BSR Report 2010: Redefining Leadership
Table of Contents
Letter From the CEO
The State of Sustainable Business
Our Impact and Case Studies
Our Challenges
Videos
Financial Statements
About This Report
Download the Report
Our People
Global Staff
Directors and Above
One Global Team
For most of BSR’s history, San Francisco has been our headquarters. Today, our reality is different. While San Francisco remains our largest office in terms of staff, we no longer think of ourselves as having a single headquarters and “regional” outposts. Instead, we operate as a single organization with several integrated offices and management spread across the organization.
Our ability to achieve our mission—working with business to create a just and sustainable world—depends on having staff members with diverse experiences, perspectives, and networks. With that in mind, we consciously aim to create a team with a wide range of backgrounds. Our employees come to BSR from leading companies, pioneering social investors, human rights and environmental organizations, and the public sector.
Over the past three years, we have grown and decentralized our team and activities. At the beginning of 2008, 80 percent of our team was in San Francisco. Today, less than half of our 102 employees are in San Francisco, and nearly 40 percent of our staff is based outside the United States. BSR is now spread across seven offices in Asia, Europe, and North America, with representatives in Latin America. The center of gravity within the United States has changed as well, with our East Coast team growing quickly in the past 18 months to 13 people working from New York and Washington, D.C.
To align management with our new reality and build a more unified organization, we made various changes to our management team, which now includes senior staff from Hong Kong, New York, Paris, and San Francisco.
During 2010, 19 employees left BSR, resulting in an overall staff turnover rate of 20 percent. Employees left for a number of reasons, including the pursuit of higher education, family relocations, or for reasons of poor performance.
We continued to host interns in our various offices, introducing students from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Coro, HEC Paris, the University of California, Berkeley, and other universities to careers in sustainable business.
In 2011, we expect to continue growing, with an emphasis on expanding our teams in New York, Paris, and our three Asian offices. We will also continue to offer our employees opportunities to spend time in other offices.
Staff Development
In 2010, we launched a new employee-development initiative, with the objectives of increasing staff training and establishing clearer career paths. Training in 2010 focused on facilitation and public speaking skills, writing, and coaching.
In 2011, we are planning to increase our support of employee development. All employees have a specific professional development goal based on their unique skills and career aspirations, and we are organizing relevant trainings for staff at all levels. We are also revitalizing our career-manager program, in which every employee has a career manager who provides guidance and career coaching and manages our 360-degree feedback process. We will also provide more guidance to these managers to enable more effective and successful career management.
Employee Engagement
Each year, we undertake an employee-engagement survey to identify key areas in which employee experiences at BSR can be improved. In response to the 2010 survey, 77 percent of respondents selected “agree” or “strongly agree” in response to questions about their level of positive engagement at BSR. Staff consistently agreed that they had the opportunity to do their best every day, that they felt their colleagues cared about them, and that they had opportunities to learn and grow. The survey also revealed that 35 percent of staff did not feel they were receiving enough recognition or praise on a regular basis. BSR plans to address this concern in 2011.
Diversity
We continue to strive to be an inclusive and diverse workplace. All told, our staff members speak more than 15 languages and dialects and represent 13 nationalities. Women comprise 54 percent of our global staff, and men make up 46 percent. At the director level and above, 30 percent are women and 70 percent are men.
