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Business in the Community (BITC) is opening up its Workwell benchmark to all companies, regardless of size. The move follows a successful trial of the process with companies listed on the FTSE 100 last year.

The benchmark measures how companies are publically reporting employee engagement and wellbeing.

The 2012 pilot highlighted the need to increase transparency of employee engagement and wellbeing practices to show whether robust people practices are in place to drive long term success.

According to BITC, currently only one third of UK employees are actively engaged in their work and levels of employee stress and anxiety are rising. This is despite clear evidence that workplaces with good levels of wellbeing have higher productivity, greater employee retention and improved customer satisfaction, the business charity maintains.

Stephen Howard, chief executive of BITC, commented: “We hope the 2014 benchmark, which we encourage all responsible companies to take part in, will begin to show improvements in the way employers manage their people and report on their staff engagement and wellbeing, to help create happier, healthier and ultimately more productive workforces. This is fundamental to businesses and individuals.”

Companies participating in the 2014 benchmark receive a detailed and confidential feedback report that provides gap analysis of their performance in comparison to industry peers, as well as making recommendations for improvement.

For more information click here

Picture credit: © Dawn Hudson | Dreamstime Stock Photos
 

Submitted by Guest Contributor

Part one of CSRwire special series: the Future Makers, based on the book.

By Joanna Stefanska Hafenmayer and Wolfgang Hafenmayer

Child of the jungle, engineer, specialist in waste disposal systems and refuse queen, Albina Ruiz Ríos grew up in the San Martin region of Peru. Her childhood was spent between the wild rivers and gigantic trees of the Amazonian jungle.

The Refuse Just Bothers Me!

“I always had the opinion that it was necessary to find new solutions. That is why I wanted to become an engineer,” Albina says. When she was 18, she moved to Lima to study.

She felt disgusted by the huge, noisy city. She lived with her brother's family in a room in El Augustino, one of the many slums in which stranded immigrants live wall-to-wall with criminals.

During her first days in the city, Albina hardly left the house. She was bothered by the gross, stinking refuse heaps that piled up everywhere in the slums, harming the environment and affecting people’s health. Comparing this to the beauty of the jungle, she was appalled. “How could the people in Lima ever be able to live with dignity when they were exposed to such filth and noxious odors every day?”

Seeing Potential Within Her Own Profession

The omnipresent rubbish heaps gave the emerging scientist the idea that she could use her abilities for something other than the construction of new machines or tools.

So, in the early 1990s, Albina started to look into the subject of waste from a scientist’s point of view. She wanted to understand the problem as a system and hoped to solve it. She founded a student workgroup, calculated the health expenses of families living in the slums and spent days in libraries. She spent time in the refuse collection trucks of the well-to-do boroughs of Lima. By doing this, she began to understand the system.

Albina wrote her doctoral thesis on the social and ecological implications of refuse utilization. Her findings drew the attention of the mayor of Lima who consequently offered her a job, in which she was asked to implement her system in a pilot project.

Many were surprised that I wasn’t working for a company and making good money. Helping other people has always been more important to me than money or a career. I always lived in poor area—and in poor areas, it is dirty. In order to make life as bearable as possible, people try to help one another and are often innovative in the way in which they do it.

A Sophisticated System with Many Employment Possibilities

The basic idea of Albina’s system is easy: the inhabitants of the slums usually spend up to US$10 a month on fighting diarrhoea and other hygiene-related illnesses, however, by investing this amount into a functioning waste collection service, they avoid a good portion of these illnesses.

Simultaneously, Albina’s system provides opportunities and income for a number of small-scale enterprises that have sprung up around the waste collection and recycling services. So, while some people pick up the refuse and collect the fees, others separate the waste and recycle a good part of it into new products – which generates a number of jobs. Often these jobs go to women who establish an additional income, for example by composting part of the refuse and later selling it as fertiliser.

Albina manages to turn a chain of resource withdrawal into a chain of resource recovery – thereby creating jobs for the poor at every stage.

As a side product, she provides information on environmental issues. It might seem amazing that 98% of the inhabitants in “her” neighborhoods pay their waste disposal fee, compared to 60% in administration-run neighborhoods. This can probably be ascribed to the fact that the living standard of people goes up noticeably when the negative side effects of the refuse are reduced so dramatically.

“A pile of rubbish is a chance, not just a problem. Plastic, organic waste, cardboard – all that means money!” Albina says. The system in Lima currently offers up to 50,000 jobs for the poorest of the poor and reaches three million people.

A Model Program

With the support of several foundations (see below), Albina’s concept has been extended to several cities in South America and her consultation is being requested all over the world.

The job is hard, but wonderful! Whenever a family gets money with the help of a junk-job and can buy fresh bread or send the kids to school, it is a wonderful feeling for me. Poor people are in need of my work, and I want to change the world for them. My dream is to have clean cities all over the world. Maybe I won’t be alive to see my dream come true, but I believe my children will. At this very moment, our model is being exported to Mexico and Uganda.

The Light and The Dark Side of Entrepreneurship

Albina's path has been long and trying: first she had to fight the prejudice against her job, then the corruption in the different administrative sections of the boroughs, while struggling repeatedly with problems of funding.

Though her systems do operate cost-effectively, their development, documentation and expansion demand initial capital. The permanent search for money, the filing of applications, responding to requests and the tiring negotiations have left their mark in the last 15 years. Today, Albina is supported by several organizations for social entrepreneurship. In 2006, she was awarded the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship and she will use the US$500,000 prize money to export her system to 20 more cities.

With Time, Reputation Settles In

Albina does not object to being called the “Refuse Queen.” After all, she creates hundreds of jobs, helps millions of people avoid sicknesses and horrendous health-care costs they can hardly afford, while beautifying their cities along the way. She would have never imagined all of this as a child, back in the jungle of Peru.

Foundations supporting Albina’s work:

• www.ciudadsaludable.org
• www.ashoka.org/node/3718
• www.schwabfound.org
• www.avina.net/eng
• www.skollfoundation.org/entrepreneur/albina-ruiz

About the Authors:

Joanna Stefanska Hafenmayer is the Managing Director of “MyImpact”, an organisation focusing on helping leaders to realize meaningful careers through coaching and seminars, as well as assessment tools and publications. An expert in the development of corporate responsible leadership programmes, Joanna is also a member of the Board of “Öbu” – the Swiss think-tank for business and sustainability – and leads the Responsible Corporate Leadership (RECOL) Forum, a group of innovative global enterprises in this area. Prior to 2012, she was a member of Microsoft Switzerland’s Executive Board as their Innovation & Sustainability Officer. Joanna was selected as a First Movers Fellow of the Aspen Institute.

Wolfgang Hafenmayer is the Managing Partner of LGT Venture Philanthropy, with a mission to improve the quality of life of less advantaged people. To realize this mission, Wolfgang built a team of 25 investment managers and philanthropy advisors on five continents to identify and support organizations with outstanding social and environmental impact currently improving the quality of life of 7.9 million less advantaged people. Wolfgang has been an Investment Manager with BonVenture, the first social venture fund in German-speaking Europe, and helped set up Forma Futura, a sustainable asset management company.

The global energy industry must play a greater role in the transition to sustainable energy systems if UN goals are to be met, warns a report from the World Energy Council (WEC).

The potential for billions of people benefiting from sustainable energy systems in future decades hangs in the balance without increased private sector support, it says.

The WEC’s 2013 World Energy Trilemma report, Time to get real – the case for sustainable energy investment, is based on interviews with more than 50 policymakers, including energy and environment ministers, leaders in development banks, governments, IGOs and NGOs, plus experts from more than 25 countries.

The policymakers interviewed expressed concern that the lack of global consensus on climate change and a future energy system framework, coupled with dramatic disruptions caused by emerging technologies and rapidly shifting patterns of energy use and supply, make it difficult to develop and implement long-term energy policies. This results in increased risk for industry and investors, which must be addressed if the much-needed energy transition is to be delivered in the future.

The report also reveals the results of the 2013 Energy Sustainability Index. The Energy Sustainability Index within the report is the world’s most comprehensive ranking of countries energy policies and evaluates how well 129 countries balance the three conflicting agendas involved in achieving energy sustainability – what the WEC has called the ‘energy trilemma’; energy security, energy equity and environmental sustainability.

The Index shows that developed countries with higher shares of energy coming from low- and zero-carbon energy sources supported by well-established energy-efficiency programmes, such as Switzerland, Denmark and Sweden, outperform most countries across all three dimensions of the energy trilemma. Nevertheless, it is clear that all countries still struggle to balance all three aspects of the trilemma's currently conflicting agendas.

Only five countries in the top 10 have been awarded a ‘AAA’ score with Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, the United Kingdom and Spain being the only countries that historically demonstrate their ability to manage the trade-offs between the three competing dimensions equally.
 

Picture credit: © Chrisharvey | Dreamstime Stock Photos

By Thomas S. Lyons, Ph.D., Baruch College, City University of New York

Typically, when we think about “sustainable business,” we concentrate on corporate social responsibility (CSR): energy efficiency, reduced carbon footprint, recycling and reuse, fair treatment of employees, and charitable giving, among other considerations. Most of the sustainable business programs, in the universities that have them, are corporate focused. Yet, corporations are not the only variety of sustainable businesses.

Sometimes sustainable business is manifested in the activities of startups and small businesses that pursue double and triple bottom lines. These are mission-driven companies that are dedicated to being socially responsible from their inception, unlike most (though not all) corporations that pursue CSR for marketing purposes or to cut costs and increase profits. While there is value in doing the “right” things, even if it is for selfish reasons, there is a certain purity about these social enterprises that has a special appeal for those of us who cherish people and planet as well as profits.

The realm in which these mission-driven enterprises operate has come to be known as “social entrepreneurship,” a term widely credited to Bill Drayton, founder of the social venture philanthropy, Ashoka. What exactly is social entrepreneurship? My colleague from New York University, Jill Kickul, and I have suggested in our book, Understanding Social Entrepreneurship: The Relentless Pursuit of Mission in an Ever Changing World, that it is “the application of the mindset, processes, tools, and techniques of business entrepreneurship to the pursuit of a social and/or environmental mission.”

This is a good starting place, but it assumes knowledge of business entrepreneurship that some readers may not have. Because of this, it might be helpful to go back to a definition developed by J. Gregory Dees, widely considered to be the “father” of the field of social entrepreneurship. In an unpublished paper written in 1998, Dees stated that:

Social entrepreneurs play the role of change agents in the social sector by:

• Adopting a mission to create and sustain social value (not just private value),


• Recognizing and relentlessly pursuing new opportunities to serve that mission,


• Engaging in the process of continuous innovation, adaptation, and learning,


• Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand,


• Exhibiting a heightened sense of accountability to the constituencies served and for the outcomes created.

In defining social entrepreneurship this way, Dees helps us to understand the major characteristics of business entrepreneurship that apply, the characteristics that make social entrepreneurship unique, and how the two are blended. The second, third and fourth bullet points in the definition provide the business-related core.

First, all entrepreneurs are what the late entrepreneurship educator Jeffrey Timmons called “opportunity obsessed.” They constantly look for opportunities to add value to the lives of their customers and prospective customers. Social entrepreneurs, too, are always looking for opportunities to advance their mission, social and/or environmental, thereby enhancing the lives of their target beneficiaries. Second, entrepreneurship is synonymous with innovation because entrepreneurs implement inventions, their own or those of others; that is, they find ways to get the given invention to market by addressing issues of affordability, quality, durability, accessibility, etc., in a way that meets the needs of the customers in that market. Social entrepreneurs do the same thing for people facing social challenges and for the environment. Finally, business entrepreneurs utilize the resources of others to start and grow their ventures. They do this by selling these “others” (investors of various forms of capital) on their business concept’s potential for success. Social entrepreneurs must do the same, utilizing the strength of a compelling mission.

What makes social entrepreneurship distinct from business entrepreneurship is its unwavering focus on the social/environmental mission. This is true, no matter what legal structure the social entrepreneur chooses. For-profit social enterprises put mission before profits, typically using their excess revenues as a means of scaling the reach of their mission. Nonprofits are increasingly finding that they cannot rely on philanthropy to sustain themselves, much less grow. Thus, they are pursuing earned income strategies that leverage the organization’s excess capacity and capability. By law, the earned income they generate must be reinvested in the enterprise and its mission. Hybrid social enterprises, which combine features of both for-profits and nonprofits, use this legal structure to expand potential revenue streams, all aimed at increasing and sustaining the organization’s ability to pursue its mission.

In Understanding Social Entrepreneurship, Kickul and I ask the question, “Is a venture that offers dry-cleaning services using environmentally friendly processes and cleaning products a social venture?” The answer lies in this enterprise’s mission. If this dry cleaner is “green” because she has recognized a market niche catering to people who value the environment and her goal is profit, then hers is not a social enterprise; although, it may be a sustainable business. If, on the other hand, the entrepreneur is focused on environmental sustainability, and profit is secondary and a means to growing and sustaining that mission, this business is a social enterprise.

Dees’s final distinguishing feature of social entrepreneurship from business entrepreneurship is that the former is held to a higher standard of accountability. This is not to say that business entrepreneurs are not accountable; they are – to their customers and shareholders. However, social entrepreneurs are accountable to a much larger group – their stakeholders, who are people who have a financial and/or emotional stake in their success. This group includes investors, employees (including volunteers in nonprofits), direct beneficiaries, and the community or society. There is no such thing as a closely-held, private social enterprise. Social entrepreneurs operate in a fishbowl and are responsible for demonstrating their social impact and for complete transparency.

Further, measuring the performance of a social enterprise is much more complex than it is for a commercial business, which can simply measure financial success. Measuring and monetizing lives saved, quality of life increased, and environmental damage mitigated (among other impacts), while possible, are exceedingly difficult to do.

Thus, social entrepreneurship can be thought of as a unique, totally mission-driven form of sustainable business. This is why we include this subject in the curriculum of our MBA in Sustainable Business Program at Baruch College of the City University of New York. We want our students to be exposed to both the corporate and small enterprise manifestations of sustainable business practice. I would add that learning the entrepreneurial, in addition to the managerial, approach to sustainable business administration can give students who choose not to launch their own social enterprise the skills to be “sustainable business intrapreneurs” – managers who are thinking and acting like social entrepreneurs within a corporation.

Thomas S. Lyons, Ph.D. is Lawrence N. Field Family Chair in Entrepreneurship and Professor of Management at Baruch College, City University of New York.

Image credit: Pexels

The UN Global Compact and newspaper group Financial Times have produced the first benchmark for CSR in Africa. The joint initiative, the Africa Sustainability Barometer, gauges the state of corporate sustainability reporting on the continent and covers more than 1,000 international companies, as well as local and regional firms.

While corporate reporting on issues of sustainability in Africa remains patchy, the Barometer highlights the need to expand the scope of reporting. For those who understand how sustainability affects their corporate performance, increased reporting and integration of the sustainability agenda looks likely, says the report. For companies who operate in a more isolated manner, and for the many smaller companies who are not in the public eye, advocacy work has a long way to go.

“With the Africa Sustainability Barometer, we hope to shine a light on the current efforts by companies to report on their sustainability, make the case for the value of comprehensive reporting, and encourage more companies across the continent to commit to responsible practices,” said Georg Kell, Executive Director of the UN Global Compact.

Covering the scope of corporate sustainability, the Barometer assesses human rights, labour and employment, environment, anti-corruption as well as corporate governance and supply chain management.

 “A growing number of investors now include environmental, social and governance (ESG) in their due diligence and risk assessment as important factors in making investment decisions. Companies that have a coherent and effective approach to ESG stand out. As such, sustainability can play an important role in driving investment to the continent, and attracting the long-term capital it needs,” said Lanre Akinola, Editor, This is Africa, Financial Times.

You can download the Africa Sustainability Barometer here.
 

Swiss pharma giant Novartis is backing a new campaign in its long-term commitment to fighting malaria.

The Power of One campaign (www.Po1.org) aims to address the treatment gap – through direct donations and existing government commitments – in view of the 300m additional treatments estimated to be needed to treat malaria patients across Africa between now and the end of 2015. The company says that every dollar donated to the campaign will buy and deliver a treatment to a child diagnosed with malaria.

The website enables the public to purchase a treatment and track the journey of a treatment. Donors will be able to see the effect of their donation on the ground, share information with their networks and recruit other donors.Novartis is supporting the campaign financially as well as donating up to three million Coartem Dispersible treatments to match antimalarials funded by the public. 

Novartis is the exclusive treatment sponsor of the campaign. Additional sponsors include Alere Inc., which is providing malaria rapid diagnostic tests, 21st Century Fox, AHAlife.com, Causes.com, Time Warner, Twitter, Venmo and others.

Zambia will be the first country to receive deliveries of treatments and tests as a result of the Power of One campaign.

The pharma company’s commitment aligns with its long history in the fight against malaria; the Novartis Malaria Initiative is one of the largest access-to-medicine programs in the healthcare industry.

Picture credit: © Furtseff | Dreamstime.com

Despite a top down approach to sustainability, more than two thirds of chief executives (67%) believe that business is not doing enough to address global sustainability challenges, according to a survey by the United Nations Global Compact and Accenture.

The report is the largest study of top executives ever conducted on sustainability and details the views of 1,000 chief executives.

Entitled Architects of a Better World, the study demonstrates broadening awareness on the part of global business of the opportunities presented by sustainability. Fully 78% of surveyed ceos see sustainability as a route to growth and innovation, and 79% believe that it will lead to competitive advantage in their industry. However, ceos see the economic climate and a range of competing priorities creating obstacles to embedding sustainability at scale within their companies.

“With thousands of companies, from market leaders to small enterprises, committed to responsible business practices, we can see that there is enormous momentum. Now, we need policymakers, investors and consumers to send the right signals to spur the next level of corporate sustainability action, innovation and collaboration,” commented Georg Kell, executive director of the UN Global Compact.

See the full story in the October issue of Ethical Performance.
 

Picture credit: © Andrew Kazmierski | Dreamstime Stock Photos

Submitted by Guest Contributor

By Rebecca Busse, Senior Stakeholder Engagement Manager, Future 500

Teach a Person to Fish

“Know your stakeholders” is a ubiquitous mantra in corporate social responsibility and it’s not unusual for companies operating abroad to map in detail the indigenous communities affected by their operations. What is groundbreaking, however, is having a comprehensive Free, Prior, Informed Consent (FPIC) strategy in place and being able to showcase community benefits that leave a positive legacy long after operations have ceased.

In development, the expression, “Give someone a fish, they eat for a day; teach them how to fish, they eat forever,” is very common – and most community development practitioners would recite it hastily. However, it is rare to find this tenet well applied in public-private community development projects or corporate philanthropic projects. There are some notable exceptions, but, by and large, many of the projects that are implemented fail, do not reach their full utility, or just don’t have lasting positive effects.

Solutions on the Ground

For Indigenous People’s Day this year, Future 500 reconnected with Rebecca Adamson, founder of First Peoples Worldwide and one of the nation’s foremost thought leaders on indigenous issues, to chat about trends in indigenous activism, palm oil and other related issues.

Being a solutions-oriented team, we didn’t just want to discuss the problems, but rather to discuss solutions that have worked on the ground. With over 20 years of working in the field alongside a diverse set of change-makers from on-the-ground indigenous and tribal communities to extractives executives, Adamson had some insight for us: self-determination grants.

Basically, self-determination grants are what they sound like: grants to indigenous communities that are designed to bolster governance and communications in the community, by the community, for the community. Since much of the natural resource extraction happening globally is on indigenous land, these grants have big implications for community empowerment, which can lead to smooth implementation of FPIC, conflict avoidance and/or quick resolution, and, ultimately, lower risk to companies.

A Win-Win

The grants are a win-win: they are good for communities because they strengthen existing governance and communications infrastructure, which has myriad benefits even outside of natural resource development.

Not all indigenous people want development – this is true.

But, according to Adamson and other indigenous advocates, most do – who doesn’t want economic development and jobs? However, indigenous people want it on their own terms, with minimal environmental and social impacts. Most parents want to see more opportunities created for their children, just not if it means losing clean air, water, habitat or their ancestral culture.

Repsol and the Guaraní

A good example of how self-determination grants play out on the ground is the case of Repsol and the Guaraní in the Amazon: in 1997, Repsol (and two other oil companies) wanted to engage in exploration and drilling in Guaraní territory, and Repsol began the process without community consent.

Instead of fighting a protracted legal battle, the community reached out to non-profits for help. First Peoples gave the Guaraní a self-determination grant, and then got out of the way of the decision-making process. The community was then able to purchase boats and gasoline for community members to reach remote parts of the community and they were able to make an informed decision about the development that helped to preserve their right to the land, and thereby their way of life. They had also improved their communications and governance systems, making the community stronger as a result.

And the grant? Just over $11,000.

Those tasked with justifying financial and social return on development projects would celebrate that hefty ROI, not only for the companies involved, but also for the community.

Not All Grants Are Created Equally

Not all grants are created equally. Not all of them solve the problem they aim to – some even cause unintended negative consequences.

As philanthropist Peter Buffett recently pointed out in his controversial New York Times piece the “Charitable Industrial Complex,” sometimes the most important thing we can do to help is listen. Listen to the communities and let them decide for themselves what change they want and at what pace.

Self-determination grants are a concrete way of providing resources to build what is essentially a deep listening infrastructure, encouraging alignment within the community and, ultimately, helping the benefits of development to last.

About the Author
As a stakeholder engagement manager, Rebecca Busse primarily focuses on the stakeholder landscape in the extractives sector: oil and mining. Prior to joining the Future 500 team, Busse earned an MBA in Sustainable Management at Presidio Graduate School. She also holds a B.A. in International Relations from San Francisco State University.

Environmentalists in the US are calling on the president of Tanzania to crack down on the country's elephant poaching epidemic. President Kikwete is currently in the US for private conservation meetings.

President Kikwete's visit comes just two months after President Obama's trip to Dar es Salaam, where he announced an Executive Order to combat global wildlife poaching and trafficking. 

Part of the Executive Order involves the creation of a Presidential Task Force to fight international wildlife trafficking to support countries, such as Tanzania, devastated by illicit poaching and trade. 

"The slaughter of Tanzania's elephants is threatening the billion dollar tourism industry and the thousands of jobs underpinned by revenue from United States tourists and others from around the world wishing to witness Tanzania's spectacular wildlife heritage," said Allan Thornton, president of the Environmental Investigation Agency, an international campaigning organization based in Washington, DC and London. "We appeal to President Kikwete to urgently confront this crisis."

It is estimated that 30,000 elephants have been killed in Tanzania's Selous Game Reserve between 2006 and 2009. 

Picture credit: © Andre Klopper | Dreamstime Stock Photos

British high street stalwart Marks & Spencer proved top of most consumers’ minds when asked to name a company that took environmental sustainability seriously in their daily business operations.

The Co-operative Group ranked second, Tesco third, BP fourth and Sainsbury’s fifth.

However, the study exposes the fact that two thirds (68%) of respondents were unable to name a company taking the issue of environmental sustainability seriously.

The research, conducted amongst 1,819 adults for the Carbon Trust by YouGov found that only 5% saw businesses as being most effective in helping the environment, when compared to environmental pressure groups, academics and the government. By contrast, 22% of those surveyed see businesses as being the most effective in helping the economic recovery.

 “Whilst it’s clear that consumers still care about the environmental future, their perspective on where the responsibility falls is skewed. It cannot be solely down to environmental groups to shoulder the weight of protecting our planet’s natural resources. Businesses have an enormous role to play here and need to be seen to be doing their part,” explained Tom Delay, chief executive of the Carbon Trust.

Read the full story in the October issue of Ethical Performance.