11. Communicating Sustainability Internally
Many organizations are falling short in communicating their strategies, goals, and actions around sustainability, especially internally. Typically there is a big push in the first year of a program and a flurry of communications around Earth Day and reporting season, but for most companies these efforts eventually fade away.
For sustainability to be in people’s minds on a daily basis, there needs to be a consistent communication that is authentic, purposeful, and across various mediums. Companies need to tell their sustainability story in a way that resonates with people, internally and externally; is aligned; and reinforces what the company is trying to accomplish.
One could write an entire book about marketing and communicating your message externally, so the focus of this chapter is primarily on internal communications.
Continuous Communication Reinforces Your Message
“Say things over and over again, until people get it!”1
Building off what was stated earlier, after you know your North Star and know how sustainability relates to your company and employees, you need to continually reinforce this message. The goal should be that everybody within your company understands it, can effectively communicate it, and can use it to influence their decisions throughout the day. This requires a commitment not only from the PR and HR departments, but from all departments, and especially middle management because that is where the breakdown in the communication chain usually occurs.
A significant opportunity exists for organizations to improve the frequency, effectiveness, and relevance of their communications to employees, especially considering that most employees I come into contact with say they want more information, education, and opportunity to contribute around sustainability, not less.
To do this effectively, you’ll have to piggyback and tag sustainability onto other communication methods however you can, whether they are e-mails from HR, part of a monthly newsletter, e-mail blasts to employees, social media, or something similar. Realize that to get your message heard with all the other “noise,” you are going to have to be persistent and a bit creative at times.
So find partners within your firm and work with your communications department to set up your communication structure in way that, as John Koriath encourages, “will not only push messages out, but that will also continually gather stories so that it becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of gathering and communicating sustainability messages.”2
Share across platforms. If you have a message, tip, or story, it can and should show up in as many places as possible and be communicated using the strategies outlined in Figure 11.1. Platforms can include, but are not limited to, the company blog, Web pages, newsletters, social media, online forums, Internet sites, press releases, or spinoff pieces from sustainability reports, events, brochures, and packaging.
Use the Calendar to Help Reinforce Your Message
Be sure to take advantage of the calendar to put sustainability into people’s mind about things they are already thinking about, both inside and outside of work. For example, combine messages around back-to-school timing, holidays, Earth Day, quarterly and annual reporting, seasonal changes, and so on. Employees are already thinking about these things, and you’ll be more successful if you can tie sustainability into your communications around these time periods.
This approach extends to competitions as well. For example, a workplace energy-reduction contest makes more sense in the winter, and a water-conservation contest makes more sense during the summer. Also, because utilities often are also thinking about conservation seasonally, keep an eye out for opportunities to use free resources and collateral provided by local utility companies around their programs to leverage and support your communications during seasonal times.
Share Both the Good and the Bad
Consumers are increasingly skeptical of companies’ “green claims,” making it paramount that companies communicate their entire story, both the good and the bad of their sustainability efforts. Authentically disclosing your successes, as well as the areas in which you still need to improve, will increase stakeholders’ confidence that your communications are accurate and will help minimize accusations of greenwashing.
Put Sustainability into Relatable Terms
Be sure to put sustainability actions into terms people can understand and relate to. Make it real. For example, when someone talks about climate action in terms of metric tons of CO2 equivalents, people’s eyes glaze over. Not many people will know what to do with that information because they just don’t know what a ton of CO2e is. Therefore, whenever you can, put things into terms people are familiar with. Provide visuals and tailor the terms to your company whenever possible. Table 11.1 provides a few examples:
Lastly, after you have the best terms and practices in place, it’s important to put the information in as many languages as possible. This not only means the different corporatespeak around the company (facilities, finance, engineers, etc.) but also the languages of your employees. For example, we were working with a restaurant that communicated its sustainability efforts in English, but the majority of its cooking and wait staff spoke and read Spanish as their primary language. Not surprisingly, even though they had done major outreach in English, the company didn’t begin to experience any change in behavior until they translated sustainability into Spanish and into terms the wait staff could relate to.
Storytelling Is Key
Storytelling is the best way to make sustainability relatable to most people because people remember stories and myths. Too often people have tried to communicate with data and metrics alone. Although this might initially persuade your audience, it’s not what they will remember over time. People remember stories. Similar to the way we learned lessons as kids, we connect with a story or myth, whether it is “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” or whatever comes to your mind. The power of a story can really help anchor the sustainability message into people’s minds.
Storytelling is also a good way to see whether what you are sharing is relevant to what people care about. Data is cool for the geeks, but not everyone remembers data points. If nobody cares, listens, or comments about your story, you either are telling it wrong or, more likely, you are telling the wrong story.
So remember that, although we’ve been taught to always make the business case, if you want something to stick, connect with people’s heads, their hearts, and their hands so that they are thinking, Hey, I can do that too! Use a story to help them relate, remember, and be compelled to act.
As Dawn Danby states, “It’s often surprising that when you talk to an executive, you think you need to be totally focused on the bottom line, but the magic occurs when you can tell a great story about sustainability that involves the business case. Often they’ll respond by saying, ‘Get more stories like that!’”3
Align Your Communications Efforts
The benefit of an aligned strategy is a clear, consistent message that all stakeholders understand and can repeat. Moreover, when departments work together and support each other’s communications efforts, they can save money, resources, and employees’ time.
Similar to what I mentioned about the importance of breaking down silos between departments on the operational front, companies need to align their communications strategy around sustainability. You want to have one message so that different stories and actions support that message. You don’t want to have divergent messages all saying multiple things, such as these efforts support our goal of carbon-neutrality, being a better corporate citizen, or being the best place to work. These all have different meaning. You want your communications aligned with one message that is consistent so that every action taken leverages the efforts of others and reinforces your North Star.
Nonaligned communications occur when the PR, marketing, HR, supply chain, sales, CSR, philanthropy/community, and design departments are all sharing different messages with different stakeholders independently of one another. They are not sharing resources or budget and aren’t working to mutually reinforce and support one another. Figure 11.2 displays many of the places where you should think to align sustainability messaging.
“When your company and its employees speak with one voice about sustainability, magic happens.”4
For example, you might have a policy that supports alternative commuting, but people aren’t engaging and taking advantage of it. Table 11.2 shows a way one client used continual and reinforcing messaging to increase employee engagement and participation.
The goal of an aligned communications strategy is for your company to get the most “bang for its buck” and be able to use messages in multiple ways. For example, something that was created by the CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) department could be written in a way that can be reused for multiple audiences, for sales to help differentiate itself with potential customers, or as information for investors or for local community outreach efforts. Such integration saves time, resources, and money, and delivers a more coherent message.
If you have 24 short stories or case studies that typically make up your CSR or Sustainability report, you could slice and dice them into distinct categories (energy, waste, volunteerism, water, etc.), and use these categories as “the issue of the quarter” that your company could work on. Then you could communicate 2 to 4 of these stories per month (6 per quarter) to provide a mutually reinforced and aligned message.
Activity 22: Sustainability Communications Alignment
How aligned are your sustainability communications?
List all the ways you currently communicate your sustainability efforts, internally and externally.
Where do your efforts best align?
Which department’s efforts are currently not aligned?
How could they better collaborate this year? For example:
How are marketing, sales, and PR working together to reinforce each other’s message?
How are sales and marketing working with design, R & D, and new product development?
In what ways could community affairs, CSR, and philanthropy better support other departments’ communication efforts around sustainability?
What is each department’s estimated spending ($ only) on communicating sustainability?
Which departments are doing the best job of communicating the company’s sustainability vision and goals when interacting with stakeholders? How can we replicate this across the company?
Share Best Practices
Sharing best practices internally is one of the easiest and most cost-effective ways to align and improve the effectiveness of your company’s sustainability program. This seems like a no-brainer, but I’ve been amazed at how few companies excel at doing this. A company typically has a few rock-star offices that are further along the continuum because they’ve already figured it out and have been doing it, but this info fails to get disseminated throughout the company because there is a lack of information sharing among departments and facilities.
The reality is that what can be accomplished at one office, facility, or plant can be mirrored in another of similar size.
Therefore, every company needs management to empower individuals, facilities, and departments to create an open dialogue for information sharing. Living, breathing documents around sustainability need to be created that are accessible, easy, open source, and updatable. This could be through an internal blog, an intranet site, or social media. This needs to be done; otherwise, you’ll still run into issues of people being in their own silos and missing out on readily available best practices.
Use Social Media Internally
Over the past few years social media has become the most effective medium in communicating sustainability messages to both Gen X and Y stakeholders because of the ability to share information and ideas within a virtual community almost instantaneously. Many of these qualities, such as reach, frequency, usability, and immediacy, offer many different opportunities for companies to engage employees and stakeholders across many platforms.
I’m going to focus on how companies can use social media internally because of its effectiveness at internal sustainability communications. Companies are turning to social media forums from their own Web portals, wikis, blogs, Twitter, Instagram, and corporate Facebook pages because social media creates an online community, support network, and solutions for overcoming barriers within the organizational culture. Additionally, it provides the opportunity to do the following:
Share ideas, insights, and best practices
Engage in dialogue on numerous issues with different perspectives in real time
Educate and provide asynchronous learning for employees
Provide a venue for fun and social connections, as well as a way to manage internal competitions
Put a human touch on actions by sharing stories, photos, and videos
Allow employees to self-select and follow groups/areas of interest
Crowd-source and recruit employees for projects, whether they be work-related innovations, philanthropic, or volunteer efforts
Reinforce the corporate strategy and track progress on goals, initiatives, and sustainability actions
Moreover, social media enables employees who tend to be humble with an opportunity to engage, to share their, passions, successes, fears, and even stumbling blocks in a safe community environment.
Don’t forget though, for internal social media to be useful, someone needs respond to the input that garners reaction. There needs to be someone managing the content, and if you can get a person of influence (manager, department head, or executive) to respond, people will notice that they are being listened to and that their ideas are being noticed, and they will be more engaged to participate.
Examples of How Companies Are Using Social Media Internally
There are many examples of successful social media campaigns; here are a few examples of social media promoting sustainability.
1. Timberland established their Voices of Challenge online platform for dialogue on key sustainability issues ranging from labor practices in their supply chain to climate-change policy. The website’s purpose is “to put thought leaders, issue experts, practitioners and everyday consumers at the heart of an online dialogue designed to present ideas for future innovation—for Timberland, for their industry, and for others in the social and environmental arenas.”5
2. Intel created a green.intel portal for raising awareness, communicating information about company initiatives, sharing best practices, and providing support, videos, updates, blogs, and open discussion forums for all employees.6
3. IBM’s On Demand Community (ODC) program features a Web-based portal that helps IBM manage its global volunteering efforts. IBM held a three-day participatory online ValuesJam on the Web to craft the values that now guide decisions.
Before Launching Internally
Companies can miss the boat if they launch into their internal social media strategy before assessing their company’s cultural readiness. As mentioned in Chapter 7, “Understanding Change Management to Guide Implementation,” you have to assess how your company and employees manage change because although social media might be easy and preferred for younger employees, you might run into resistance from older employees.
Also, if you have a command-and-control type of organization, realize that social media tools are organic and democratic, so after you unveil them, management will have given up control. The users will decide which functions and forums they want to use and how to use them. So go in with eyes open to that reality, but don’t hesitate at the beginning to set expectations about the culture you want to promote online.
External Reporting
If you are being asked by your investors or your customers to complete an external report such as the Carbon Disclosure Project or a supplier questionnaire, it’s required. However, we get asked by clients and prospective clients all the time about where and how they should report voluntarily, and our answer is almost always the same: to the organization and in the format that makes the most sense for your company while meeting the expectations of your stakeholders.
This might depend on a number of factors, including these:
Your position in your industry
What stage your company is in on the Hagen-Wilhelm matrix
The expectations of your stakeholders (investors, suppliers, and customers)
Determining the reporting system that works for your company and your goals can seem like a big decision, but the good news is that there’s no wrong answer. All roads lead to a more sustainable company, but some reports might be better suited for your company than others. Moreover, reporting guidelines are constantly being updated, so here are a few ways to choose among external reports:
1. Determine which report would provide the most value to your primary stakeholders.
2. Decide which report you feel is the most applicable to your company. CDP focuses mainly on materiality and emissions, as opposed to the GRI, which focuses on the company’s disclosure management approaches and responses to six indicator categories (economics, environmental, societal, human rights, product responsibility, and workplace).
3. Determine the companies you would like to be benchmarked against and find out which report those companies are using. Companies that use the equator principles, for example, are typically multinational companies working in developing countries in energy/mineral extraction.
4. Figure out the type of results you want the report to show. Bloomberg has GHG reporting that shows emission per dollar, whereas GRI shows year-to-year GHG emissions performance against a company’s baseline.
Some companies even ask the stakeholders (clients and employees) whether they have a preference.
If you want to quickly assess some of the types of questions and categories being asked by these reporting agencies, see the TKR metrics stated earlier in Chapter 5, “Goals/Vision and Your Sustainability North Star.”
Benefits of Reporting—Sustainability Rankings
One of the benefits of reporting externally is the opportunity to be ranked and compared against your peers on your sustainability performance. And although various methodologies are being used by different agencies such as Newsweek, Corporate Knights, Climate Counts, Fortune, and many others, one thing is clear: A high score across multiple rankings can communicate how well your company is doing on sustainability to interested stakeholders, while requiring no additional effort on your end.
I actually have written about this topic multiple times under the heading of “Sustainability Rankings Craziness” because of the variance of companies’ scores on whether they are being judged on sustainability, on “green,” which just means environmental criteria, or for their community citizenship and how they treat their employees. For those that score well across all these categories, these rankings can supplement the company’s communications, provide free PR, and enhance the brand value not only with employees, but with customers, suppliers, and investors. For a comparison of how companies are doing, check out this article at www.sustainablebizconsulting.com/articles/sustainabilityrankings2013.
I’ve found that no matter the extent to which a company decides to report externally, going through the reporting process provides business value by uncovering blind spots and revealing previously unknown gaps.
Awards
Awards provide similar benefit. Nothing can give you credibility and reinvigorate a program like winning an award. If you win, as Molly Ray says from experience, “for some reason it makes it more real to employees and it gets management jazzed.”7
Transparency Builds Trust
One of the biggest questions companies face when they communicate their sustainability efforts is “How much information should we release?” No company is perfect, nor has any leader done all that can be done within a company, so it’s only fair that some are a little hesitant to be fully transparent about their social, environmental, and financial performance.
So how transparent should you be? Will the value it brings to shareholders and customers be outweighed by the risk that competitors could learn from the processes and procedures that lead to your success? Could you accidently be opening yourself to potential liability down the road?
These are all good questions because it takes guts and it takes leadership to be transparent. It’s not for the faint of heart. I know that most managers would rather not disclose any information on an area in which they aren’t doing well. But this is where transparency can uncover the hidden opportunities and risks that can help a company make the changes it might need or want.
For example, when SBC started working with a large service-based client on its first CSR report, one of the things we came across was that although more than half of the employees were women, there was a noticeable income disparity between men and women. Now most of this was overseas, where culturally this might be more acceptable, but by being forced to seek information regarding this issue from a reporting stance, the client had to think about how to respond. It pushed this issue up to the management level, as opposed to something traditionally handled by HR, and the company began to address the issue head-on.
A different example about transparency was with one of our government clients. The agency was afraid to disclose any employee information, due to risk concerns. They were averse to disclosing HR information because they had had one sexual harassment complaint a few years back (which turned out to be false and was dismissed), and they still felt as though it was a black mark against the organization.
We were able to show them that any issues they had were below the average number for a government organization their size and well below those in the private sector. This helped the organization realize that their management and the policies that they had put in place were in fact doing the job. This helped alleviate their concerns about disclosing this information externally, and turned an issue that they were afraid to talk about on its head.
Who Will Be the Roadblocks to Transparency?
As you can imagine, human resources and legal are the typical roadblocks to transparency. It is in their nature to be cautious regarding external disclosure (especially the first time) because that is what they’ve been trained to do, so it will be more than just management that will need convincing.
HR might not be sure why you are asking these questions because they might never have had to disclose this internal information before. Legal, of course, is worried about future liabilities from disclosing internal information, so it too wants to hold all information close to the vest. Therefore, whenever your company discusses transparency or takes on a new reporting scheme, you’ll want to involve representatives from HR and legal in the initial meetings so that they understand what is being disclosed and why, and be sure to communicate that this level of transparency has management’s blessing.
I believe that the best way to approach this is to first get all the information on the table and then decide what information can be stated publically versus what should be kept private for internal use only. This will help avoid running into obstacles from HR and legal throughout the process. Also, be sure to remind everyone that it’s always up to your company to determine what information it discloses.
My Personal Lesson with Transparency
I haven’t been immune to the concerns about transparency either. In fact, although I was willing to disclose more than what my competitors and peers were doing, socially and environmentally, it wasn’t until after the financial crash of 2008 that I truly understood what it meant to be fully transparent.
Like many companies, as we headed into 2009 we were facing a harsh financial reality. Many of our clients were telling us that they loved us, and that we had done exceptional work, but due to budget cuts on their end, we were not likely to have any work with them for the next year or two.
All of this put tremendous pressure on our company’s bottom line. Like most CEOs, I was stressing about how I was going to meet payroll while also trying to decide how much of the financials I should share with my employees. So I said, “The heck with it. If we won’t be 100% transparent, who will?” So on March 1, 2009, I opened up my books to every employee in my company.
I had never considered doing this before. In fact, although I had read case studies of other organizations doing this, I had never known anyone who had personal experience with this level of transparency. But with revenues declining and my not being able to sleep many nights, I felt that everyone would benefit from understanding the true economic reality. I figured that I had little to lose and much to gain.
We started with an honest and frank discussion about the state of the budget and forecasted revenues, and we talked about what that could mean for everyone. The employees, of course, had been feeling anxious too, but now trust was created and this provided them with the opportunity to speak frankly, share their fears, and, more important, engage and feel empowered to help come up with a solution. “It made it so that there were no surprises,” Senior Consultant Ruth Lee said. “It showed trust through all tiers of the company and fostered a stronger team feeling that we’re all in this together.”
We immediately started brainstorming ways to save money, get new clients, and improve our process efficiency. “By presenting the situation transparently, we could all ask ourselves what we could do,” said Lee. What was amazing was that this new level of transparency led to increased morale, a better financial understanding of the company by my employees, and a feeling that we were all in control of the situation.
So instead of me just saying no to new equipment purchases or ideas, together we would decide to hold off on that purchase for the next few months. In fact, in many cases it was my employees themselves who mentioned shifting some expenses into the future and canceling others. This financial transparency continues to this day in how we make shared decisions. In fact, more often than not, nowadays, it is my employees who are saying no to things to which I typically would have said yes.
What I learned was that if I trusted my employees and showed them respect, they would engage. None of this was easy, but instituting our open-book policy was a leap of faith that resulted in one of the achievements that I’m most proud of with my firm.
Additional Lessons from My Transparency
Five years into this experiment, I’ve realized a few things now that this level of transparency has become “normal.” The first is that after you show this level of transparency, you cannot pull back or people will start to wonder why and become anxious again. Second, we became transparent during a crisis, but after conditions improved, sharing financials just seemed like business as usual. So in order to keep people engaged, I needed to make the open-book policy more relevant to the issues of the day and again make it personal for them, as opposed to just becoming information shared from management.
Transparency will be tough at first, but if you want to have the most engaged workforce and stakeholders of the twenty-first century, transparency is key.
Tailor Transparency to Your Company
Although expanding our level of transparency and dialogue from social and environmental to include full financial transparency was important for my company, the issues and their importance will vary by company. For your company, the transparency might involve disclosing female/male ratios to CDP investors, providing information on gender pay gap differences to the GRI, broadcasting your environmental goals and progress to stakeholders, or whatever is important to your company and stakeholders at the time. Know that whatever the topic of conversation might be, there is real business value in being transparent, whether it’s mitigating potential PR disasters, getting good ideas and constructive criticism, forging and strengthening relationships, or turning skeptics into proponents of your organization.
Lessons Learned
The following are key takeaways from the “Communicating Sustainability Internally” chapter:
Continuous communication is key.
The goal is for everyone in the company to speak to sustainability with one voice. People should know the vision and what sustainability means to your company so that every effort or action can be communicated as building on that vision.
Share the good and the bad. This will show authenticity and minimize charges of “greenwashing.”
Find alignment in your communications between departments: marketing, PR, sales, HR, supply chain, CSR, philanthropy, community affairs, public affairs, and investor relations. Look for opportunities to mutually reinforce and leverage each department’s communications.
The medium of communication might be just as important as the message. Younger stakeholders and employees will prefer visual, electronic, and social media, whereas older stakeholders might prefer more traditional communication methods.
There are a various ways to report externally; choose the one that is right for you, that meets the needs and concerns of your stakeholders.
Transparency is tough. It builds trust, but each company needs to determine the right amount of transparency for itself at that point in time. You don’t need to go from where you are to 100% transparent tomorrow; it is a process that takes time.