Posts tagged “CSR”

Here are some fascinating examples of staff behaviour change initatives, particularly about travel, which have been carefully thought through, using creative responses to the elements which might enable and discourage the new desired behaviours.  I’ve analysed them using the six sources of influence framework which still feels very intuitive and helpful to me, a few years after I first came across it.  (There’s a very useful summary here.) This article was published in the environmentalist on paper and on line, last month.

The article didn’t have room for the table below, so when you’ve read it, come back and see this more systematic matching of actions to sources of influence in the case of Akzo-Nobel’s sales team car travel.

The article was written some weeks ago, before the encounter with a disgruntled staff member which I blogged about here.  (Neither of the organisations in the article is the one in that blog.)

Pondering on the approaches take by Lloyds and Akzo-Nobel would have avoided this response, I’m thinking that this is probably less about the specific initiative, and more about the sense of alienation that staff have from the organisation they work for.  If you’re grumpy generally about your workplace, then an initiative like the low-carbon diet will exacerbate and provide a focus for that anger.

Greenwash or win-win?

Trewin Restorick at eco-behaviour NGO Global Action Plan has also blogged recently about staff travel.  A good period of internal engagement prior to setting up systems and initatives – to make sure that incentives and polices are aligned rather than contradicting each other – seems needed, given some of the insights he describes.  He makes an interesting point about greenwash – in this case, dressing up a travel reduction initative as an environmental benefit when it is ‘really’ a cost-saving measure.  This is in contrast with Paul Turner’s experience, described in my article, of seeing the dual-benefit as a win-win which enables Lloyds’ to appeal to different groups of staff.

A while back, that unstoppable author on CSR Wayne Visser invited me to write an entry on change management for the updated 2010 edition of his A-Z of Corporate Social Responsibility.

What a great opportunity!  Not having a very clear picture of the readership, I began by justifying the inclusion of the topic.

Some businesses are very good at CSR. Others find it a struggle or are only just beginning. If you want to improve an organisation, then you want to change it. Sometimes the scale of improvement which environmental champions or others want to see is quite large. So far-reaching organisational change may be desired.

What do we know about how organisations change, and how organisational change can be managed – or catalysed and steered?

The article goes on to contrast ideas about planned organisational change with perspectives which see change as an emergent phenomenon.  It also looks at what changes, when an organisation changes, drawing on Schein’s three levels of culture.

And as you’d expect, there are signposts to some practical advice.

You can read the chapter here (search for ‘change management’).

What did I miss?

If I’m asked to do an update for a future edition, what changes should I make to the article?

Further reading

You can buy a copy here (NB Amazon don’t seem to be able to distinguish this 2010 edition from the previous edition).

I’ve also posted a slide show which develops some of these thoughts, which you can reach via this blog entry.

When the new editor of the environmentalist, Paul Suff, asked me to write a kind of ‘how to’ article on understanding what sustainability means to an organisation, it took me some time to figure out how to make it fit into a two-page article.

I’m pleased with the overall framework, and the questions which it seems to all boil down to:

• What’s the best thing we can do?
• What’s the best way we can do it?

See what you think: access a pdf of the article here.

This is the first edition of the environmentalist under its new editorship, and you can access the whole mag for a limited time here.

I’m not a great one for ‘top’ lists.  (‘To do’ lists are an entirely different matter.)

Perhap it’s a girl/boy thing: my life partner loves nothing better than to update his bird list,  flick through the cricket statistician’s bible Wisden, or relive his youth by combing down indexes of obscure Clash gigs.

As for me, when my kids ask me what my top three favourite songs are, I’m really stumped.  I don’t think I’d even be able to narrow it down to the eight specified by Desert Island Discs.

So I wasn’t that interested when the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and Greenleaf published The Top 50 Sustainability Books.   In fact, it wasn’t until I actually had a copy to take home from a workshop that I realised its great value.

Because of course it’s so much more than a list.  Each book in the top fifty is summarised, and its ideas put into a wider context. The author(s) are profiled, there are some choice extracts and reflections from the authors about the impact of the book.

Well-known classics like Silent Spring and Small is Beautiful sit next to more recent and more obscure : Heat, and The Chaos Point.

Wayne Visser and Oliver van Heel have done a great job, creating a pass notes summary and bluffers guide to some absolute classics.  The book helps the busy reader understand key ideas in the sustainability field, reminds them about what they’ve already read – sometimes years ago – and introduces them to some new thought leaders.

So I’m happy to discover that my initial reaction was wrong.

Off to begin my list of books I should have paid attention to first time around…

Update: May 2011

Wayne has been blogging about an updated list, noticing trends towards more practical titles and an increase from a low base of women authors. See here.

At an action research seminar organised by Bath University, Dr Gill Coleman shared a work-in-progress: a learning history of the iconic eco-factory built by MAS Intimates in Sri Lanka.

By coincidence (if you believe in it), someone from MAS had been a student on the Post-Graduate Certificate in Sustainable Business (on which I’m a tutor) so I was intrigued to listen to this detailed inside story.

I’ve written more (in the environmentalist) about learning histories as an ‘intervention’, and about the eco-factory here .

From time to time I’ve been invited to work with Jane Ashton and her team at First Choice, now part of TUI Travel plc.  Jane understands the importance of enabling sustainable development to leave the safe haven of the CSR team, and spread virally through the organisation.

One way that First Choice encourages this is through tailored training for people in different parts of the organisation, whether they work in retail shops, in holiday destinations, liaising with local suppliers of accommodation and activities, or in teams that dream up the new products to sell to holidaymakers.  I was delighted to be asked to work with Jane’s team and the Travel Foundation to develop this training.

Once piloted by First Choice, the training courses and materials were made generic, so that any similar business in the sector could use them.  This won’t just help staff become more aware of sustainable tourism, it will also help them plan together how to rethink their own businesses to make them more sustainable.

You can access those training materials here.

Most often, corporate action around sustainability issues is looked at as if the organisation is a single discrete entity, making decisions by itself. While this is convenient for discerning general patterns and for traditional management theory, itʼs not the way it appears to me in my day-to-day work with change agents.

For example, Tom Lyon and John Maxwell talk about the usefulness or otherwise of companies including environmental activities under their CSR umbrella. Their post, understandably given their interest in the level of overall society rather than the micro of what happens inside organisations, concentrates on whether voluntary activity by companies might work against a potentially more effective approach of government regulation.  That’s an interesting debate and one which I’ve seen first hand when I was the expert rapporteur for the European Commission’s Round Table on CSR.

But I’m interested in the lived experience of individual actors.

So, what if we look at this from the point of the view of the individual change agent?

If I’m in a company, and I’d like to get it to begin shifting towards sustainability, then I’ll look around to see where the opportunities might be.

If there’s already an active CSR programme of some kind, then I might see this as a useful initiative to piggyback on or link in with.  Perhaps I can build in operational environmental improvements to a CSR programme which currently is little more than philanthropy.  Or perhaps the CSR team would appreciate support in making their community activities more related to organisational strategy.

Getting involved in existing activities gives me the legitimacy to be part of the conversation about how they can be made more strategic, more mainstream and more ambitious.

Being part of the conversation is critical if we’re to add tinder to the sparks of positive intent which will be present where people are doing CSR.