Search Results

Blog | Tuesday June 29, 2021

The Corporate Rainbow: Going beyond Pride Celebrations and Creating Lasting Impact

Preview

I can recall the first time I emerged from the Castro MUNI tunnels in awe, staring up at the biggest rainbow flag I had ever seen. I wore a rainbow bracelet, had hung up a rainbow flag on my bedroom wall, and loved seeing the array of colors in every shop window as I strolled through downtown San Francisco in June. The rainbow had become symbolic to my challenges with coming out and getting comfortable with my identity as a lesbian. I felt accepted by the increasing visibility in my environment.

Today, after a decade of corporate Pride campaigns consisting of rainbow logos featured on social media, parade floats, and banners as well as endless rainbow merch, I find myself needing to see more. I, and the queer community at large, urge companies to support Pride in ways that deliver long-lasting impact for members of society who are still facing social and political inequity and denied basic human rights.

In the last few years, companies have been criticized for both performative allyship and rainbow-washing:

• Performative allyship is a form of action appearing to promote change but that, in reality, raises little to no impact and maintains the status quo. It is usually acted out by people who have privilege and power and serves as a way to minimize scrutiny and garner approval.
• Rainbow-washing is a form of performative allyship. It provides optics that suggest allyship, but there is no substantive action behind the visual cues. It serves as a way to co-opt and commodify movement.

These themes are especially relevant to the latest criticism facing companies in the U.S. For example, companies are being challenged for celebrating Pride while also donating to politicians and political candidates who sponsor discriminatory anti-transgender legislation. According to data highlighted by PBS, 2021 has set a record in anti-trans bills in America. With this growth in oppression, allies and advocates—as individuals and companies—can show solidarity and advocacy in combatting increasing transphobia in society, socially and politically.

Pride is not important just because we want to celebrate our right to love and be ourselves—it exists so that we remember the continued sacrifice of surviving in a world that has been systemically and socially structured to repress our identities.

How Companies Can Combat Performative Allyship and Rainbow-Washing

To fully support the LGBTIQ+ community in ways that create long-lasting impact, companies can take several actions across the business:

• Ask yourself questions to recognize when a Pride campaign lacks impact. What is the transformative impact you seek to have within the LGBTIQ+ community? How can you be inclusive of stakeholders with lived experience? Beyond Pride month, how can you integrate this into regular business operations and culture?
• Share resources for allyship and advocacy with your employees internally. Check out this Human Rights Campaign allyship toolkit as a start.
• Celebrate intersectionality in the LGBTIQ+ community. Use the Progress Pride Flag in your graphics and highlight the history of the Black trans women and other LGBTIQ+ people of color who have been instrumental in the progress of Pride celebrations.
• Invest in your LGBTIQ+ employee resource groups. Provide resources and development opportunities for employees to raise their voices and set up a rewards system for those leading LGBTIQ+ projects in addition to their existing workloads.
• Select LGBTIQ+ suppliers for your Pride campaigns and celebrations and include them as part of your corporate diversity supplier program.
• Address LGBTIQ+ discrimination in countries outside the U.S. by partnering with global civil society organizations and local community NGOs, such as the LGBTIQ+ Workplace Equality Index in India partnership or the Tent Partnership for Refugees.
• Use your influence to combat discrimination in political actions, such as through supporting the passage of the Equality Act, and by incorporating diversity, equity, and inclusion work into corporate political spending.

To be clear, I admire the progress in visibility and LGBTIQ+ support that multinational companies and small businesses have made. I appreciate the Pride flags in the windows, the advertisements that include non-heterosexual couples and non-binary individuals, and portions of proceeds that are donated to LGBTIQ+ nonprofits.

However, visibility does not mean inclusion. Pride is not important just because we want to celebrate our right to love and be ourselves—it exists so that we remember the continued sacrifice of surviving in a world that has been systemically and socially structured to repress our identities.

We celebrate Pride because children are still growing up thinking they do not belong in this world, resulting in deep trauma and violence. We need to keep pushing progress forward. Companies participating in Pride cannot celebrate without also helping the LGBTIQ+ community thrive in a world that has historically—to this day—oppressed our human rights. Rather, they have a powerful opportunity to act, enable, and influence to champion LGBTIQ+ rights and generate lasting impact.

Blog | Tuesday November 6, 2018

Is Your Business Ready for a Radically Different Future?

Preview

With rapid automation putting millions out of work, a new “Humans First” movement emerges—determined to fight back. Saudi Arabia decides that emissions mitigation efforts are too slow to prevent severe climate disruption and announces plans to launch a risky geoengineering program, prompting threats of retaliation from other nations. The rate of Type 2 diabetes has dropped for the second year in a row, thanks to a powerful new health AI that guides consumers toward healthier behavior—and punishes those who make unhealthy choices.

None of these things have happened—yet. But what would it mean for your business if they did?

During times of rapid change, the greatest danger lies in being unable to imagine radically different futures.

BSR’s new report, Doing Business in 2030: Four Possible Futures, combines research with imagination to help you consider disruptive possibilities such as these. The report presents four scenarios describing alternate future contexts for business. These scenarios explore key factors that could reshape the world over the coming decade and describe how they might develop, interact, and transform.

From climate disruption to automation to artificial intelligence, these changes are rapid, complex, interconnected, uncertain, and nonlinear. They are creating an entirely new operating environment for business.

While the scenarios explore numerous factors reshaping the future, on a high level they are organized around two critical uncertainties: 1) whether the forces of centralization or decentralization prevail, and 2) whether we will stick with the current economic paradigm of endless growth and profit maximization or shift toward a new paradigm that views the purpose of the economy as providing for equitable prosperity on a healthy planet.

Each scenario, summarized briefly below, imagines different answers to those questions.

Scenario 1: A Tale of Two Systems

Automation and environmental disruption cause global turmoil. China promotes a vision of “prosperity, order, and sustainability” and draws emerging economies into its orbit. Western government and business leaders realize they need to radically reform the social contract if free market capitalism is to survive.

Scenario 2: Move Slow and Fix Things

Health concerns, misinformation scandals, and a global recession undermine trust. People become disillusioned with consumerism, big business, and social media. As more localized economies emerge, people rediscover the benefits of community, and a culture of healing starts to take root.

Scenario 3: Tribalism, Inc.

The notion that “all business is political” drives social, economic, and cultural fragmentation. New “tribes” emerge with profoundly different experiences of reality. As collective action becomes increasingly difficult, some of these tribes experiment with radical approaches to global challenges like climate change.

Scenario 4: Total Information Awareness 

Highly personalized AI companions become an essential part of everyday life. Concentrated networks of huge businesses leverage extreme data to provide affordable, effective, and seamless services. Privacy is gone and much work is automated away, but most people embrace the new reality.

Scenarios are neither predictions nor forecasts, and none of these will “come true” exactly as written (although elements of each are likely to happen). Instead, they are a tool to help us think differently—and to consider truly radical changes that escape the bounds of our current models. Rather than providing us with a single answer about the future—which would almost certainly be wrong—they enable us to embrace uncertainty and develop more robust and resilient strategies.

So, how should you use them?

First, suspend disbelief and immerse yourself in each of these worlds. Imagine it is 2030, and the scenario you’re reading accurately describes the world you inhabit. What would your life be like? Where do you live, what do you care about, and how do you spend your time? Use questions like these to develop an intuitive understanding of what these worlds would be like to live in.

Second, explore what new challenges and opportunities each of these worlds would present for your business and for sustainability, and consider how your company would need to operate differently in 2030 to address these. How has your supply chain changed? What new competitors have entered the market? Who are your employees, and how is their work different from today? What do your customers need, and how are you meeting those needs sustainably?

Finally, consider how you could make your company’s strategy more resilient to the entire set of scenarios. Are there any elements of your current strategy that would fail in one of these scenarios, but which could be reconsidered? Are there any no-regrets actions you could take that would work well across all the scenarios? What sorts of hedging strategies could you use to avoid risking everything on one big bet? Once you’ve identified the most promising strategic initiatives, consider what you’d have to start doing today to bring them to life.

Much of what characterizes our current reality—from highly accurate facial recognition technology to Brexit—was not so long ago considered unlikely or even crazy. Scenarios offer us a unique opportunity to step outside of the box for a moment and consider truly different possibilities. While nobody can predict the future, thinking about the ways things might evolve can help us make wiser choices today. During times of rapid change, the greatest danger lies in being unable to imagine radically different futures.

Business—and the well-being of people and the planet—depend on new strategies for the future that account for the profound changes underway and imagine transformative new opportunities to create a more just and sustainable world.

Blog | Tuesday February 14, 2017

Turning Global Challenges into Collaborative Solutions: BSR's Collaborative Initiatives

Preview

Since being founded 25 years ago, BSR has had a consistent focus on uniting the business community and its stakeholders in collaborative initiatives that co-create solutions to systemic business and sustainability challenges. Today, we’re engaging more than 200 companies in 20-plus initiatives, covering a wide range of sectors and issues—from clean fuel for commercial road freight to ethical practices in luxury-industry value chains. And BSR had a hand in developing several well-known initiatives that today operate as independent organizations.

With the continuous efforts of our members and stakeholders, this collaborative work generates concrete positive outcomes for business, societies, and the environment through sharing best practices, changing business norms, and driving collective, sustainable solutions. For example:

• The Healthcare Working Group has developed the Guiding Principles on Access to Healthcare, through which CEOs of 13 major pharmaceutical companies have framed their efforts to reduce the global burden of disease by helping ensure that medicines, vaccines, diagnostics, and other medical technology and assistance are effectively developed and deployed.
• Through the Future of Internet Power, more than 20 technology companies have committed to sourcing 100 percent renewable energy for their data centers.
• Companies in the Responsible Luxury Initiative have developed and adopted a set of high-level principles for the sourcing of leather, fur, and exotic skins.
• The Clean Cargo Working Group continues to provide a leading industry platform for promoting responsible shipping, as well as reliable year-on-year emissions performance data from 23 of the world’s leading ocean carriers that represent approximately 85 percent of global ocean container capacity.
• The Maritime Anti-Corruption Network, now with more than 80 corporate members, is working with governments, local authorities, and civil society stakeholders around the world to improve the transparency, efficiency, and integrity of business operations at global trading hubs. 

Commitment to Transformative Change

The growth and impact of these initiatives demonstrate a clear desire among companies and stakeholders for coordinated action—but we’re convinced that we can go even further to drive truly transformative change. Last year, the United Nations reinforced this message with the inclusion of the 17th Sustainable Development Goal (SDG), which recognizes that the other 16 goals will only be achieved through “partnership that brings together governments, civil society, the private sector, the United Nations system, and other actors and mobilizes all available resources.”  

This year, we are strengthening BSR’s capacity to convene business and stakeholders to develop and scale collaborative initiatives that overcome the challenges the SDGs present. We will seek to radically evolve our capacity to drive transformative change through collaborative initiatives, using the following principles for success:

• Collaboration requires meticulous management: We’ll strengthen our operational capabilities, such as communication, technology, governance, and administration platforms.
• Impact requires scale: We’ll strengthen and scale our existing Collaborative Initiatives through several approaches, including by partnering more effectively with stakeholders, funders, and governments.
• Innovation requires multistakeholder involvement: We’ll employ inclusive and interactive innovation processes to incubate and develop new collaborative initiatives.

This work will build on our platform of key initiatives that tackle systemic challenges, and we will actively engage with our members to ensure that the new collaborations address their business needs, as well as drive positive societal and environmental change. This includes reaching out to our network to understand which issues our members and partners most want solved, as well as hosting a series of multi-day, multistakeholder workshops focused on systemic challenges and new ideas for collaboration.

Look out for further opportunities to engage as we build out this key element of BSR’s business leadership strategy for a just and sustainable world.

Over the next two weeks, we’ll highlight outcomes and impacts from BSR collaborations in a social media campaign—follow @BSRnews—and on the BSR blog.  

Blog | Thursday November 2, 2017

Reflections from the BSR Conference 2017 (And How to Review Highlights)

Preview

It’s been one week since the sun set on our 25th anniversary celebration at the BSR Conference 2017 in Huntington Beach, California. Since our 2016 Conference, which took place right before the U.S. election last November, a lot has changed in the world: Political volatility has increased, nationalistic sentiments are on the rise, we’ve experienced increased economic and technological disruptions, and policy changes around the globe are reshaping the path forward for business.

At the same time, in the past year, hundreds of businesses and leaders from the private sector, NGOs, U.S. local and state governments, and civil society have stepped up on an unprecedented scale and raised their voices on issues ranging from climate action to diversity and inclusion.

Last week at BSR17, we convened our member network and community to discuss how business can continue this momentum on sustainability leadership. Inspiration, positivity, and action-planning set the tone throughout our three days in Huntington Beach—in between sunrise yoga and al fresco meal functions, participants gathered to hear from changemakers on the plenary stage: Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore encouraged businesses to continue to take climate action, Microsoft’s Brad Smith described the company’s experience raising its voice on political issues and bridging the digital divide, and Planned Parenthood’s Cecile Richards urged companies to support women’s empowerment and health, specifically by committing to provide birth control regardless of regulatory changes in the U.S.

Breakout sessions on topics like engaging on public policy in uncertain times, futures thinking, and harnessing technologies for supply chain sustainability brought the brilliant minds of the BSR community together to discuss best practices and new ideas.

Here are five ways that you can re-live the highlights of our event—or catch the things you missed:

1. Watch plenary session videos: Almost every plenary session is now live on our YouTube channel, from Richards’ standing-ovation-receiving speech, to Morgan Stanley’s Audrey Choi’s presentation on inclusive growth, to a panel on how corporations can help solve the global refugee crisis, to National Geographic Photographer Annie Griffiths’ inspiring talk on the power of photography as a tool for telling stories and creating empathy.
2. See the social media highlights: Follow @BSRnews, @BSRherproject, and BSR staff on Twitter, and see what you missed on the #BSR17 hashtag. You will also find photo highlights on our Instagram accounts, @bsrorg and @herprojectbsr.
3. Find yourself in photos: We’ve uploaded photos from the week onto our Flickr account—head on over to see whether we captured you, or your favorite moment, in our BSR Conference album.
4. Share your thoughts: If you were with us in Huntington Beach, please take a moment to complete the Conference survey (available in the mobile app under “Surveys”). If you weren’t there, you can always tweet at us or email us your perspective.
5. Read our new insights: We launched several new publications last week, including our new report on The Future of Sustainable Business. And we published blog posts about a new UN Foundation report on how business can support women’s health and empowerment and Morgan Stanley’s new framework on embedding inclusive growth. Our new Climate Policy Tracker tool with We Mean Business is also now live.

Thank you for participating in our 25th anniversary event, whether you were stage-side in the ballroom with us or tuning in via Twitter and the livestream. You make our community strong, and the BSR Conference wouldn’t be as enlivening and inspiring without you—as Levi Strauss & Co. Vice President of Sustainability Michael Kobori proclaimed on stage during our BSR Alumni panel, “The BSR Conference has converted me from an optimistic pessimist to an optimistic optimist.”

Don’t forget to mark your calendars for November 6-8, 2018, when we head back to the East Coast for the BSR Conference 2018 in New York. We hope to see you next year!

Blog | Wednesday April 22, 2020

ESG Isn’t Going Anywhere: Investor Expectations in the Age of COVID-19

Preview

One of the most important topics in corporate sustainability is the dramatic increase in attention by investors on the integration of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations.   

The COVID-19 pandemic has created a global health crisis, upended the economy, and led to major stock market declines. As a result, many investors are reevaluating both short-term and long-term portfolio strategies, and companies are reevaluating their sustainability priorities. This raises an important question for corporate sustainability professionals: how will the rise of COVID-19 affect ESG investing strategies both in the short term and the long term, and what does it mean for companies?  

Preliminary indications are that the COVID-19 pandemic has—if anything—increased investor attention on corporate ESG management. In particular, investors have been even more vocal about their expectations on issues such as employee health and safety, workforce policies, job security, and business operational and strategic resilience. Front and center are investor concerns about responsible corporate governance, specifically related to COVID-19 response.   

Preliminary Indications Are That Investors Are Full Steam Ahead on ESG 

Leading asset owners and institutional investors are renewing their ESG investing commitments. The Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) of Japan, the world’s largest asset owner, and other major asset owners remain steadfast in their expectations of ESG and long-term investing. Even as the virus and market turmoil spread in mid-March, a new round of major asset owners joined GPIF’s letter.   

Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, also released a letter at the end of the first quarter in which he emphasized that “the pandemic we’re experiencing now highlights the fragility of the globalized world and the value of sustainable portfolios. We’ve seen sustainable portfolios deliver stronger performance than traditional portfolios during this period.” Blackrock is also continuing to take ESG action as a shareholder even during the crisis, notably voting against a board member at a natural gas distributor based on the company’s inadequate climate-related risk disclosure. 

Early data seems to show that ESG funds are performing better and proving more resilient during this turbulent moment in time. S&P Dow Jones' analysis notes that ESG portfolios have delivered better returns during the COVID-19 crisis and over the longer-term as well.  

BSR has partnered with Polecat since 2017 to deliver real-time corporate reputation and ESG intelligence from global online and social media discourse. Our review of data from Polecat indicates that many ESG topics (e.g., climate change, indigenous rights, etc.) are being reframed in relation to COVID-19, increasing their urgency and reach.   

The Wall Street Journal also envisions that the pandemic could elevate ESG factors in investment decisions, characterizing remarks from the head of research at the British investment bank Barclays: “Companies should expect more investors to ask questions about resilience and contingency planning, viewing the issues in light of the pandemic as relevant to a company’s long-term performance. Down the line, those conversations could evolve to broader ESG discussions…” 

More broadly, COVID-19 has also highlighted enormous disparities in society and corporate performance on the “S” in ESG. As the world assesses the challenges and rebuilds—and invests the capital to do so—it is likely to be guided by the imperative to “build back better” with a more just and sustainable economy. Companies will be evaluated by how they address those challenges in their businesses and being part of global solutions will be both a competitive differentiator and an ESG differentiator. 

COVID-19 Will Demand Emphasis on Different Areas of ESG

Many, if not most, corporate sustainability materiality matrixes will need some updating. The pandemic has demonstrated that many companies might generally have identified the right set of issues but may not be prioritizing them correctly or setting the right agendas to address them. For example, many service companies have not thought that employee health and safety was a high risk for their business. This thinking is obviously now changing.  

In this regard, BSR has seen a variety of material issues emerge as areas of particular interest to ESG investors. These include employee health and safety outside as well as inside the workplace, supply chain and resource risk and resilience, and employer-employee social contracts. It will be noteworthy to see how companies begin to report on COVID-19 in relation to these material issues, especially with the impending release of many corporate sustainability reports.  

COVID-19 has also put a spotlight on building resilient business strategies through scenario planning and considering second or even third-order effects. Issues that may have been deprioritized because they seem attenuated have—by the nature of the virus and its related effects on labor, supply chains, etc.—highlighted that a one-dimensional view of risk is not sufficient in designing resilient business strategies. Using scenario analysis in materiality and integrating the process with enterprise risk management are examples of ways that companies can better identify emerging ESG issues, some of which could manifest as quickly as COVID-19—and manage those risks accordingly. 

COVID-19 Is a Reason to Accelerate Efforts on ESG, Not to Pause Them 

Companies that are more strategically and operationally resilient and that treat their workforces better will likely be more attractive to all investors. In the short term, that means companies should increase efforts to integrate ESG investor expectations, ratings, and perspectives as part of sustainability initiatives, stakeholder engagement, and resilient business strategies.  Corporate leadership should also be conversant in ESG topics that relate to the COVID-19 response as investors ask tough questions and stakeholders evaluate companies on their effectiveness, credibility, and leadership on those material topics. 

Longer-term, COVID-19’s effects and the responses may also become a testbed for ESG analysis that helps create a new understanding of ESG impacts on business. For example, many investors have struggled with how to model and quantify the “social” aspects of ESG (whereas “environmental” are quantitative and more understood), and this may improve understanding of the financial impacts of major social disruptions. If this happens, companies should expect to see an increase in the quality of ESG investor expectations for corporate reporting. 

As we look ahead to the day when COVID-19 is no longer front-page news every day, it will be imperative for companies to learn and apply the lessons of this crisis. We believe investors will in turn hold them to higher ESG expectations. It will only become more important for companies to turn corporate sustainability principles into action, placing robust approaches to ESG at the center of resilient business strategies. 

Blog | Tuesday September 18, 2018

The State—and Future—of Sustainable Business in 2018

Preview

The past 10 years have seen incredible progress in sustainable business. There are global multi-stakeholder commitments on climate action and the SDGs, collaborations driving systemic change across value chains, and tremendous improvements in corporate and investor practices towards a more sustainable world. The BSR and GlobeScan State of Sustainable Business 2018 Survey is a great testament to the progress of corporate action and provides insight into how companies are preparing for the next 10 years as they respond to a rapidly changing world.

The survey, released today, includes responses from business leaders representing 152 global companies—more than 60 percent of BSR’s global membership network. This is the perspective of the people who do sustainability and corporate social responsibility work every day, inside some of the largest and most influential companies in the world.

In recognition of our 10th year and the fact that BSR sees a changing global agenda, we updated the list of corporate sustainability priorities that we track. Interestingly, ethics/integrity and diversity/inclusion were on the list for the first time and jumped straight to the top two priorities for sustainability efforts over the next 12 months. While these are of course longstanding corporate issues, they are now increasingly viewed as part of the sustainability agenda—perhaps a reflection of global attention on these topics.

Blog | Monday May 4, 2020

Sustainability Reporting and Early Lessons from COVID-19

Preview

Public scrutiny of how businesses are responding to the COVID-19 pandemic is bringing renewed attention to the importance of corporate transparency on sustainability issues. Effectively meeting these expectations starts with understanding two key dimensions of sustainability reporting: how companies are responding now and defining how companies should respond in the future.

We have observed several trends emerging from the pandemic and compared them with best practices on reporting. We are sharing these insights here to assist company sustainability teams as they strive to keep stakeholders informed—despite, in many cases, the reality of limited time and diminished resources.

What We’re Seeing Now

1. Companies adjusting their reports. COVID-19 has shaken all businesses, causing some to delay or scale back their formal sustainability reporting. Companies that recently released a 2019 report or are in the final approval stages are primarily acknowledging COVID-19 in one of three places: the CEO letter, as a call-out box or case study within the report itself, or in the report’s corresponding press release. Companies are also linking to informal and regularly updated webpages that provide specifics on their immediate COVID-19 responses.
2. Investors watching closely. Investors remain eager for the latest performance data and have reiterated the importance of engagement on long-term environment, social, and governance (ESG) issues despite the havoc wreaked on businesses’ day-to-day operations. BlackRock notes this proxy season will focus on board composition and quality, environmental risks and opportunities, corporate strategy and capital allocation, compensation that promotes long-termism, and human capital management. JUST Capital is tracking how employers are treating stakeholders amid the current crisis, and Truvalue Labs has introduced a free Coronavirus ESG Monitor that captures impact using the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board's (SASB) material issue categories. The ESG issues that investors were looking at prior to COVID-19 still hold—indeed, the current crisis has amplified their importance to investors’ decision-making. 
3. An emphasis on social criteria. The COVID-19 crisis is placing heightened importance and increased scrutiny on how companies are addressing the “S” in ESG. News outlets and investors alike are focusing on companies’ treatment of employees, suppliers, and the communities in which they operate, naming and shaming (or faming) good and bad actors along the way. Reputation is an important driver of this focus, but business continuity, economic inclusion, and public safety considerations are also critical. Given mounting investor, civil society, and media attention, companies are increasing their focus on social issues to demonstrate responsiveness to the top priorities of the day.

What We’d Like to See in the Near Future

1. Consistency and completeness. Investors still want comparable year-on-year data and will be especially interested this year in gauging companies’ resilience to shocks. Although managing COVID-19’s immediate impacts remains top priority for many public companies, reporting historical ESG data and performance remains essential. While a slight delay of this year’s reporting is understandable, companies should still strive for the same level of coverage as previous years and continue to improve their disclosures moving forward, with the expectation that their performance on key social issues will be even more thoroughly examined than usual.
2. Accountability during the new reality. Reports should provide an enduring account of how companies are responding to the COVID-19 crisis. The extent to which companies do this now or in the future depends on where they are in their reporting cycle: reports near completion today (e.g. by companies that operate on a calendar-year basis) will provide less insight than those with more time available (e.g. by companies with a fiscal year that doesn’t match the calendar year and report later in the year). Regardless of reporting calendar, companies will need to explain decisions made during this time and make forward-looking statements about how they intend to help "build back better" in the future. Sustainability reports will become an essential venue for accountability when looking back at company actions during COVID-19.
3. Numbers backed by narrative. Stark reductions in business operations and travel as a result of COVID-19 will likely reduce companies’ greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts, in many cases accelerating progress towards sustainability goals. Similarly, COVID-19 will impact many other metrics, such as diversity, employee engagement, and supply chain labor compliance. Going forward, it will be essential for companies to provide a narrative that identifies what change in historical performance relates to COVID-19 factors and what change results from previously existing plans—numbers on their own will be impossible for readers to interpret. It will also be important to provide a forward-looking narrative explaining their potential trajectory once COVID-19 is behind us.
4. Meeting stakeholders’ information needs outside the annual reporting cycle. Honest and timely communications are more important now than ever. Reporting is about meeting the information needs of external stakeholders, and in the current crisis, that may entail disclosure outside the boundaries of the formal sustainability/annual report, such as dedicated COVID-19 webpages. While not a substitute for formal reporting, well-designed websites and other responsive communications can be a powerful tool to distill the most material information to stakeholders, enabling them to make informed decisions and provide feedback to companies in the near term.

Sustainability reporting exists so that stakeholders can make informed judgments about how companies impact the world around them and understand how the changing world impacts the sustainability performance of companies. In this sense, sustainability reporting is more important now than it has ever been, and looking forward, it will be critical to understand how COVID-19 may impact sustainability reporting over the long term. Stay tuned for a follow-up blog post on how to “build the future” of post-COVID sustainability reporting.

Blog | Tuesday March 30, 2021

Inside BSR: Q&A with Sethypong Sok

Preview

March is always an exciting time, kicking off with International Women’s Day. Throughout the month, we celebrate BSR’s work to empower women, including HERproject, our collaborative initiative bringing together global brands, their suppliers, and local NGOs to deliver workplace-based programs to workers in global supply chains.

It made sense to us to feature Sethypong Sok, HERproject’s country representative in Cambodia, for this month’s Inside BSR interview. Sethypong works with global brands and factory management as well as multinational and local financial services providers to design and implement financial literacy programs for low-income factory workers, particularly women.

Read on to learn more about Sethypong, his work on HERproject, and his drive to lift fellow Cambodians out of poverty.

Tell us a bit about your background. Where are you from, where are you based, and how did you get into working on women’s empowerment and worker well-being?

I come from the Kingdom of Cambodia, or simply known as Cambodia, located in Southeast Asia. I was born in 1993, the same year when the United Nations Transitional Authority administered the first national elections for my country. In 2012, I graduated from high school with an outstanding degree. And despite the poverty trap my family encountered itself, I was persistent enough to pursue a bachelor's and master's degree at Pannasatra University of Cambodia with the faculty of Social Science and International Relations.

I meet and speak with people and workers who face countless hardships due to poverty. My feelings of powerlessness and pity actually strengthen my dedication to the goal of helping them have their voices heard and their rights fulfilled. By being part of driving HERproject in Cambodia, I feel I am a part of the solution.

I have more than seven years of experience working in non-profit organizations and in the development sector in various positions to serve local communities, vulnerable groups, or hard-to-reach populations, including children, women, survivors of labor and sexual exploitation, and low-income workers in Cambodia.

I started working in supply chains and worker well-being as a Trainer with Youth Employment Service Centre (YESC). At that time, I provided support services and training to factory managers, workers (particularly women workers), and young people aiming at enhancing employability, encouraging them to fulfill their potential, and increasing their economic opportunities.

Tell us about your work at HERproject. What is your current role and what does that entail? What are some interesting projects that you get to work on as part of your role?

I am currently serving as an in-country representative for BSR’s HERproject. I have been with HERproject for almost two years. I am responsible for managing HERproject program activities and leading other Women’s Empowerment projects in Cambodia. My main role is to liaison with the multinational financial services corporation, local financial services providers, brands, and factories management to design projects which aim at strengthening, implementing, and ethically enforcing internal procedures and policies in expanding the financial inclusion of low-income workers.

Currently, in Cambodia, we are piloting HERfinance Digital Wages. The project aims at ensuring the poor—particularly women—have the proper knowledge, skills, and attitudes toward financial services and enabling them to participate in the formal financial sector. I do enjoy working on this project because I am always excited to work on programs that aim to promote and enhance financial services in a timely manner through a sustainable financial system. This will help to bring these people—the unbanked—into formal financial services by supporting the development of an efficient and stable financial sector. At the same time, I also can gain extensive knowledge and skills on cooperating with social responsibility, union representatives, and financial service providers in global supply chains.

What issues are you passionate about and why? Does your work at HERproject reflect that?

My motivation to get involved and solve community problems started since I graduated from high school. I could not see myself being in another field not related to humanitarian work. I grew up in a country with a long history of the periodic humanitarian crisis, which undoubtedly affects the majority of the vulnerable population, particularly disrupting their welfare and education, security, the access to quality of public health service, and the shortage in skilled workers.

Another inspiration driving me to address the society complications was from my work experience, particularly from field work activities, where I meet and speak with people and workers who face countless hardships due to poverty. My feelings of powerlessness and pity actually strengthen my dedication to the goal of helping them have their voices heard and their rights fulfilled. By being part of driving HERproject in Cambodia, I feel I am a part of the solution.

2020 was undoubtedly a difficult year. What were the things that brought you joy amid lockdowns/quarantines? What are you most looking forward to when the pandemic is over?

Amid the challenges of 2020, I’m grateful that I can keep up with friends on social media platforms and connect with folks via videoconferencing, even if these aren’t really the same as seeing people in-person. I also enjoy this new normal that I never would have guessed how easy it is to do without so many modern conveniences.

I am looking forward to COVID-19 ending and not having to wear a mask and being able to give hugs to my friends and family again. I can’t wait to be able to high-five and shake hands with my friends, family, co-workers, and neighbors. I look forward to seeing all the smiling faces that have been hidden behind masks for years now.

Blog | Monday February 5, 2018

Three Hot Debates in Sustainability Reporting Today

Preview

In 2017, we spoke with more than 50 sustainability leaders from our member companies and other leading organizations to shape our thinking about the future of sustainable business.

These interviews informed our new report, Redefining Sustainable Business: Management for a Rapidly Changing World, which provides a blueprint for company strategy, governance, and management fit for our sustainable development challenge. Included in this blueprint is our point of view about how companies can report sustainability information in ways that enable improved sustainability performance and catalyze action beyond a company’s own boundaries.

Also during 2017, we had the opportunity to learn from the work of our Future of Reporting collaborative initiative. These discussions informed our Practitioner’s View of Sustainability Reporting, which shares insights about the future of sustainability reporting from those who are closest to it.

However, we were struck by three questions throughout these conversations where opinions were often sharply divided.

Does sustainability reporting distract attention from sustainability strategy?

One interviewee complained to us that, “Sustainability teams need to be story-makers, not storytellers, yet too often reporting reduces bandwidth for half the year and prevents us from doing our jobs.” Indeed, it often becomes too easy for the sustainability team to prioritize responding to external requests and producing an annual report at the expense of shaping the strategic direction of the company.

However, others argued that the discipline of publishing information in the public domain creates a powerful incentive for performance improvement, helps socialize sustainability across the organization, and helps focus strategy on the issues of greatest importance to company success. As one interviewee put it, “Reporting has an effect to solidify program management. There is a difference between high quality and low quality, and this pushes higher quality outputs.”

We believe that strategy and reporting are both essential and should not be viewed in competition. Both outcomes shouldn’t necessarily be pursued by the same team, though—just as the company strategy function doesn’t write the annual report, so the company sustainability function shouldn’t necessarily write the sustainability report.

Should we move toward more real-time sustainability reporting and disclosure?

Advocates of real-time reporting argue that it would bring the twin benefits of engaging a wider range of people in the sustainability agenda and enabling more timely decision-making on important sustainability issues. Opponents judge that sustainability is the ultimate long-term challenge; it is inconsistent to argue that short-term decision-making by investors is damaging to sustainability, while at the same time advocating for more real-time performance information and updates on sustainability.

We believe that the discipline of the annual reporting cycle is essential to maintain, as it allows analysts to make year-on-year comparisons and identify forward-looking trends. However, we think that companies should also communicate about sustainability using the full suite of today’s social media tools to engage relevant audiences. It makes sense for companies to look at new formats where real-time sustainability data can inform decision-making by external stakeholders—for example, sustainability information about products could be made available in real time to consumers—but this is not the same as sustainability reporting.

Should companies stop using the term “materiality” outside the investor relations context?

Some argue that using the term “materiality” outside of the investor relations context creates confusion for report users, who may be unclear about what definition of material is being used, and whether certain issues are of material concern to investors or not. One interviewee commented, “People get tired of hearing that all sustainability issues are material to the business.” Outside the investor relations context, companies could use other terms, such as “relevance.”

On the other hand, the concept of materiality is the threshold at which issues become sufficiently important that they should be reported to a target audience. In financial reporting, materiality is the threshold for influencing financial decisions made by investors; in sustainability reporting, materiality is the threshold for influencing a wider set of decisions, made on a wider range issues, by a wider range of stakeholders.

The financial reporting discipline does not have a monopoly on the term “material,” and applying such a proven concept in the sustainability reporting discipline substantially increases its value for report readers. Provided the company is clear about the definition of materiality being used and the process applied to define material issues, then using the term “materiality” should not, in theory, create problems.

Yet the fact remains that, in practice, the dual use of the term is confusing. Ultimately, the substance of the materiality principle in sustainability reporting matters more than the term that is used, and we believe that companies can use other terms—such as relevance or prioritization—in the context of sustainability reporting targeted at non-investor audiences.

Our Future of Reporting collaborative initiative is a group of companies that share reporting best practices with each other and use these insights to inform the future of sustainability reporting. If you are interested in participating in the group during 2018, please contact us.

Blog | Monday March 13, 2017

Preventing Violent Extremism: An Interview with Amy Cunningham, GCERF

Preview

Amy Cunningham is a senior advisor at the Global Community Engagement and Resilience Fund (GCERF), a Geneva-based public-private partnership and global fund working to support grassroots initiatives to prevent and counter violent extremism. A foreign policy professional who previously spent five years at a U.S. think tank working on issues related to human rights, security, and religious tolerance, Cunningham leads the fund’s private-sector engagement and supports its external relations and outreach.

She sat down with us to discuss how all stakeholders, particularly the private sector, can engage to provide positive alternatives that prevent vulnerable men, women, and youth from joining terrorist groups.  

Susan Winterberg: Why should business leaders focus on the issue of violent extremism?

Amy Cunningham: Violent extremism threatens not only the safety of citizens, but also economic development and investment. According to the 2016 Global Terrorism Index, the global economic impact of terrorism reached US$89.6 billion in 2015. Violent extremism affects business operations, disrupts markets and supply chains, depletes talent pools, inhibits investment, limits expansion, and curtails innovation. Additionally, it is important that the private sector take this issue seriously because, at times, their actions have inadvertently stoked community tensions or contributed to the ability of groups to perpetuate a violent narrative.

There is a misconception that violent extremism threatens only those companies with assets on the ground. In fact, violent extremism (including the presence of or threat from terrorist groups) prevents access to markets and hinders growth in all sectors. Certain industries have obvious interests in preventing violent extremism, such as extractives and agriculture, which are threatened by violence that erupts in the areas where they maintain personnel and property. For the tourism industry, revenues are twice as large (in terms of contributions to GDP) in countries where there have been no terrorist attacks. There are, however, many other industries that can play an important role in preventing violent extremism and that are also directly affected (food and beverage retailers, garment industry, construction, and technology, to name a few).

Winterberg: How is GCERF working with communities to promote inclusion as a means of preventing violent extremism?

Cunningham: From our work in Bangladesh, Kenya, Kosovo, Mali, and Nigeria, we know that political, social, economic, and other forms of marginalization can play a huge role in motivating a person toward adopting violent extremist narratives. For this reason, GCERF works diligently to promote inclusion and social harmony from the grassroots level upward.

Community cohesion is essential to strengthening resilience against violent extremism ("resilience" being the ability of community members to adapt and recover from violent extremist threats and attacks). For this reason, in each community we fund activities in, we prioritize raising awareness of the threat of violent extremism. To raise awareness, we support community dialogue programs that are inclusive of members of society who might otherwise not have the opportunity to engage with their peers and neighbors. For example, we fund network events for women and girls who might traditionally be excluded, interfaith dialogues to encourage peacebuilding, and gatherings to provide safe avenues for engagement and sharing of frustrations among civilians, law enforcement, and officials. An inclusive society, one where trust, transparency, and human dignity are prioritized, will prove more resilient—and, ideally, resistant—to the violent narratives and ideologies professed by terrorist groups.  

Winterberg: What opportunities are there for companies to become engaged in work on preventing violent extremism?

Cunningham: There is no shortage of opportunities for companies, large and small, to engage in preventing violent extremism. On the whole, the private sector is regarded as faster, more flexible, and more focused than the public sector and, therefore, has the potential to help stabilize at-risk communities, while simultaneously securing its own business operations. When encouraged and supported, enterprise can also take more risks, such as piloting ideas or innovating programs that might fail but still provide valuable lessons for all stakeholders.

We recognize that business can offer more than just financial resources. For example, companies have marketing and branding acumen that can help position and promote prevention of violent extremism objectives. Also, by virtue of working on the ground directly with—and within—local communities, they have intimate understanding of local contexts, cultures, and networks that governments and aid agencies may not. In our experience, some of the best private-sector engagement on this issue comes from communications, technology, and social media companies, which readily harness their internal expertise to produce or amplify content online that counters violent extremist narratives. Similarly, it is no secret that one way to curb the appeal of violent extremist groups is to provide positive, alternative opportunities to vulnerable individuals, such as job training and job creation—two things that the private sector has excelled in.

At GCERF, we frequently meet with dedicated and ethical business leaders who are genuinely committed to making a difference in the communities where they operate, but too often, their CSR objectives are nearsighted or lack a prevention of violent extremism “lens,” which is to say that they fail to appropriately consider fragile cultural contexts and the level of resilience within the community in advance of beginning programming. We are huge advocates for CSR, but we also think prevention of violent extremism should be considered when crafting core business strategies. After all, you can have security without development, but development without security won’t stand a chance.

To learn more about GCERF, visit the organization’s website, or download its annual report.