Employee demand driving sustainability forward
Over the past few months, Zumer has attended several conferences. A common trend we have noticed is that companies are writing their CSR reports to communicate to an often overlooked stakeholder – their current and prospective employees.
I’ll admit that we too at Zumer have overlooked the importance of employees or prospective employees as an audience for CSR initiatives. While we are focused primarily on providing CSR data to consumers, we have also identified investors, students, researchers, NGO’s and community groups as some of the other segments that would be interested in the Zumer Database Project.
In November we attended the Global Reporting Initiative Briefing in Calgary, Alberta. At the briefing I asked Sue Lowell (Director of Sustainability Strategy, for oil sands giant Suncor) what audience was driving their sustainability reporting. While she named a long list of stakeholders, she emphasized how critically important it was to communicate this information to Suncor employees. A copy of the CSR Report goes out with job offers, it is given to current employees, provided in orientation, and is a key component of their recruitment and retaining practices.
Mark Brownlie, of Responsibility Matters, further articulated that while CSR information is important to investors and members of affected community, the people who “rally around the report are the employees.” In a tight job market, it plays a big part in retaining and motivating a workforce, and building a strong corporate culture.
These sentiments echoed the atmosphere of the Net Impact conference the week before in Nashville, Tennessee where MBA students from the top Business Schools across North America were on their game quizzing companies on their environmental and social policies. True, career searching has a large component to play in any Net Impact Conference, but time and time again students were making the connection between Zumer and power to be used as a research tool consulted when deciding what company to build a career with. It is quite evident that this generation of talent has several options and there are several factors that come into play into their career decisions – these are aspects that go beyond a dollar sign, and extended benefits.
Scott Noesen of The Dow Chemical Company probably said it best when he mentioned that within the next ten years, 50% of their employees will be eligible for retirement. This is a major demographic change and Dow Chemicals in not alone in this crisis. In such a situation, it will be the top performing companies both financially and socially that are able to attract the top talent in such a competitive job market. Dow Chemicals has the added difficulty in living down a past legacy, which has been a major driver in changing both their image and their policies as people no longer want to work for a “big bad chemical company.”
After all, who would you like to work for?
