers concerned that they have their own agenda and matters of materiality risk and priority are predetermined. 

It is evident that the opportunity to build long-term sustainable value needs to be revived in the U.K.  Only those presiding over the failure know the reasons behind it; the methods of monitoring should be disclosed so the full extent of the challenge can be understood and responded to by those not willing to sleepwalk into a disaster and give up on the potential of what this planet could be. 

About Kye Gbangbola

Kye Gbangbola is the founder of Total Eco Management (TEM) a company determined to be a leading light in the movement to reduce the environmental impacts. Kye is responsible for Development, Asset Management, Corporate Sustainability, and CSR. He is a recognised expert in sustainability reporting and governance, a CIOB Ambassador with interests in leadership, and a representative of the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group and the International Integrated Reporting Committee [IIRC] Pilot consisting of 70 of the world's leading organisations.

Submitted by Guest Contributor

Dr. Adam Corner

Increasingly, companies are realising that sustainability means more than implementing a few more rules, regulations and benchmarks – it means engaging directly with the question of human behaviour.

Whether it is the actions of their customers – playing more and more of a role in whether particular products can achieve their sustainability potential – or employees themselves, many businesses are starting to ask how they can influence behaviour in a sustainable direction.    

Awareness & Facts: Not Enough in Sustainability

At first, it was assumed that once people knew how environmentally damaging their actions were, they'd soon start making changes. Unfortunately, sustainable behaviour campaigns require more than just a clever campaign slogan and clear facts to succeed. Many sustainability initiatives over the past 20 years have targeted low-hanging fruit – so-called "simple and painless" behaviour changes like unplugging phone chargers, switching to energy-saving light-bulbs, or re-using plastic bags.

But there is only limited evidence that starting with simple and painless changes is the best way of catalysing further changes – and there is a risk that people will feel they have already done their bit.

So what should we be doing instead?

Developing a Sense of Environmental Identity

First and foremost, individuals – and individual behaviours – cannot be separated from their social context. We act according to our personal values and priorities and in line with the social norms of our peer group. The key to promoting meaningful changes in sustainable behaviour – that do more than just pay lip service to tackling climate change – is to nurture and develop a sense of environmental identity or citizenship.

When a person acts in his/her self-interest, that person will perceive themselves as someone who does things for their own benefit. They will only engage in further sustainable behaviours if there is something in it for them – so as soon as the 'sweeteners' dry up, so will their interest in sustainability.

But if people begin to think of themselves as someone who does things for the environment, the chance that they will engage in other sustainable behaviours is much higher.

It may not always be the quickest way of promoting a specific sustainable behaviour, but ultimately people can figure out for themselves whether something is in their own interest or not. The job of a sustainable behavior practitioner is to help them see the bigger picture, and make the arguments about sustainability that an appeal to their wallet cannot do.

Looking for Leadership: Building on the Power of Social

A huge amount of everyday energy use is embedded in habitual behaviors. The problem is that something seemingly straightforward like getting the bus to work is actually made up of lots of smaller (habitual) decisions, for example, leaving home earlier or showering the night before to save time, all of which can derail even the best intentions. Research on how habits form (and how they change), shows that breaking habitual behaviours down into detailed "if/then" style plans is one way to break bad habits and create more sustainable ones.

Editor's Note: Want to win one of the DoShorts titles? Have a look around the series and tweet your idea for a new @DoShorts topic using hashtag #suggestadoshort to @CSRwire!

But even the best-designed campaign to promote sustainable behaviour is limited in its scope if it fails to link everyday behaviours to the wider challenges of sustainability. Most people do not have a social network with sustainability at its core, but working to develop a group – rather than individual – sense of environmental responsibility and identity should be at the heart of any sustainability campaign.

Similarly, for those who are trying to promote sustainable behaviour in the workplace, there is an obvious place that most employees would look to for leadership: their employer. Changes in personal behaviours among workers can catalyse further changes from an employer because the argument that "we've done our bit – now you do yours" is a powerful one.

The Politics of Sustainability

Cultivating reciprocal links like these – between staff and employer, or between members of a social network – is one of the ways to ensure that promoting sustainable behaviour isn't detached from the politics of sustainability. How people act says something about their underlying values, the priorities they hold, and the type of world they want to live in.

So although engaging with employee and customer behaviour is a messier, more complex and more time-intensive way of thinking about sustainability, it is ultimately the only way that substantial progress in CSR is likely to be achieved.

It would be nice if it were possible to wave a magic low-carbon wand, and create zero carbon buses, energy efficient building and a power supply that came from clean renewables rather than dirty fossil fuels. But even if this wand did exist, it would be waved by a person as susceptible to the quirks, biases, and pitfalls of human judgement as the rest of us.

The reality is that human behaviour underpins it all. And this means that promoting sustainable behaviour in the most effective way is an absolutely critical part of society's response to climate change.

Editor's Note: Want to win one of the DoShorts titles? Have a  look around the series and tweet your idea for a new @DoShorts topic using hashtag #suggestadoshort to @CSRwire!

About the Author:

Dr Adam Corner (@AJcorner) is a researcher and writer whose work focuses on the psychology of communicating climate change. He leads the Talking Climate programme for the Climate Outreach and Information Network, and is a Research Associate in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University.

This article draws on Adam Corner's book Promoting Sustainable Behaviour: A Practical Guide to What Works -- part of Dō Sustainability's new DōShort series of concise, sustainable business books for professionals. These practical books support professionals in the vanguard of sustainable business -- who are often forging new paths in their organizations -- by giving them the confidence, information and tactics they need at every stage of their career.

CSRwire Discount: For 10% off the RRP of any DōShort title, use code CSR10 at checkout when you order from www.dosustainability.com/shop. Currencies will be converted, and orders can be fulfilled immediately, anywhere in the world.

Subscriptions: You can also get access to the entire DōShorts Collection via a personal or corporate subscription. Read more about subscriptions here.

Queries? If you would like to contact Adam Corner or find out more about the DōShorts series, email [email protected] or visit www.dosustainability.com.

Submitted by Aman Singh

By Aman Singh

Using Integrated Reporting as a catalyst for integrated thinking.

That's how Peter Graf, SAP's Chief Sustainability Officer expressed the firm's decision to replace two reports – the annual report mandated by the law and submitted to the SEC indicating the company's financial performance and the sustainability report , voluntary in nature and showing its non-financial performance– by one Integrated Report for 2012.

While Integrated Reporting is a fairly new trend – The International Integrated Reporting Committee [IIRC] website hosts a total of 41 Integrated Reports since 2011 – it's not surprising.

As the trend of CSR and sustainability reporting grows – due to multiple factors including a recessionary economy, dwindling resources, emerging conflicts in supply chains and a better connected world – logically, Integrated Reporting is the next step for any organization truly attempting to be as transparent as possible about its financial and non-financial challenges and performance. 

Shift in Engagement: From Sustainability to Integrated

At SAP, the impetus for the shift was the realization that "we needed to engage within our organization on a different level" according to Graf. "We have been reporting on our sustainability performance since 2008. The report has grown in sophistication over the years and we even won several awards in the last two years for our report's interactive nature, etc. So technically, we could have continued on that road," he added. 

Last year, CSRwire collaborated with Graf and his team on a webinar to launch SAP's new interactive report. Complete with social media buttons, comment sections and multimedia options, the report could be customized and perused in multiple ways depending on your agenda. The report was well received – and in a span of an hour we received over 30 questions from a very engaged audience. [Join us for a webinar with Peter Graf, IIRC CEO Paul Druckman and others today at 11am ET]

SAP set a trend last year, so why the shift again?

Connecting the Dots: The Bigger Picture

"We have been measuring key performance indicators [KPI] on the financial and non-financial side for quite a while. But one day, we started to put them all on a white board trying to draw connection lines between them. Before we knew it, the chart was pretty full. We started to do research both internally and externally , to better understand and compute those relationships. Suddenly it became clear, just how interconnected non-financial and financial performance indicators really are," he explained.

"When I heard about Integrated Reporting for the first time, I got excited. But then I thought: It’s going to be a very long process to achieve the integrated thinking that must be portrayed in the report. I viewed the Integrated Report as an outcome. However, over time our team reached the conclusion that instead of waiting for the right engagement at SAP to happen, we should use the process of producing an integrated report as the forcing function to drive the necessary engagement," Graf added.

"In its integrated report, SAP lays out the interdependencies between financial and non-financial indicators," said Graf. Proof points like: an increase or decrease of one percentage of SAP's retention rate saves/costs the company 62 million euros. And since 2007, a peak year for energy consumption at the company, SAP has avoided 220 million euros ($285 million) through energy conservation efforts.

"When these kinds of relations appear between financial and non-financial indicators, they do more than make the business case for sustainability. They serve as the catalysts for an integrated corporate strategy." said Graf.

While the entire report is available online, a parsed version – "we kept out customer stories but retained all other ESG data and metrics" – is submitted to the Securities & Exchange Commission.

SAP's 2012 Performance: Key Highlights

So what will you find in the integrated Report this year? 

For one, retention was up [94 percent in 2012] as was diversity, i.e., the number of women in management [an increase of one percent from 2011 to 19.4 percent].

The goal: to reach 25 percent by 2017.

Total energy consumed stayed stable at 2011 numbers while revenue increased by 17 percent and emissions per Euro in revenue and per employee were reduced for the sixth year in a row. Overall emissions were slightly reduced, in spite of the company  adding 9,000 new employees in 2012. Finally, the use of renewable energy increased from 47 percent in 2011 to 60 percent in 2012.

Also intriguing to me was a section, which detailed SAP's People Strategy. 

I asked Graf what the strategy involved – and how did they measure the outcomes besides retention and diversity?

"Having a sound strategy around people is essential in a company that solely relies on its employees to create value. Thus our ability to compete is highly dependent on our human resources and it’s impossible to separate that from our financial performance," he said.

"First, we want to hire more diverse people. We believe more diverse groups innovate better. Second, we want to nurture our talent through clear development plans, challenging assignments, social media, e-learnings, etc. And finally, we want to leverage employee engagement as a decisive factor. So we measure retention and diversity but also engagement, which is a core and central KPI in driving our overall performance in the future," Graf added.

Measuring Employee Engagement: Critical to Business Performance

So what contributed to a drop in employee engagement in 2006-2009?

"I believe there are various reasons that led to a decrease in engagement during that time. Most important, however, is how we made it back to the high engagement scores of today: When economic growth came back after the recession, the leadership of the company changed, a compelling innovation strategy for growth was established, the company was given the purpose of helping the world run better to improve people’s lives and overall we enjoyed strong and continuous revenue growth as a result. So, a combination of issues got us into low engagement scores and a combination of things got us back on track."

SAP also measures a Business Health Culture Index. Does that measure the company's engagement quotient and connect it with business performance? 

"We use this index to measure the health of our employees. There are four times as many stress-related illnesses in the intellectual property industry as compared to other industries. So we use data from eight questions [purpose, leadership, recognition, empowerment, rewards, stress levels, compared to people my age I feel more/less healthy] to understand where we stand and what we need to do to take care of our employees."

In 2012, SAP's Health Index stood at 66 percent, a one percent increase since 2011 and significant growth since 2008-2009.

Integrated Reporting: Check. What's Next for SAP?

With all the data and metrics dancing around in my brain, the only question left to ask was, what's next?

"On the one side, we recognize that integrated reporting is an early trend and that we certainly have to continue to improve and learn. On the other side, we have the ambition to lead, even if this means that we may make a mistake that followers might be able to avoid," said Graf.

"The next steps clearly are to continue to move away from just having a sustainability strategy to making our corporate strategy more sustainable. This requires an engagement with leaders across SAP that we have not achieved before moving to integrated reporting," he added.

His recommendations for companies who might be complacent with limited voluntary disclosure or perhaps hesitant to mix the voluntary with the mandatory?

"As soon as people recognize that  integrated reporting helps companies understand and grow the way how they create value at their core, , it will pick up. More and more people know this intuitively today but when someone connects all the financial and non-financial numbers with each other, then the big picture emerges," he said.

SAP’s Integrated Report 2012 is available at www.SAPIntegratedReport.com.

Poverty solutions of various approaches have been underway for decades, many of which have shown only mixed results. While the global middle class is still growing and many developing countries have made impressive gains, clearly more work can be done. Government and NGOs are unable to solve poverty on their own; and therefore the past few years have witnessed a trend of businesses partnering with non-profits to take on the globe’s most pressing challenges. Market-based solutions are starting to show results as the world’s poor have always proven they want a stake, not handouts, in their local water sources, environment and economy.

So how can business work with NGOs, local governments and directly with the world’s poorest citizens on finding poverty solutions? Here are three ways businesses can start:

Help build expertise and capacity

Instead of writing checks to charities, an effective poverty solutions strategy a company can launch is to lend their employees to non-profits on a part- or full-time basis. In India, the telecom giant Vodafone partners with the NGO Dasra and assigns 25 employees to work within NGOs of their choice across India for several weeks. The World of Difference program allows these employees to share their insights and experience on a variety of functions, including information technology, communications, human resources and communications. The German enterprise software company SAP operates a similar program in which employees participating in a four-week sabbatical program work with social enterprises in remote areas of India, South Africa and Brazil. Building organization capacity and NGOs while inspiring employees? A win-win for Vodafone and SAP.

Invest in Women

Women often bear the brunt of poverty’s ravages in both the developed and developing world. But there is hope: if 10 percent more of a country’s girls attend school, the rising tide lifts more boats. That same country’s economy in turn can grow 3 percent. Women also tend to invest in their families and communities at a rate more double than that of men.

Funding and staffing investment and training programs for women in countries in which a company does business is one way that an organization can become an engaged and effective stakeholder. For example, the retailer Anthropologie has trained artisans in Rwanda to make scarves sold in the company’s stores. ExxonMobil through its foundation invested in programs that taught women how to use mobile telephone and other technologies. Avon has launched a variety of projects, including no-interest, low-capital program training women to sell its products.

Earlier this year Avon took a courageous and political approach: its foundation helped rally its sales representatives in Hungary to mobilize and push their country’s parliament to pass a law declaring domestic violence a crime. To Avon, domestic violence was not just a moral issue, but a business and economic problem.

Partner on water and sanitation projects

Without water nothing else is possible, so I mention a few inspiring projects to highlight World Water Month. In emerging economies, the old days of digging a well or building a public latrine are over. More companies are partnering with non-profits to arrive at market-driven solutions to tackle the programs of water scarcity and unsafe sanitation. Beverage companies and breweries find themselves at the forefront of projects that tackle microfinance, tap into water mains and the build safe and clean private toilets. SABMiller works with WWF to build groundwater recharge structures giving farmers a more reliable source of irrigation water. PepsiCo and Water.org collaborate to provide microloans so citizens can pay for rainwater harvesting systems and gain access to municipal water supplies.

Training, water and women’s empowerment are just a few of the low-hanging pieces of fruit a company can take on to join the quest to find more poverty solutions. If your organization has found success tackling global poverty, we welcome you to share your ideas.

Image credit: Pexels

Submitted by Guest Contributor

By Farron Levy, President, True Impact

Employee volunteering can be a powerful force for improving the lives of those in need, promoting community wellbeing, and supporting important social initiatives. At the same time, such programs can support core business interests, like employee engagement and development, sales, recruiting, and stakeholder relations. 

But too often companies invest in employee volunteer programs under the promise of these social and business benefits, with little follow up as to whether their particular volunteer activities are generating these results.

As with any investment, measurement is what enables managers to prove – and improve – the value of their volunteer programs.

First, objective measures enable you to report to leadership and other stakeholders on the social and business return on investment (ROI) of your volunteers’ time, often crucial to attracting and retaining support for your program. Second, such measures enable you to identify what components of your program are working well, so you might replicate them, and what components are falling short of expectations, so you can intervene and improve them.

But how do you measure the impacts of your volunteer program in a way that is both practical and compelling? Here are a few practical tips:

Measuring Social Value

The most common way to convey a volunteer program’s social value is to monetize it: that is, calculate how much money nonprofits saved by not having to pay someone to perform the services your volunteers provided for free.  To monetize the value of services provided by your volunteers, calculate the total number of reported service hours, multiplied by the value (rate) of the services they provided. 

One of the best sources of data for this calculation is the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which maintains a comprehensive database of job functions and mean wages from across the country. The Independent Sector’s annual average value of a volunteer hour calculation is derived from this database, however, your own calculations will be more accurate – and you will be better positioned to steer your own programs towards higher-value activities – if you track value at an activity level rather than on a composite basis (e.g., where Food Service is $11.28 per hour and software systems development is $54.07, compared to using the Independent Sector composite value of $21.79 for all activities).

Another way to measure social value is to gather feedback on how the volunteer service helped improve the capacity of the nonprofit served. Options include:

• Increasing efficiency: helping a nonprofit to use fewer resources – such as man hours or materials – in performing its operations or delivering its services
• Increasing effectiveness: helping a nonprofit increase the success rate of the services it provides (e.g., for a nonprofit fighting homelessness, the percentage of homeless people served that ended up sustainably housed)
• Increasing reach: helping a nonprofit to serve more beneficiaries

Traditional volunteerism (applying non-specialized skills, such as tutoring or food preparation) is often most appropriately measured via monetization or reach numbers, while skilled volunteerism (applying professional or professional-level skills) can more frequently be translated to efficiency and effectiveness gains.

Measuring Employee Satisfaction and Engagement 

Employee engagement is an important driver of productivity and retention, and as a result many companies regularly gather survey feedback from their employees to monitor whether corporate practices and policies are keeping engagement levels high.  Volunteerism – with its ability to engage employees with social issues they care deeply about, while interacting with colleagues or learning new skills – can be an powerful tool for bringing a more well-rounded sense of fulfillment and engagement to the workplace.

So, instead of simply gathering feedback on how satisfying employees find their specific volunteer experience, consider going one step further and asking how important such volunteerism is to their overall job satisfaction.

Using categories and questions that match how your company already tracks employee engagement is a powerful way to convert your results into a “currency” that your company already uses and can immediately relate to. Immediate post-volunteerism surveys and exit surveys from departing employees can be effective data collection tools as well.

Measuring Skill Development

Volunteers often apply professional skills when they volunteer, but that’s not the same as developing skills.  Volunteer programs that put employees in a position to “stretch” – for example, to gain capabilities and experience with project management, client relations, or other job-related skills – are more likely to earn the attention (and participation!) of your human resources or talent-development departments.

As with engagement impacts, look to track skill development effects in the same terms – such as skill types and proficiency levels (either formally or informally) – that are already used within your company. 

For those looking to monetize the value of skill development, options include:

• Calculating productivity gains by estimating the resulting efficiency improvement (e.g., how many hours are saved multiplied by the average salaries of those who realize the improvement)
• Calculating avoided cost by estimating the price of having employees trained on the skills that were gained through the volunteerism experience

The data for either of these calculations tend to be easily available from an HR department. 

Measuring Sales, Recruiting and Stakeholder Effects

Volunteerism can help your company attract or retain customers in much the same way that it can also influence the behavior of recruiting prospects, business partners, regulators, legislators, advocacy groups, and other stakeholders: through brand enhancement and relationship development.

Generating positive PR can put your company “top of mind” or improve perceptions among stakeholders. Many companies measure performance in this category by tracking the number of media impressions they earned (i.e., how many people viewed or heard the story generated by the media outlet).

This may be another type of acceptable currency within your company, yet it’s not itself a measure of bottom-line value. For that, you need to look at what kind of behavior changed as a result of the brand enhancement.

For example, is there a change in the number of customers or what they purchased, or the number of applicants or their job-offer acceptance rate, or the nature of regulatory action and the effects on the company’s costs?  Brand effects can be powerful and generate substantial bottom-line value for a company – effects that tend to be most easily tracked by the functional area being affected (e.g., sales and marketing, recruiting, and government affairs).

That said, one must be realistic about the potential impact of an individual volunteer activity – or even an overall volunteer program – in its ability to “move the needle” on stakeholder perceptions in a way that will translate into these kinds of behavior changes. 

Whether your company is likely to benefit in these ways depends on the dynamics of your industry and your specific company: it is a determination you may be able to make via discussions with the internal departments that would be potentially impacted, based on their experience with related interventions.

Next Steps

One of the wonderful things about volunteerism – and corporate citizenship activities in general – is the many positive social and business ripple effects that can result. And while none of these individual effects are particularly difficult to measure, trying to take on all of them at once can feel overwhelming.

Instead, try focusing on one or two impacts at the beginning, and use as light a touch as possible in whatever data collection approach you take (piggybacking on existing management systems is often easiest). The best solution is the one that runs in the background, requiring little if any extra effort among administrators, accumulating data for when it’s time to generate that report for leadership (to prove value) or identify strengths and weaknesses for strategic planning (to improve value).

______________________

Metrics, measurement and their effectiveness will be discussed in depth at the only conference dedicated solely to employee engagement – the Charities@Work best Practices Summit taking place on April 3 and 4 in Manhattan. Learn more about the conference and register.

About the Author:

Farron Levy is president of True Impact (www.trueimpact.com), which provides web-based tools and consulting services to help companies such as Deloitte, PepsiCo, Pfizer, Wells Fargo, and their nonprofit partners to measure the social, financial, and environmental impact of their corporate citizenship activities.

At some point there is a transition from trying to avoid the collision to bracing for the impact.

That could be an excerpt from a driver’s education manual. Then again, it could be the outlook for the business climate given the now inevitable changes and effects of global warming.

According to the world’s largest professional services firm, Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC), “Now one thing is clear: businesses, governments and communities across the world need to plan for a warming world – not just 2C, but 4C or even 6C.”

Their warning comes as the result of an assessment of the global community’s inability to make the needed reductions in carbon emissions to avoid the greatest effects of global warming. PwC’s latest report claims that a reduction in carbon intensity of 5.1 percent per year is needed if we are to meet the target of limiting temperature rise to 2 degrees Celsius. However, last year, despite the economic slowdown, we saw a reduction of only 0.7 percent, which has been typical of every year since the turn of the century.

“We have passed a critical threshold,” says the report.

Earlier this week, Admiral Samuel Locklear, told the Boston Globe that global warming, “is probably the most likely thing that is going to happen . . . that will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.”

Even if we were somehow able to double our rate of de-carbonization, we would still be on track to hit a 6 degree increase by the end of the century. The only chance we have to hold temperatures to 2 degrees, would be to come up with a six-fold reduction in carbon emissions, which may be possible eventually, but it’s not going to happen anytime soon.

So, given this cheery prologue, what are the challenges and opportunities that businesses should be preparing for as we look forward to a destabilizing climate thanks to the effects of global warming?

1. Uncertainty

Without a doubt, the number one impact on business will continue to be uncertainty. Businesses will need to become far more agile and far more strategic, with contingency plans in place that must look bravely into the upcoming crisis without blinking and relegating as little as possible to the realm of the unthinkable.

According to Malcolm Preston, PwC’s global lead on sustainability and climate change, “Even with progress year-on-year in emissions reduction, the reality is that the level of corporate reduction is nowhere near what is required. The new normal for businesses is a period of high uncertainty, subdued growth and volatile commodity prices. If regulatory certainty doesn't come soon, businesses' ability to plan and act – particularly around energy, supply chain and risk – could be anything but 'normal.'”

Of course, uncertainty and risk are two sides of the same coin. According to John Steinbruner, Professor at the University of Maryland and Chair of the Committee on International Security Studies of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, speaking at the World Affairs Council Summit on Climate Change last week (video), “The consequence of climate are certainly going to be very large. We know that without any uncertainty whatsoever. But unfortunately, the character, magnitude and timing and location of those consequences cannot be predicted with sufficient confidence to really tell us what to do about it.”

2. Crowded

If we hit the 6 degree Celsius increase we are now on track to meet by 2100, even if we double our current rate of carbon reduction, according to Mark Lynas, author of the book Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet, southern Europe, north Africa the Middle East, and the American Midwest will be uninhabitable due to excessive heat and drought. At the same time, inundated coastal cities will need to be evacuated. Roughly one-tenth of the world’s population live in low-lying coastal areas. Admiral Locklear spoke of entire nations being displaced by the rising sea level. All of these climate refugees will need some place to go. It’s likely that there will be some negative feedback effect as we pass 2 degrees at mid-century, as the latest Shell scenario report predicts. This will hopefully lead to substantially enhanced efforts to deal with the problem, once impacts have become truly undeniable, which could steer us more towards a 4-degree increase, if it’s not already too late by then.

3. Disrupted

All of this dislocation will put a tremendous strain on all kinds of services unless action is taken in advance that anticipates the challenges. Robust and resilient systems need to be put in place that can withstand the weather impacts while building in enough capacity to serve all of those who will be in need. Heavy weather events will cause injuries, deaths, days of work missed, as well as damage to infrastructure such as bridges, tunnels, roads, power lines, hospitals, power plants, etc.

4. Wet and dry

Water will be the primary vector through which climate change will make its presence known. Because a warmer atmosphere can hold more water, precipitation patterns will change dramatically, with the trend being towards more water coming down at once, leading to increased runoff and flooding, with less water being absorbed into the ground. Other areas will be deprived of rain altogether, becoming deserts as a result. There is a saying, “You don’t miss your water till your well runs dry.” The same can also be said for the precipitation patterns that until now, made such a large portion of the planet viable for human activity.

5. Hungry

In addition to existing farmland falling prey to heat waves and drought, low lying coastal regions also face contamination from salt water. All of this will place tremendous stress on our ability to feed a steadily growing population. This, in some regions of the world, has already led to social unrest.

These will be the primary impacts. The secondary impacts, which are the human responses to these conditions, could potentially be even more severe, depending on our abilities to navigate through these challenges. Secondary impacts will include:

6. Civil unrest

People are going to be unhappy. They will protest, they will demonstrate, they will riot, they will sue. As Admiral Locklear said, “If it goes bad, you could have hundreds of thousands or millions of people displaced and then security will start to crumble pretty quickly.” People will want someone to do something about all of the things that are making them unhappy.

7. Government action

Given the increasing severity of these impacts, and in some cases, you might say, finally, governments around the world will have no choice but to issue increasingly stringent regulations in an attempt to manage continuing emissions, as well as any scarcities of food and water and other services that might be occurring, while at the same time maintaining security. These regulations will undoubtedly add to the unhappiness of a great many people. It will certainly strain our leaders' ability to lead, far beyond anything that is being seen today.

Rather than end on such a gloomy note, I would add that there are a few positive impacts that might be expected as well. These include:

8. Longer summers

This will not only provide more time for outdoor recreation, but more importantly, given the increasing population, a longer growing season. This could well prove to be critical in meeting the demands of feeding all these people.

9. Milder winters

According to some studies, warmer winters will mean lower mortality from disease. One Stanford study says, "Most people would enjoy higher temperatures, and the evidence supports the proposition that humans would live longer and avoid some sickness."

10. Open trade route

A melted Arctic will provide an open trade route from the Atlantic Ocean to Asia. This will allow much shorter transit times and will, somewhat ironically, save energy.

It’s not too late to try and avoid the collision, or at least reduce its severity, and at the same time, it’s not too soon to start bracing for the impact, either. As Admiral Locklear said, “The ice is melting and sea is getting higher. I’m into the consequence management side of it.”

[Image credit: Andy Lederer: Flickr Creative Commons]

Submitted by Guest Contributor

The Civic 50, a groundbreaking initiative launched in 2012 by the National Conference on Citizenship, Points of Light and Bloomberg News, identified the top 50 community-minded S&P 500 corporations that best use their time, talent, and resources to improve the quality of life in the communities where they do business. The ranking is based on seven dimensions - community partnerships, measurement and strategy, leadership, design, employee and civic growth, cause alignment, and transparency.

In part three, Jackie Norris, Executive Director of Points of Lights' Corporate Institute, decodes the third dimension: cause alignment.

_________________________

 A few years ago, Bladimir Martinez, then 16, was chosen as one of 10 high school students to run a real Capital One bank branch inside Parkdale High School in Prince George’s County, Maryland -- a county where only 44 percent of high school graduates are considered college or career ready. In the few years since then, Martinez has transitioned from an ambitious kid who was “not much interested in school” into a bank teller and college student studying business.

Through Capital One’s student-run bank program, students like Martinez are not only responsible for operating a bank branch and offering savings products to their fellow students and faculty, but also for teaching their peers about money management topics such as budgeting and saving. The program provides real-world job experience – all of the students receive professional job training, entry-level bank teller salaries, mentoring, and career – and college preparatory experiences through colleges and universities.

Strategic Community Development: Connecting Education with Empowerment

The program, which focuses on schools in low- to moderate-income communities, has already paid off for many of the students. To date, more than 90 percent of the program’s alumni have since enrolled in college – a decision that could be worth a million dollars in income over the course of a lifetime for each of those young adults.

Martinez traces his turnaround to one of his first interviews with a Capital One Bank mentor who left a lasting impression on him. “That was the moment I thought, ‘To be this guy, I have to go through this.’ I realized that nothing happens overnight. School is a must in my life now.”

Financial literacy, education and workforce development are among the goals of Capital One’s Investing for Good strategy, which aligns the bank’s community engagement programs, funding decisions and employee skills with its core business capabilities as a bank.

“We believe that strong business and strong community go hand in hand," said Carolyn Berkowitz, Managing Vice President, Community Affairs; and President of the Capital One Foundation.

"We recognize that creating thriving communities doesn’t happen overnight – it requires a long-term focus and commitment, coupled with deep partnerships with effective nonprofit organizations and community leaders, to drive lasting economic outcomes.”

“Our community engagement goes beyond ‘checkbook philanthropy’ – we don’t just write a check and walk away,” Berkowitz adds. “We focus on making strategic, long-term investments – through philanthropy, lending, and volunteering -- to catalyze economic growth in our communities.”

This approach helped Capital One earn top honors in cause alignment last year from The Civic 50, a ranking of America’s most community-minded companies.

The Civic 50, a partnership between National Conference on Citizenship and Points of Light, ranks corporations on seven dimensions of local involvement. The cause alignment dimension requires a firm to show that it uses its workers’ professional skills in community engagement programs that are consistent with its core business competencies and objectives.

Investing for Good: Focusing on Scale

One way Capital One does this is through its Investing for Good pro bono volunteer program, through which its employees in departments such as Brand, IT, Legal, and HR leverage their unique business skills to help local nonprofit organizations enhance their ability as a business to address local community needs.

For example, last year Capital One employees stepped in to help the Legal Aid Justice Center of Charlottesville, Va., find a solution when the economic downturn flooded Legal Aid with requests from new clients just as the organization’s government funding was cut by 20 percent. Legal Aid lost half of their staff attorneys as demand for their services increased by nearly 60 percent. 

“We’d send emails and faxes and call lawyer after lawyer after lawyer” trying to match each client in need with a volunteer attorney somewhere in the state with the right skills for the case, said Alex Gulotta, executive director of the Legal Aid Justice Center. “Calling and calling and calling is not very efficient.”

Capital One sent a team of 15 volunteers from its legal, systems analysis, supply chain management communications and information technology departments to find a new approach.

The result of that collaboration was Justice Server, an electronic data management system that gives volunteer attorneys across Virginia easy access to Legal Aid’s computerized files on all the cases needing help. 

“This is now our primary case-management system, and other states are looking at the model,” Gulotta said. 

The Center “needed a different kind of technical solution for organizing their work, the kind of thing Capital One people develop all the time,” said Berkowitz. “And our people got involved in ways they feel really great about.”

When Capital One channels its employees’ talents to solve community problems, “they bring back to the company new leadership skills and are better employees,” Berkowitz said. In fact, more than 90 percent of Capital One managers said their associates' leadership development skills were demonstrably improved after engaging in pro-bono work.

And when Capital One brings more to the community than just donations, it “helps make people in the community confident that we’re the kind of folks they’d like to bank with and it fosters long-term economic growth in the community that is also good for business. It’s a win-win for us," added Berkowitz.

Previously:

The Citi Foundation Finds New Ways to Measure the Impact of CSR Efforts

The Civic 50: Why IBM's Integrated Commitments Make it America's Most Community-Minded Company