Getting the House in Order

If you don’t have the foundations of a healthy business in place, any attempt at a mission-driven strategy or net positive model will likely fail. You won’t have the resources, energy, and focus on purpose that you need. Getting the house in order at Unilever centered on a few areas:

Focus on basics and reinvest in the business.  Paul increased investments in people, brands, R&D, and manufacturing to improve quality, ensure competitiveness, and reestablish the vibrancy and growth of the core businesses. He introduced new tools and practices to identify growth areas, drive out costs, and free up capital for reinvestment—no different from most companies, but it was hard work.

In the first year, the 9 for ’09 program gave everyone solid, but achievable, growth and cost-cutting goals to prove what they could accomplish by working together and leveraging global scale. The slogan “We are Unilever” resonated—the former chief sustainability officer, Jeff Seabright, says they were finding the “Uni” in Unilever. Another initiative, Max the Mix, focused on developing innovative products that delivered more value for consumers and higher margins for the business. To drive R&D effectiveness up, they set a target that 75 percent of innovations had to add to margins and achieve minimum scale—on average, new initiatives were adding only £2.5 million to turnover, a rounding error for a £38 billion revenue company.

Restarting growth, eliminating non-value-added costs, and rigorous working of capital management (from positive to negative) freed up funds to reinvest in long-term, purposeful business priorities and to accelerate M&A. As the business came back, so did confidence and enthusiasm about the company’s potential, which led to more investment. It was the start of a positive virtuous circle, the proverbial flywheel gaining momentum.

Create a compelling vision based on core values.  The growth message was clear, but the language from the top changed in other important ways. Consistently using words such as purpose, multistakeholder, and long-term—and then acting on those ideas—started shifting the culture. Unilever also created a new strategy framework, the Compass, a simple two-page document laying out the basics of winning in consumer goods. The Compass made clear why the company existed and provided discipline, a common set of values, a bias for action, and clear standards of leadership—things like maintaining a growth mindset, investing in people, and taking responsibility. A company run by principles, within a framework, is far more effective than one run on rules.

With the launch of the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP) a year later, the core “why” in the Compass shifted to match the new mission. This brought the strategy and sustainability roadmaps into alignment. In a small language shift to build pride, Paul said the new strategy should always be referred to as the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (not some generic sustainable living plan). It’s important to play your own game—you’ll always be a distant second trying to be someone else.

Simplify structure for speed.  Unilever reorganized to reduce decentralization and complexity. Being close to different geographies and markets to understand them was vital, but so was solidarity and common purpose. Leadership wanted Unilever to feel like a single company with powerful brands, not a conglomerate of independent silos, but remain agile enough to win in highly competitive markets. It was a balance. The company moved to leaner structures to get faster feedback from markets and minimize the “lost in translation” syndrome companies often suffer from. The center of gravity had to switch from internal focus on self-serving interests to an “outside-in” view, centered on the citizens the company served. To break up those product and country fiefdoms, Unilever reorganized around major product categories—food and refreshments, health and beauty care, and home and personal care.

Bring the board along.  No organization can succeed over the long term without the support of the board of directors. Yet, as we mentioned, senior executives rank boards as the number one source of pressure for short-term performance.³ The gap comes, in part, because board members struggle to understand what ESG (environmental, social, and governance) means, how it’s tied to strategy, how to provide active oversight on it, and how to prepare for higher external expectations. In a survey of EU companies, only 34 percent of board members said they had the knowledge they needed on climate change (versus 91 percent on finance).⁴ Most board members grew up in another era and find a focus on purpose unsettling. They often express concerns that addressing ESG issues will expose the board to more risk, but it’s the reverse—understanding and managing sustainability issues reduces risk and increases opportunity. Our grand challenges, such as climate change and pandemics, are exposing these board shortcomings and raising more questions about how to improve corporate governance.

Unilever changed the board to support a long-term, multistakeholder model. It increased racial diversity, and sadly it’s still the only major board in the United Kingdom that’s gender balanced. Unilever has been blessed to bring in people with significant knowledge in areas ranging from climate change to the future of food. Unilever leadership also exposed the board to the company’s many partnerships and mission-driven activities, which greatly increased buy-in. When the board is in sync, sustainability goes deeper into the DNA of the company. During the aborted Kraft Heinz takeover attempt, the board was tested, but united in not only sticking with the USLP, but strengthening it.

Connect employees to the mission.  The structural changes were easier to make than shifting beliefs. With a new CEO, turnover in the executive ranks, and a new, intense mission, many employees were skeptical—especially after many previous attempts to revitalize the company had failed. For some, the USLP looked too ambitious. Unilever leveraged the Compass to get everyone engaged. To drive performance, the organization borrowed a page from the book Execution by Larry Bossidy, and asked all 170,000 employees to write a “3+1” plan for themselves: three business goals tied to the Compass, and one personal area to work on. Sandy Ogg, the SVP of HR at the time, says that senior leadership looked at samples of employee plans and called some people to say, “You’re awesome and what you’re working on is cool.” Or, in harsher moments, they might “call some guy sitting in the middle of Sweden and say, ‘I looked at your three-plus-one and it’s not great—step it up, dude.’”⁵

Sending the Right Signals to Create the Right Environment

Getting back to basics laid the groundwork for profiting from purpose, but those elements were not enough. Paul and the management team also had to send clear signals about the new direction. Leaders should demonstrate complete consistency in message, commitment, actions, and behavior to avoid the “say/do” gap. People will remember what you do more than what you say. If you don’t walk the talk, why would anybody take you seriously?

When Paul told investors he would not provide quarterly guidance anymore, the move was a powerful signal to investors. But it had an even greater impact on the organization. It told managers they could think bigger, make investments in innovation and in stagnant brands, and make decisions for the long-term. This is in stark contrast to the common bad habit of manipulating earnings to hit quarterly targets.

Unilever sent signals across the business to align the organization around the revitalized mission and long-term focus. For example, while exiting the quarterly earnings game, Unilever also examined how its own $26 billion pension fund was being managed. Like any fund, it had money in the whole market, including fossil fuels. It wasn’t consistent to talk about long-term thinking and climate change while investing the pension for short-run returns, and putting money into coal companies. Take the systems view: Unilever’s business will be severely damaged by climate change, so the company was partly financing its own demise.

Unilever committed its pension fund to align with the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investing, which commits the money managers to consider ESG performance (they had no guidelines prior). The incentives for the fund managers shifted to reward performance over the longer term, not the quarter. The fund started to perform better. The company was also consistent and creative in financing. It issued the first corporate sustainability bond, for £250 million, to build more sustainable factories in South Africa, China, Turkey, and the United States.⁶ These fiscal moves gave the company credibility and a seat at the table to push financial markets to think longer-term.

Unilever also revamped executive compensation. Even with slowing sales in the 2000s, bonuses remained high. That disconnect created a disincentive to grow and evolve. For consistency, the pay system was harmonized so people at the same level got the same pay structure globally, after tax, no matter where they lived (which took self-serving salary discussions out of the equation). Unilever sent organizational signals in a range of ways that we’ll touch on throughout the book, such as revamping the supplier code to reflect USLP goals and priorities; issuing one of the earliest integrated annual reports (that is, financials and ESG performance in one document); releasing human rights and modern day slavery reports; publishing a tax code; changing recruiting policies; improving gender parity in management and pay (the company hit 50/50 in gender in 2019); and adding gender and racial diversity to the board. Combined, these efforts created a multiplier effect and accelerated change. Consistency built trust and more action.

The right Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) also sent clear signals to support the longer-term, multistakeholder vision. The original USLP provided many publicly stated metrics, but there were other important internal targets to help track the move toward net positive: metrics on diversity, the pay gap, and how in-demand the company was as an employer of choice, for example.

Sending the right signals took focus, commitment, and courage. But you know what most of them did not need? Money. Sure, how you allocate capital and prioritize budgets sends powerful signals, and those shifts happened in Unilever as well. But it doesn’t cost anything to send important signals about what a company cares about or harmonize your values across operations. So, why not do it?

Starting at the Top

As the former Unilever marketing head and architect of driving purpose back into brands Marc Mathieu says, “If you want to change a brand in the consumers’ minds, you have to change it in employees’ minds first, especially the leaders.”⁷

Change efforts can be like rebuilding an engine while the car is moving and accelerating. The biggest area of work to get the house in order was in HR. For a change agenda this big, the company needed to get the “right people on the bus,” which meant executives who cared about the world and its challenges and had enthusiasm for purpose. Unilever had an outside firm interview the senior leadership team and map skills to jobs. The project exposed some disturbing insights about the culture and capabilities: a low level of curiosity, lack of diversity of thinking, and low awareness of key trends in the world. Doug Baille, a senior operational exec who took over HR in 2011, says the assessments showed “we were weak in thinking systematically.”

In those early months, the personnel changes were dramatic. It’s okay to have productive skeptics around, but cynics are harmful. No company has the luxury to spend time trying to convert people. Some execs self-identified as uninterested in the whole purpose thing, including the then–marketing director. About 70 of the top 100 executives were “refreshed” along with substantial changes to the board.

In parallel, the HR systems needed reworking to make the new strategy come alive. They tied job descriptions and requirements to the USLP, for example, to help create a purpose-driven performance culture. If you choose a purpose-driven path and the business results look lousy, skeptical shareholders will say, “I told you so.” The whole experiment to show how business can be a force for good is ruined. As Unilever pursued purpose, the organization felt more pressure to do well financially, not less.

As the top executive ranks shifted, the best people were matched not with the biggest jobs, but with the roles most critical for future success. Unilever combined communications, marketing, and sustainability into one job, chief marketing officer, tasked with embedding the USLP into the company. It was a central role, not some special sustainability group on the fringes of the organization. Keith Weed, the first person to hold the combined job, says the position aligned internal and external communications and clarified how the company talked about purpose. In creating this position, he says, Unilever built “an organizational machine to help deliver the USLP and its big ambitions.”⁸

Unilever also needed the right capabilities and buy-in in key departments—R&D, sales and customer development, marketing, supply chain, finance—to integrate the strategy and build consistency. Getting these areas on board is a hard lift. For most companies, finance is the most difficult area to change, and it was no different at Unilever. Finance execs feel the analysts and investors breathing down their necks more than any other company leaders. They also tend to be risk avoidant, which is not the way net positive companies play the game.

To build more knowledge and commitment, Paul encouraged the CFO, Graeme Pikethly, to represent Unilever on key global sustainability partnerships, such as the World Business Council on Sustainable Development’s Redefining Value project. Pikethly also served as vice chair of the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures (TCFD), a protocol that every CFO now needs to understand.

The HR moves helped ensure that people truly got the mission, and that their souls were in it. All of this work to get the house in order, send the right signals, and align the organization got Unilever’s heart beating stronger. But these were basics—hard work, but frankly nothing new. Getting to the next level required more—it took purpose.

Retrospective Purpose—A History of Serving

To make the drastic changes the company needed, it was not enough for Paul to stand on a soapbox and decree it. Unilever needed to go back to its roots, the undeniable heart of the company. So, in the weeks before assuming the CEO role, Paul researched Unilever’s rich history. He visited Port Sunlight, the small village in northwest England where, in 1878, the founding Lever brothers built a community for workers from their nearby soap factory. Before the factory was fully running, they built houses, a school, a health-care facility, and theater and art houses.

About 131 years later, Paul deliberately held the first meeting with his senior team in the place where it all started. The discussion focused on the values that had made the company great and lasting. The Lever brothers created the company’s first brands, Sunlight detergent and Lifebuoy soap, to improve health in Victorian Britain. Lord William Lever, even in the nineteenth century, spoke in terms of shared prosperity and serving society. His early aim was “to make cleanliness commonplace and to lessen work for women” and he pitched a form of moral capitalism.²⁰

It wasn’t all smooth sailing. An attempt to build a community like Port Sunlight in the Congo, with the Belgian government, failed. It led to forced labor plantations, a not uncommon but deeply troubling problem at the time.²¹ But at home, Lever Brothers was highly innovative and socially progressive. It was the first company in the United Kingdom to offer pensions and a guaranteed six-day workweek. As workers left to fight in WWI, the company held their jobs open and paid the men’s wages to their families. It was highly unusual. So, a century later, when Paul’s chosen successor, Alan Jope, guaranteed jobs for months after the pandemic started, he was following in the founders’ footsteps.

Not every company has 140 years of history to draw purpose from, but most have a founder with a story. They have a reason for being, and it pays to find it. In India, Mahindra Finance’s leader, Anand Mahindra, looked back to why his grandfather founded the business, and refocused the company on a mission of helping rural communities “rise.” Through fair lending rates on homes and small agribusinesses, the company grew to serve 50 percent of Indian villages and six million customers.²²

At Unilever, the purpose work never stopped. It was an early leader in modern corporate sustainability. In the 1990s and 2000s, the company created the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) with World Wildlife Fund to protect fisheries, cofounded the Round Table for Sustainable Palm Oil, developed a code of practice for sustainable agriculture, and ran many community programs in emerging markets. Some brands had started to integrate purpose. The two biggest initiatives were Lifebuoy’s hand-washing program and Dove’s global self-esteem campaign. These efforts were all good models of corporate social responsibility. But they were disjointed, not tied into the core of the business, and looked more like typical corporate social responsibility (CSR) work.

The history was there. Lord Lever had implanted meaning and “doing good” in the company’s DNA, and other Unilever CEOs had championed similar themes. But they were never central to the company’s strategy and, too often, they faded into the background like a recessive gene.

Many Unilever managers took the company’s heritage for granted. The company needed a way to bring the history into the foreground again. It needed a framework, focus, consistency, and an ambition to seek transformative efforts—the systems changes that are the hallmark of a net positive company.

A new direction would take some effort and time—and a big, new plan to rally around.

Purpose Going Forward: The Unilever Sustainable Living Plan

After two years of refocusing on Unilever’s history of service and prepping the organization by getting it growing again, it was time to launch a more formal, unified strategy around purpose. It was time to look forward and understand the landscape. You need both, or you get stuck in nostalgia for the past.

In 2010, the company launched the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP). The need to stop the decline of the business and rediscover purpose and identity was core to the launch. It moved purpose from a nice-to-have to an explicit driver of success by significantly increasing ambition and embedding it throughout the company. As former Unilever sustainability executive Gavin Neath says, Paul’s framework made the company’s history and purpose “central to the company’s strategy, and [we] managed it like other business activities, setting targets and metrics and rewarding good performance.”²³

Beyond the business reasons, the USLP also came from a deeper, elemental, and moral place. The leadership knew it was no longer good enough for companies to be less bad. With climate change and inequality, big business needed to be good; they needed to be net positive.

The USLP translated the company’s purpose of making sustainable living commonplace into a core aim: double the size of the business through strong performance, while decoupling environmental impact from that growth, and optimizing Unilever’s positive social impact. At launch that translated into three audacious goals to achieve in a decade:

• Improve the health and well-being of more than one billion people
• Reduce environmental impact by half
• Enhance millions of livelihoods through the growth of the business

The environmental impact goal had a broader meaning, committing to “decouple” the business from material use. Unilever would aim to grow without using more resources. In practice, some goals went further—aiming to use only green energy, for example. Other goals sought to reduce impacts by improving standards, such as a 100 percent sustainable sourcing target. Back in 2010, these were highly aggressive goals, especially for a $40 billion revenue company. With the other two statements focused on social impact, the total intention of the plan was to move toward net positive.

Beneath the three overarching goals sat seven subcategories, each with specific targets for the business: health and hygiene, nutrition, greenhouse gases, water, waste, sustainable sourcing, and better livelihoods. That last category covered the entire social agenda. At the urging of Marcela Manubens, Unilever’s global VP of integrated social sustainability, it was later expanded into three social agenda items: fairness in the workplace, opportunities for women, and inclusive business (see figure 3-1). As the company continued to learn by doing, there were other adjustments along the way, but the three big goals remained in place for a decade.

FIGURE 3-1

Unilever Sustainable Living Plan

Before the USLP, a small handful of mission-led, privately held business leaders had developed aggressive plans to build net positive businesses—Patagonia, IKEA, Mars, and Interface with its Mission Zero. But for big, public companies, extensive sustainability goals were nearly nonexistent. In 2007, British retailer Marks & Spencer launched Plan A (because there is no plan B) with about one hundred targets for operational footprint, sourcing, customers and products, health and well-being, and more. It was detailed and leading-edge, and it inspired others, including Unilever.

The USLP broke new ground. It set more audacious targets and aspirations at the scale of one billion people, extended the time frame to a ten-year horizon, introduced the idea of decoupling, and covered all brands and the full value chain. It also set a few goals for entire systems, not just the company. The plan was more than just strategy or tactics—the “P” could stand for philosophy as well. It was an aspiration and a way to prepare for a world that was evolving quickly. The USLP needed to be seen as a way of doing business.

The plan accomplished much in terms of measurable outcomes (see the box “The Success of the USLP”), and Unilever learned a great deal through creating and implementing something so broad and deep. Let’s look at what worked, what they needed for it to succeed, and what they would do differently in hindsight.

What worked.  When it launched, the USLP did two important things. It said to the world, “We don’t have all the answers,” making the company accessible and human, and it said, “We can’t do it alone,” which forged crucial partnerships.

The USLP was meant as a guiding star, but flexible enough to evolve as the business and the world changed. The plan was not a CSR-style add-on, sitting to the side of the core business. It was, and is, the strategy, and it’s hard-wired into the growth agenda. Because it wasn’t separate, the company could not excel if the USLP was not successful, and vice versa. From early on, the USLP was independently verified by PwC and used as a tool of transparency, accountability, honesty, and trust. The plan included more than fifty public targets, a choice that was heavily debated. Some saw it as a risk if they missed some. But with trust in business so low, being more transparent was the best way to restore it.

The USLP was also hard-nosed. Managers had to provide facts, testing, and proof that the purpose-driven initiatives to help society—such as reaching 1.3 billion people (as of today) with health and hygiene programs—were effective in their mission and helped the business. As former HR exec Sandy Ogg says now, “There was nothing soft about the USLP (or about Paul).”

What it needs to succeed.  Buy-in from employees and major stakeholders is a must. If the goals in a plan like the USLP are big enough, then it’s clear you can’t do it alone, and partnership becomes essential. A company also needs credibility as a whole before driving it into the brands or divisions. And that comes in large part from consistency. Both the individual leaders and the businesses need the courage to walk the talk and follow through on their promises. When you know what’s right, find the strength to fight for it.

Key learnings.  Unilever made mistakes that others can learn from. It underestimated the level and regularity of communications needed to sell the plan to stakeholders. The board was a particularly important internal stakeholder, and continuing to educate them about the world’s thresholds and the company’s approach took more work than expected. To focus efforts and attention, Unilever set up a separate board committee on sustainability and corporate reputation; it was a better option than just adding the agenda to the audit or compensation committees. (Today as reporting requirements increase, board audit committees should also be competent in nonfinancial reporting. Things are moving fast.)

Externally, Unilever should have engaged shareholders more in the value creation discussions. By not reporting earnings quarterly and abolishing guidance, Paul had many fewer conversations with investors. The ones that did happen were more strategic, but they needed to make the case for tying purpose and ESG performance to strategy and financial outcomes. The general low level of understanding of ESG materiality, and lack of metrics to measure or compare performance, made these discussions harder. We have better data now, but at that time, the proof of the link between ESG and value creation was grossly absent. When you’re promoting a model that treats profit as a result, not an objective, investors need to be enrolled and educated; otherwise, they will make life difficult. Unilever lost some initial investors and it took more time than expected to attract investors who would embrace the long-term model. Most companies still cater to their existing shareholder base rather than seek out better partners.

Looking back, it’s also clear that the first plan had too much of the “E” in ESG, and not enough of the social agenda or governance. It wasn’t complete. The company strengthened those areas over time, and more recent events, such as Covid-19, have further increased awareness of a weak social contract and the need to address racial and income disparities.

When you go public with a big plan, NGOs and others will hold you to a higher standard and demand more. Taking the lead makes you a target. It’s mostly a good thing, because you attract partners, but if you miss some of the goals that require help—for example, shifting the supply chain—NGOs will be critical when you don’t quite get there. At times, Unilever ran ahead of NGOs and was almost a bigger advocate on an issue. You want NGOs who are willing to join the journey and support each other. The company learned also that it takes a long time to set up broad partnerships to tackle big challenges.

Cynics and skeptics abounded when Unilever launched the USLP. Back in 2010, the bottom-line benefits of sustainability had yet to be proven. And after years of financial underperformance, many felt Unilever could ill-afford cuddly experiments with “purpose.” But time has vindicated the USLP, and it accomplished a great deal for the company. It brought much-needed oxygen to a business that was stagnant. It has been a purpose-driven roadmap that inspires, encourages consistency, provides a lens to help make better choices, and drives the business. Unilever is more successful and resilient today, and the plan has directly paid off in many ways, both financial and intangible.

The only real regret is that, given the state of the world, the USLP wasn’t more aggressive, as the world is still falling far short of what’s needed. Many of the original goals are table stakes or not good enough anymore. They’re not fully net positive.

We’ll talk more about the USLP in the next couple of chapters, diving into how the targets helped expand thinking and how the plan created trust and transparency with stakeholders.

The Rewards and Risks of Deep Engagement

Beyond employee attraction, the purpose work has also paid off in rising employee engagement. Unilever HR leader Nair says that her department has data going back decades, showing that the percentage of employees happy to be working there continues to rise every year. More than 90 percent say they have pride in the company, an impressive number in a world where engagement scores average just 15 percent.³¹

Sunny Verghese, who founded the $24 billion agribusiness company Olam, based in Singapore, has a strong view on employee engagement. At a basic level, he says, you satisfy people with training, providing a safe working environment, and fair goals. Up a level from that is “engaged,” where people have more autonomy and a chance to master skills as part of a winning team. But making people “inspired,” Verghese says, is a different animal: “They need to see a purpose … and that all the effort is going to make a difference.” It’s not about more profit or growing more cocoa, but finding meaning, especially for the younger workers.

Olam’s purpose is to re-imagine global agriculture and food systems. To invite workers into that mission, his company ran an exercise asking employees to reimagine the global agriculture system so it could feed nine or ten billion people—and do it with a fraction of the resources used today. More than eighteen thousand employees answered the call. In a different part of the food chain, Trane Technologies—one of the world’s largest producers of climate solutions for buildings, homes, and refrigerated transport of food—invited its thirty-five thousand employees to join a worldwide innovation brainstorm dubbed Operation Possible. The goal was to identify “absurdities standing in the way of a better future” and rank the favorites. The employees picked as their top choice “the coexistence of hunger and food waste,” a serious challenge that they can help with. In the early days of the USLP, Unilever also wanted to engage everyone in the journey. Miguel Veiga-Pestana, the global head of external affairs and sustainability when it launched, helped organize a 24-hour online global brainstorm. It brought together twenty thousand people inside and outside the company to pose questions and seek answers about how to reach the USLP goals. It was a powerful way to enroll people in the vision. Again, years later, when designing the post-2020 USLP, Unilever opened up the discussion and fifty-five thousand employees chimed in. That’s a huge number of people feeling that they have a stake in the future of the company.

There’s an interesting problem (and opportunity) that arises with so much engagement: it drives internal expectations through the roof. Employees who come there to change the world can sometimes find it a letdown to have a regular, nonsustainability job to do. But every job needs people thinking in systems, in net positive terms, and about how to help the world thrive. These inspired new hires pressure the company to go faster.

Employee demands on business to do more, especially on climate, is a growing force to be reckoned with. Before 2020, when Amazon started to take leadership positions on climate change, the company had been quiet on sustainability. Things changed when nearly nine thousand employees signed an open letter to CEO Jeff Bezos with a list of demands, such as a zero emissions goal and cutting political donations to climate deniers.³² Other workers launched Amazon Employees for Climate Justice to continue the pressure.³³ Employees are calling out their companies on social media, and even at press conferences, if actions don’t meet the ethics or stated values. There is little chance this trend will slow down. So, embrace your younger employees and let them pull you into the future.

If you’re heading in the right direction, employee pressure is not a problem, but an advantage. For a company trying to accelerate toward net positive, it’s a powerful asset to have aggressive allies all over the organization. Take advantage of it and help create internal social activists and entrepreneurs who will demand much of the company and themselves in service of the world.

Serve Employees and Enable Their Humanity

Much of the discussion on employee engagement focuses on the benefits to the company, such as higher productivity. But what if companies operated in service of those employees? They would work to improve employee well-being, a net positive result, and enable them to bring their full selves to work. They would help them with big life moments by, for example, providing extensive leave for new parents or others providing caregiving.

The Covid-19 crisis was a big test—and opportunity—for companies. How did they handle employee needs? Did they treat them like numbers and assets, or like people deserving respect? Employees, communities, and governments were watching companies closely to see if they would keep paying their vendors, or how they handled layoffs—did they provide help with mental health, loans, retraining, and more? Some companies failed their Covid-19 test miserably, which is a good way to destroy engagement. Some put staff at direct risk by not giving them enough protective gear—meatpacking plants were particularly negligent. The companies that succeeded in the crisis took care of direct and indirect staff, ensuring some financial stability for suppliers and customers. It’s not expensive to do this right. Unilever was watchful of employee mental health as people shifted to at-home work, to ensure that nobody felt isolated or left behind.

Outside of moments of crisis, companies can help their people live more sustainable lives—like a Goldman Sachs program offering all US employees access to clean energy for their home or subsidies for employees to purchase electric vehicles.³⁴ Organizations are also encouraging employees to be active citizens. Hundreds of companies, including HP, L’Oréal, PVH, SAP, and Walmart, joined the Time to Vote initiative, giving employees election day off to go do their civic duty. In 2020, Old Navy (owned by Gap, Inc.) paid employees for eight hours if they worked at the polls.³⁵

As more people want their voices to be heard, and protests in the streets are common, companies will face more moments of choice. How supportive are they? In early 2021, consulting giant McKinsey made the wrong choice. As protests grew in Russia in support of opposition leader Alexei Navalny, McKinsey’s Moscow office sent an email to staff saying that demonstrations “will not be authorized … employees should stay away from public areas … and please refrain entirely from making related posts in any media … this line of conduct is mandatory.” Even for Russia, that’s Siberia-level cold. And it had to be enervating for employees.

In contrast, during global climate marches, Patagonia and Canadian retailer Lush shut down stores to let their people join the movement. The Australian enterprise software company Atlassian goes even further to encourage employees to become climate activists. Cofounder Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote a blunt blog, Don’t @#$% the planet, announcing that employees could take a paid week every year for charity, marches, and strikes.

Companies are now realizing that they also need to address systemic problems (such as racism) that their employees face—in one survey, 87 percent of employers “plan to take steps to overcome barriers and build a culture of dignity over the next three years.” That’s up from 59 percent just a few years ago.³⁶

Treat people the way they want and need, or what some call the Platinum Rule (a twist on the Golden Rule, where you treat people the way you want to be treated). Ask employees how they want to serve society, and help them make a net positive impact.