4.30.2010

Building the Sustainability/CSR Department and Personnel Competencies

With the increasing need to address Sustainability and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) issues, organizations are faced with several options on how to proceed in developing their internal capabilities.  Beyond their sustainability and CSR strategy, there are nuts-and-bolts issues to consider, such as who will lead the effort and how to build the team or department.

A common starting place is to tap the EHS department and their personnel.  The logic for this is strong given how central EHS is to sustainability and CSR.  While the EHS function and its personnel are a good starting point, sustainability/CSR quickly encompasses areas in the organization well beyond EHS.

The C-suite needs to consider how it is going to identify and develop its people who lead and manage sustainability/CSR.  In the case of EHS professionals, those competencies and skills go beyond their solid technical foundation. Read More

Posted By Charles Redinger | in Corporate Social Responsibility, Emerging Issues, High Performance Teams, Strategic Thinking & Planning, Sustainability | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

4.28.2010

The Sustainability “Megatrend”

It is common knowledge that sustainability is a big deal.  It is a multidimensional issue that impacts all sectors of society.  Companies wrestle with how they are going to respond beyond the obvious of energy conservation and waste reduction, when sustainability begins to blur with corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Some direction and insights are provided in an excellent article, “the Sustainability Imperative: Lessons for Leaders from Previous Game-Changing Megatrends,” by David Lubin and Daniel Esty.  This article frames sustainability in ways that organizations can take actionable steps to impact their sustainability efforts (Harvard Business Review, May 2010).

Many readers are familiar with Esty’s landmark book, Green to Gold and his work in the environmental policy arena.  Ideas presented in Green to Gold evolve in the Sustainability Megatrends article.  Lubin and Esty assert that the current sustainability movement can be viewed as a megatrend as popularized by John Naisbitt in 1982.  As such, there are lessons that companies can learn by examining other megatrends such as IT and quality. Read More

Posted By Charles Redinger | in Corporate Social Responsibility, Emerging Issues, Innovation, Risk Management, Strategic Thinking & Planning, Sustainability | Tags: , , , , , | No Comments »

3.26.2010

An Externalities Framework to Develop Sustainability and CSR Strategies

Since the 1987 Brundtland Report that put sustainability on the business map, the Rio Conference in 1992 and its famous declaration, and the concept of a “triple bottom line” put forth by John Elkington in 1994, issues related to sustainability have expanded as a central topic in corporate boardrooms and business strategy.  Along the way in the evolution of sustainability ideas and concepts, they have morphed into the broader area of corporate responsibility (numerous terms are used to describe this, such as corporate citizenship, corporate social responsibility, and simply social responsibility).

As an important and rapidly evolving area, there is a wild-west quality to defining, executing, and measuring sustainability and CSR initiatives.  With sustainability, concrete issues commonly identified are reduction of energy use, carbon-generation, waste, etc.  With CSR some norms have gained general acceptance, sustainability issues for sure have, as well as child-labor issues and good EHS practices.  But with CSR especially, this is still a very fluid area.  The CSR (or SR) ISO activities (ISO 26000) might help, but it will be many years for this to flesh out. Read More

Posted By Charles Redinger | in Corporate Social Responsibility, Emerging Issues, Innovation, Risk Management, Sustainability | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

3.26.2010

Is Your EHS Audit Program Hitting The Mark?

Auditing is a tough subject.  The term rarely conjures pleasant thoughts.  It’s often a dreaded event for the auditee.  For the EHS department, it is a complex endeavor that the EHS professionals often don’t feel they fully have a handle on, as issues of program validity and reliability swirl around. With internal audit programs in large companies, scheduling can be a nightmare with auditors swamped by primary-non-audit duties.  While the audit job gets done and reports are generated for the C-Suite, Board of Directors and External Third Parties, the EHS audit programs I’ve observed often miss the mark that the EHS department want to hit.

Some of the recent EHS audit program challenges I’ve observed are 1) integrating EHS management system audits with existing compliance audits, 2) developing procedures to close the gap between EHS program/system upgrades and the audit tools measuring them;, 3) training auditors how to audit the EHS management system, and, 4) identifying leading indicators that can hopefully shorten the audit process or be used in site/plant self-assessment activities. Read More

Posted By Charles Redinger | in Auditing & Metrics, Corporate Social Responsibility, ISO News, Risk Management, Sustainability | Tags: , , , , , , , , | No Comments »

3.25.2010

Use of Causal Loop Diagrams in Building High Performance EHS Teams

I have worked with several EHS departments to increase their performance and cohesiveness.  In partnership, we’ve addressed performance beyond simply meeting regulatory compliance, rather looking at ways they could integrate EHS deeper into the organization and impact sustainability and CSR.  A starting place in all of these engagements has been to get the EHS management system up-to-snuff and firing on all cylinders.  Beyond the EHSMS, we then focused on:

  • Team vision.  Developing a strong vision based in the team’s collective wisdom.
  • Communication skills.  Strengthening internal and external communication and generating alignment.
  • Team learning.  Developing mechanisms for feedback, analysis and integration.
  • Systems thinking.  Strengthened skills in systems ID and mapping.

Read More

Posted By Charles Redinger | in Emerging Issues, High Performance Teams, Management Systems, Personal Mastery, Strategic Thinking & Planning | Tags: , , , , , , | No Comments »