How to Accelerate HR’s Role in

Sustainability:

The Next Big Step!

December 9, 2015

Impact Hub NYC Jeana Wirtenberg, Ph.D.

Transitioning to Green, LLC

Building a Culture for Sustainability

Introductions

Transitioning to Green, LLC Your connection between sustainability and success.

We assist every organization we partner with to…

• Align corporate strategy and operations with financial resources, risks and profitability. – Adapting your Purpose for Prosperity.

• Responsibly manage supply chains, material resources, facilities and products.

– Respecting natural systems.

• Engage employee passions for creativity, innovation and inspired performance.

– Nurturing your people to thrive.

Purpose for today

• Educate and inspire leaders and managers in every

function in how to mainstream sustainability into all

aspects of your corporate culture.

• Play a pivotal role in unleashing talent in service of a

sustainable future

• Create a purpose driven, conscious, connected workforce,

and help steward a shift toward total employee involvement

in sustainability

• Embed eight essential elements for creating authentic

sustainability cultures

Brief Introductions

Introduce yourself:

Name, affiliation, background in sustainability

What brought you here today?

“Enough …for all …forever” African Delegation to Earth Summit II Rio +10, 2002

Envisioning a Sustainable World, 2050

Systems thinking

Core Sustainability Concepts

Intergenerational responsibility

Socio-economic justice

Enough … … for all … … forever.

People Make Sustainability Happen!

Human Resources and Sustainability/CSR Perfect Together?

Engage Employees in Sustainability

Modern Survey’s “Spring 2012 National Norms Survey.”

• Companies with engaged employees

grew profits 3 X faster than competitors (Corporate Leadership Council)

• Highly engaged organizations have 87% less staff

turnover and 20% better performance than

average (Corporate Leadership Council)

• Operating income of companies with engaged

employees improved by 19% in one year vs. a

decline of 33% for companies with low levels of

employee engagement (Global survey by Tower Perrins-ISR,

involving an 664,000 employees in 50 companies)

• 59% of engaged employees say their job brings out

their most creative ideas vs. 3% for disengaged

employees

Engagement Drives Results

WBCSD, “People Matter – Engage: Inspiring Employees about Sustainability,” August 2010.

Five Talent Elements to Align with Sustainability and CSR

1. Attracting Talent 2. Recruiting Talent 3. Developing Talent 4. Engaging Talent 5. Retaining Talent

“It’s the talent that makes it all happen!”

Making an Impact Increases Satisfaction

Net Impact’s “Talent Report: What Workers Want in 2012,” June 2012,

Based on a survey of 1,726 senior university students and employed graduates. .

Employees who say they have the opportunity to make a direct social and environmental impact through their job report higher satisfaction levels than those who don’t, by a 2:1 ratio.

CSR & Engagement Matter

CBSR and Hewitt Associates, “Engaging Employees Through CSR” webinar, Jan 2010

CSR and Engagement

From a slide used by Jay Dorio, Kenexa, at a UNEP FI meeting, March 31, 2011. Based on Kenexa’s

WorkTrends 2010 data base from 10,000 U.S. employees surveyed.

• Tie Sustainability education to the company’s mission and goals

• Make it relevant to job performance

• Make Sustainability outreach personal and voluntary

• Focus employees on community outreach

• Focus on key impact areas and set improvement goals

• Make learning easy and fun!

Engaging Talent: Best Practices

Source: Dan Pink, Drive, 2011

DRIVE: The Surprising Truth About

What Motivates Us

Retaining talented people: Why does it matter?

Soaring costs

• Experts agree that the cost of replacing workers can easily be two times their annual salary…

• And that’s not including the “hidden” costs of lost tacit and explicit knowledge

• Other costs are impact on morale, increased stress and inefficiency

Retaining talented people: Why does it matter?

More Soaring Costs

• Add on direct costs of replacing talent, such as advertising, interviewing, and sign-on bonuses, and the hard to measure costs of orientation, training, putting work on hold, lost productivity, and lost customers, and the total is staggering!

Retaining Talented People: How can you keep them?

As a manager, you ask:

• How can I make work more satisfying for my people?

• How can I better understand their career ambitions?

• How can I better respect the work-life issues they face?

• How can I bend the rules to support them?

Retaining Talented People: How can you keep them?

As a manager, you:

• Tell them where they stand

• Tell them where they need to improve

• Have fun and encourage [respectful and appropriate] humor in the workplace

What is the Manager’s Role?

“Managers need to step into their roles as managers and spend time learning about their employees and their career aspirations and help craft development opportunities as part of the day-to-day work.” Edie Goldberg, 2012

Associate Engagement Starts with asking and listening

• Listening doesn’t mean you have to make any promises or commitments….just listen

• Questions to ask: – Do you feel recognized for your accomplishments? – Do you feel challenged in your work? – Are you getting enough feedback? – Is the training you want available to you? – Do you see a fit between your career goals and the

opportunities available to you? – What can I do to support your goals? – What are you struggling with? – What would make your life easier?

Employee Initiatives to Engage in Sustainability

• Launching “Green Teams”

• Providing opportunities for Employee Volunteerism

• Developing “green” products and services

• Greening your supply chain

• Conducting life-cycle analysis of your products

• Reducing your carbon footprint

Communications: Creating an Ennobling Conversation for the Future

Craft a compelling and inspiring sustainability

story…Make it inclusive and widely shared inside and

outside the organization.

Engage the entire organization in a conversation

designed to give rise to a vision of what’s possible, with

sustainability being the fuel that unleashes everyone’s

energy, exciting and ennobling them by giving new

meaning to their work and bringing whole new

possibilities into being.

Wirtenberg, 2010

Learning and Development: Embed Sustainability Training in All Functions

• Fundamentals of Sustainability

• Marketing, Communications, & Social Networking

• Human Resources

• Strategy and Metrics

• Operations/Facilities

• Finance

• Supply Chain

• Greening Information Technology

What if?

Every employee had goals around sustainability, working in concert with the business’ goals to solve some of our most intractable problems? And every employee could articulate what that

means to them personally?

Sustainability happens when…

Managers make decisions and take actions every day that take sustainability gain and harm into account.

Sustainability Pyramid Framework

The Next Big Step in Sustainability is

CULTURE.

BUILDING A CULTURE FOR SUSTAINABILITY:

PEOPLE, PLANET, AND PROFITS IN A NEW GREEN ECONOMY

Jeana Wirtenberg, Ph.D. President, Transitioning to Green and

Co-Founder/Senior Advisor, Institute for Sustainable Enterprise, Fairleigh

Dickinson University

* Purpose of the book

– and at all stages…from those just starting their journey to sustainability to those who are seeking to accelerate and deepen their positive impacts on people, reduce their environmental footprint, and enhance their financial bottom line in the short, medium, and long-term.

*Megatrends 2013-2050

• Growth of the Middle Class • A Resource Crunch • Persistent inequality • Major demographic changes • Urbanization • Growing human health vulnerability • Growing connectivity

Source: Richard Wells, “To Build Long Term Sustainability, Envision the Future First,” GreenBiz, 2013.

* Building a Culture for Sustainability: Nine In-depth Company Case Studies tell the story…

*How do we get there?

• The good news is that culture is fungible. It can change, and business leaders and managers can help shift the balance to sustainable mindsets and behaviors by influencing their own and others belief systems and behaviors.

*How do we get there?

• Companies don’t need to resort to top-down command and control, coercion, or even peer pressure because…

• People already care about these issues. • Companies need to offer the enabling

environment, encouragement and reinforcement for people to contribute what already resides within them!

WHAT DOES A CULTURE FOR SUSTAINABILITY LOOK LIKE?

Essential Elements of a Culture for Sustainability

• Sustainable Values

• Sustainable Mind-Set

• Leadership for sustainability

• Visionary

• Employee engagement

• Multi-disciplinary

• Diversity, inclusion, social justice

• Wisdom

Essential Elements of a Culture for Sustainability

• Sustainable Values; sees organization in context of community, society, and earth

• Sustainable Mind-Set; systems thinking

• Leadership for sustainability; leads with purpose and authenticity

• Visionary: Envisions the future we want to create

• Employee engagement; builds agility and resiliency; engages imagination; fun

• Multi-disciplinary; Embeds sustainability throughout learning and development

• Diversity, inclusion, social justice; deep caring for all people

• Wisdom: emotional, social, and ecological intelligence

Essential Elements of a Culture for Sustainability Exercise

• Sustainable Values

• Sustainable Mind-Set

• Leadership for sustainability

• Visionary

• Employee engagement

• Multi-disciplinary

• Diversity, inclusion, social justice

• Wisdom

COMPANY EXAMPLES AND BEST PRACTICES

A NOBLE VISION THAT EXCITES PEOPLE:

“We’re going to connect the unconnected world. We’re going to make sure the 2 billion people with no access to communication services for health care, for life, for education, for learning have all that in the next 20 years.”

Employees find meaning, passion, and inspiration in the company’s vision—“to realize the potential

of a connected world.”

They incorporate sustainability thinking into every job function they perform, whether in procurement, facilities, product development, network design, marketing, finance, or Human Resources.

• “Engage”: Maximizing Communication through Social Media

• Collaborating across Stakeholders and Industries

Systems approach is the “Verbund” concept, which permeates every function, facet, and operation of the organization.

Verbund is an interconnected system of relationships generating greater value than the sum of its parts

BASF’s global people strategy is a comprehensive approach to creating and maintaining a culture of

sustainability

• The global people strategy was developed through future forecasting and mapping the gap

• The strategy is organized around 3 categories:

1. Excellent people

2. Excellent place to work

3. Excellent leaders

Corporate Communications Programs for Engaging People

• “We Create Chemistry World Tour”

• Simply Dare!

Case Example: BASF Market Customer Focus Teams

• Action learning mode: “Anchor in the work that people do and give them space to practice new behaviors.”

• Seattle Mariners, member of Green Sports Alliance, pledged to divert 85% of waste from landfills.

• BASF team leveraged its material technology to create 100% compostable snack bags, made from BASF’s Ecoflex.

• Created successful new product line using biopolymer technology, now marketed to Universities and sports teams worldwide.

• It’s all about Mind-set

• Respecting and Learning from Failure

• Reporting the Bad with the Good

• Integrating sustainability into the way it does business

• Manifesting it in how everyone approaches the work they do every day

• Instilling a sustainability mind-set internally

• Helping customers become more sustainable

• Capturing Employees’ Hearts and Minds Through Employee-Centered Initiatives – Green Teams and Certification – Sustainability Champions Drive

Change – One STEP Forward – Personalizing

Sustainability – Values: From Home to Workplace – Life-Cycle Thinking

• Creating and Sustaining Customer Value

– Segmenting the Marketplace

– Creating a Green Portfolio through Open Innovation

– Outcome-Driven Innovation

– Applying ODI to Sustainability Challenges at Ingersoll Rand

– Ingersoll Rand’s Green Portfolio

Sanofi’s 4 CSR Pillars “The key to a culture for sustainability is full participation, to make everyone feel they are part of something greater and bigger.” ‒John Spinnato, VP of CSR, N. America

“Because of Wyndham’s massive reach and ability to influence change, we know it's important to inform and educate our guests, investors, employees and business partners about being green.”

-- Wyndham’s website

HOW TO GET THERE

• Creating a grand vision

• Making the business case: Sustainability is a business imperative

• Starting at the top

• Embedding sustainability in the organization’s DNA

• Setting priorities and making commitments

• Communicating with authenticity and transparency

• Recognizing accomplishments and disclosing areas for improvement

BASF’s culture for sustainability is relationship and people-driven

• Take the passion for problem solving, bring it to

sustainability and make that the focus of the

business.

8 ELEMENTS:

• Changing Mind-Sets

• Getting Close to Customers

• Finding solutions to Intractable Problems

• Letting Science Decide

• Making the Shift from Functional to Solutions-Driven Strategy

• Integrating Sustainability into Everyone’s Goals

• Creating Sustainability Champions

• Igniting Contagious Passion

• Take a Strengths-Based Approach

• Build Partnerships

• Recognize the link between Sustainability and Premier Performance

• Tie Sustainability to the Company’s Brand, Promise, Vision, and Purpose

• Create a Rallying Point and a Focus area for Alignment

• Translate Sustainability into Customer Value

• Set a Small Number of Strategic Priorities

Evolving CSR/Sustainability

• Passion to help people

• Environmentalism

social consciousness

innovation

• Fostering a culture of

innovation

• Connect with

employees in every

function

• Tie Sustainability to Innovation

• Integrate Sustainability Fully into Company Strategy

Employee Giving Fund and Volunteerism

• Volunteer opportunities

• Partnerships with NGOs

KEY TAKEAWAYS

Integrated Thinking Core Capacities

1. Systems Thinking

2. Strategy Development

3. Collaboration and Teamwork

4. Integrating the Bottom Line

Do it yourself Can’t do it alone

You

Kindred

Spirits

Their

Networks

Whole

Company

Whole

Industry

All

Industries

The

World

“Never doubt that a small group of

thoughtful, committed citizens can

change the world; indeed, it's the only

thing that ever has.”

― Margaret Mead ―

“Give me a lever long enough and a

fulcrum on which to place it, and

I shall move the world.”

― Archimedes ―

Common Attributes of Collaborative Cultures

Promote frequent, cross-functional interaction

Leadership and power are spread through organization

People are accessible regardless of their level

Mitigate fear of failure; failures are turned into opportunities

Encourage broad input into decisions

Common Attributes of Collaborative Cultures (continued)

Provide opportunities for cross-pollination of people

Support spontaneous or unscheduled interaction

Structured and unstructured interaction, as appropriate

Formal and informal mentoring

Available tools fit work objectives

3 Challenges to Collaboration

1. People hold back from contributing their best work

2. Inadequate conflict-handling skills

3. Poor communication skills abound

Appreciation not blame…

Encourage the expression of diverse viewpoints and opinions

Discuss and assess their relevance, fit, and overall importance

Judge well and often – in regard to input, actions and outcomes

Go with the best overall decision, given the information at hand – including the assessment of risk and consequences

Recognize the value of the work different people contributed

Cultivating Collective Intelligence

“A life-affirming leader is one who knows how to rely on and use the intelligence that exists everywhere in the community, the company, the school, or the organization. A leader these days needs to be a host—one who convenes people, who convenes diversity, who convenes all viewpoints in creative processes where our intelligence can come forth.”

--Margaret Wheatley

Collaboration is holistic and personal

www.collaborateup.com

About Collaboration

It is not unlike dancing. In collaboration, one must pay attention to the whole of the project and the whole of the team…Anything less is mechanical, a going through of the motions of a process someone else set up, check-listing a set of activities asynchronously, rather than creating cohesively something of value.

David Coleman and Stewart Levine Collaboration 2.0. Technology and best practices for collaboration

Self-Interest Mutuality

The Team Dynamic of Self-Interest and Mutuality

Attributes of High-Performance Teams

(especially for sustainability)

Participative leadership

Shared responsibility

Aligned on purpose

High communication

Future focused

Focused on task

Creative talents

Rapid response

Source: Robert Kreitner & Angelo Kinicki, Organizational Behavior, Tenth edition, 2013

Five Dysfunctions of a Team

Inattention to

RESULTS

Avoidance of ACCOUNTABILITY

Lack of COMMITMENT

Fear of CONFLICT

Absence of TRUST

Based on the work of Patrick Lencioni

Example: A threat to Group Effectiveness

• Groupthink

– “a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when members’ strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action.”

Source: Robert Kreitner & Angelo Kinicki, Organizational Behavior, Tenth edition, 2013

Symptoms of Groupthink

Invulnerability Inherent morality

Rationalization

Stereotyped views of

opposition Self-censorship

Illusion of unanimity

Peer pressure Mindguards

Source: Robert Kreitner & Angelo Kinicki, Organizational Behavior, Tenth edition, 2013

Groupthink Research and Prevention

• Groups with a moderate amount of

cohesiveness produce better decisions

than low- or high-cohesive groups.

• Highly cohesive groups victimized by

groupthink make the poorest decisions,

despite high confidence in those decisions

Source: Robert Kreitner & Angelo Kinicki, Organizational Behavior, Tenth edition, 2013

Three Big Tipping Points

1. Co-Creation

2. Bottom-Up

3. Long View

Lessons Learned

• Create a shared focus on solving a global problem—such as the dilemma of the digital divide.

• Make use of frameworks and tools that have already been proven and that work

Lessons Learned

• Culture change is a team sport

• Linking sustainability to business success brings along even the hard core skeptics.

• Systems approach (e.g., Verbund) supports embedded sustainability

Conclusion: People, Planet, and Profits in a New Green Economy

Critical Issues and Challenges that Must be Addressed

Company Conundrums in Addressing Sustainability-Related Challenges

• People-Related Challenges – Changing Mind-Sets and Behavior – Filling the Pipeline from STEM Disciplines – Overwhelming Workloads and Competing Priorities – HR Needs to Step Up to the Plate

Company Conundrums in Addressing Sustainability-Related Challenges

• Planet – Consumer Perceptions that Green Costs More, and

Finding a Workable Trade-Off – Being Sustainable versus Touting It – Tree Hugging, Cutting Edge, or Bleeding Edge?

Company Conundrums in Addressing Sustainability-Related Challenges

• Profits – Measuring ROI of Sustainability Initiatives – Dealing with Short-Termism – Working with Different Measurement Systems and

Methods around the Globe

Promote Well-Being by Cultivating Sustainability-Inspired Habits and Practices

• Silent Reflection

• Mindfulness

• Listening generously

• Both-And

• Being, Satisfaction

• Caring, Compassion, and Service

• Gratitude

• Collaboration

• Balance

Thank You!

Jeana Wirtenberg Ph.D. jwirtenberg@transitioningtogreen.com

Phone: 973-335-6299

@Trans2Green @jeanawirtenberg

Transitioning to Green

www.transitioningtogreen.com

Transitioning to Green Foundation www.TTGFoundation.org

Institute for Sustainable Enterprise

FDU www.fdu.edu/ise