Guest Blog: Embedding an ESG mentality (part 2)

Guest Blog: Embedding an ESG mentality from the C-suite to the stationery cupboard

 This article was written by 4leaf Coaching founder, Julia Fawsley Grant. 4leaf is an affiliate organisation of ESGmark®. It is a coaching consultancy that partners with small companies to keep their founding principals at the forefront of everyday business - working to make sure they remain both purposeful and profitable.

If you as a founder, CEO or senior manager are taking your business towards a more ‘ESG’ friendly mentality, you need to take your team and employees with you. How best do you embed your ESG culture in a way that extends beyond management protocol? Your ESG success stands or falls by your staff engagement.

Part 2 of this blog explains how identifying appropriate metrics, education and culture are important considerations in the journey to strengthening the ESG credentials of your business.

Metrics and reporting. What are your metrics for measuring change? Until very recently positive impact projects focused on input rather than output. If you are working towards a triple bottom line of people, planet and profits, profit alone will no longer be your lodestar. How then are you integrating performance measures into management reviews and P&Ls? Also remember to define the overall scope of what you are doing along with the milestones. For example you can’t achieve carbon neutrality in one fell swoop. It’s a process that takes time and clearly identified markers along the way.

With metrics come reports - what sort of reporting are you doing around the effectiveness of the new policies and who will you be addressing ie. will it be shareholder/internal only or are you planning to use your metrics in consumer/client facing reports as well? These decisions are up to you and have to be feasible to produce - reporting on your work should not get in the way of doing your work, but you do need to put measurement in place to capture your positive output along with a system of reporting. If nothing else, if you are not measuring your impact then there is no way of quantifying whether your efforts are making a difference.

Education/Training. Inextricably linked to metrics is your training and education rollout. What does good practice look like and why is this focus being adopted; what process changes are expected to make the policy a reality? It has to be practical and applicable. Workshops, forums and Q&As are a critical way of clarifying the company’s expectations around individual employees’ contributions along with allowing your staff to help make the policies relevant to their own working day. Creating a feedback loop is important to make sure that policy changes aren’t hidebound by philosophy and impossible in real life - listen to your colleagues and make sure that what you’re asking of them is actually do-able. As well as making it actionable, employees have to be excited about the policy change. A pivot towards greater positive impact is, in my opinion, inherently exciting. Positioning what you’re doing as a win for everyone ensures team-buy in at all levels of the company - and also remember that we’re all human! No one wakes up in the morning determined to grossly underpay someone further down the supply chain, or inadvertently use up 3 times their acceptable carbon footprint. People just aren’t like that - or 99% of people. Also remember that ethical leadership needn’t be about life and death decisions. Yes your carbon footprint, choice of suppliers etc etc are critical to your overall positive or negative impact but “social” starts at home. How are managers and team leaders allocating work schedules? Are they setting the example when it comes to work/life balance? Doing good feels good so make that a central part of appealing to your colleagues. Which segues nicely into company culture, my final point...

Culture. “Company culture” is a much (over)used expression and is neither a one size fits all methodology nor something that can be rolled out overnight. Whilst a robust company culture takes time to develop, that isn’t to say it can’t be given a helping hand - especially when it comes to an increased ethical focus. Making ethical business practice the norm starts with making good practice normal practice. Rather than highlighting mistakes, how can you give the spotlight to people within your team who really embody what you are trying to achieve. Company newsletters, team meetings and ad hoc shout outs are all effective ways to spread the word and make improved business practice a daily talking point rather than a policy issue that only comes up in quarterly meetings. Make sure the feedback loop mentioned previously is robust - you’ll find that staff have their own ideas as to how to improve the organisation’s ESG activities and bring in their expertise when it comes to broadening the company’s reach within their given area of specialism. Make the process democratic.

Ensuring your business does some good in the world is an ever-expanding responsibility and one that will move as times change. I hope the above has given you a few practical ideas to take to your teams and wish you every success in your ESGmark® journey.