Engaging trends along the TBL…

... the Triple Bottom Line is a phrase that writer John Elkington dreamed up to describe corporate sustainability  - that’s the point where financial interests dovetail with social and environmental interests. Organisations have recognised that doing good, is good for business. It’s all about CSR and the three P’s - People, Planet, Profit.  It’s about green business trends - and not just going green, but being transparent in reporting what,  and how much, you’ve been doing. In fact, disclosure of  corporations’ and  companies’ CSR activities and behaviour has been steadily increasing over the years.  

In 2011, in statistics from CorporateRegister.com, the figures showed that over 5,500 companies worldwide issued sustainability reports: a remarkable advancement on the figures 10 years ago, when they were around 800. And a recent KPMG study found that 95% of the 250 largest companies in the world now report on their corporate responsibility. What’s more, according to Forbes’s Top 10 Ten Trends in CSR for 2012, the pressure for ever-increasing levels of transparency and disclosure will intensify this year.

Cynthia Figge is co-founder and COO of CSRHub, and a pioneer and advocate of the corporate sustainability initiative.  She believes that a number of  trends are driving corporate transparency and disclosure towards a point where disclosure will be the norm and opaque behaviour will be anomalous.

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HR doesn’t only need to gain a seat at the table - it needs to pound it!

Gary Lear, CEO & President of Resource Development Systems LLC, maintains if HR is to gain a seat at the table among the decision-makers, then many HR practitioners had better change their perspective about their profession. Jack Welch, chemical engineer, business exec. and author, and Chairman and CEO of General Electric between 1981 and 2001, obviously agrees about the seat at the table, but takes it further, stating that “HR executives need to pound the table to get a voice in their organisations. Riding along, being a bureaucrat, or playing less than a critical role in the organisation should be unacceptable to anyone worth their salt.” Those are harsh words - but then, Welch should know a thing or two: when he was in the hot seat at General Electric, the company’s value rose 4000% and for a while was the most valuable company in the world.

Lear draws attention to the fact that there are many HR practitioners who are perfectly content to stick with handling the paperwork and the admin tasks allotted to them and aren’t interested in taking a major role in organisational strategies and decision-making. Almost inevitably, these are the ones who cry “Unfair!”  when budgets are cut or the issues of outsourcing or down-sizing are proposed. On the other hand, there are those who strongly believe HR’s involvement is pivotal to  the organisation’s success, and have assumed a more prominent role. The improvement of HR management practices provides value as a result, and that value is proved by the increased tangible success. The problem is that there are numerous HR practitioners who have no doubt that HR is valuable to the organisation, but don’t know how to convince other executives in the organisation who hold a different opinion.

Employee engagement is achieved through intensive, consistent internal communication: it is internal communication that integrates strategy with performance, makes authentic impact and ultimately delivers the sought-after objectives. By acquiring the skills of internal communication and clearly understanding its importance, HR practitioners would be in a position to have their say , get the attention of  the executives, and convince them.

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Q: When is corporate communication redundant? A: When it means plain-old nagging.

According to a new study (published online this month by Organization Science) by Professor Tsedal B. Neeley of Harvard Business School and Northwestern University's Paul M. Leonardi and Elizabeth M. Gerber, ‘redundant communication’ (i.e. nagging) actually works. It’s all about frequently excessive messaging. The authors were interested to know why managers swamped their teams with the same irritating messages (a deliberate strategy of nagging) which, at first glance,  were bound to be a waste of time. However, they discovered that the strategy of repetition delivered results.

But wasn’t it Albert Einstein who maintained that doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, was crazy? (He probably meant it in the context of his theory of relativity or his discovery of quantum - not nagging.)

The title of the study, “How Managers Use Multiple Media: Discrepant Events, Power, and Timing in Redundant Communication” gives gravitas to, let’s face it, the technique of badgering people under the ambiguous pseudonym ‘redundant’, which is guaranteed to confuse at least one person I know. The research team conducted an ethnographic investigation to find out what compelled managers to deploy this kind of repetitive communication. The result showed that messaging the same important request many times, through technology or face-to-face, was common practice by managers who were under pressure to complete projects or meet certain goals.

The team observed 13 project managers in 6 companies in the computing, telecommunications, and health care industries, recording 256 hours of their daily activities.

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How much is your company’s reputation worth to you?

…or to put it another way, how much do you value your values?   For that matter - how valid are your values? In a study by Edwin Giblin and Linda E. Amuso of California State University, published widely a few years ago, the authors stated that corporate values were often used interchangeably with the concept of corporate culture. “The usual paradigm is that corporations with strong positive cultures have institutionalized a set of corporate values,” they wrote. “These beliefs help employees identify with the organisation and develop a commitment to its goals. The problem, however, is that the corporate goals (financially stated) bear no resemblance to the firm's articulated culture and values. In fact, more often than not, there are obvious conflicts between these traditional business goals and the corporation's espoused values. And, when push comes to shove, the former always prevails.”

However, they conceded that the interest in corporate culture and values reflected  “a yearning for a different view of the corporation… driven by the cold reality that the old paradigm does not work.” Giblin and Amuso maintained that the crux of the dilemma was that most of those so-called corporate values were “not values at all” but little more than a “compilation of platitudes or slogans.”

“Values are just good intentions
until behaviours make them reality”

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Teleworking is about people, flexibility and developing the virtual workplace

In the USA and Canada they call it telecommuting, but all the rest of us prefer ‘teleworking’. What is teleworking, anyway?   Basically, it simply means working in a distance from the workplace - but it’s a good deal more complex than that: it includes a variety of work activities.  It is about people and how they work, interact and manage a rapidly changing world.    It’s about flexible locations, work times, management structures and flexible responses to change - and getting the most out of available resources. Teleworking reduces costly office workspace and avoids office distractions, for example.      However, this form of work needs sensitive implementation and it should be integrated with the workplace and be an initiative that suits the organisation’s culture and ethos.

Telework does, of course, have impacts on the business operation: positive, neutral or negative:

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Do organisations put enough emphasis on developing leadership talent?

Some people may be born leaders - but to develop into a good, effective one takes work, and you need will-power and determination. It doesn’t just happen: it’s an ongoing process of self-analysis, education, training and experience. Effective leaders have a genuine care for people, a genuine care for the job, and a genuine care for the organisation. The leadership role is a tough one - and it’s based on character. Those with leadership character are the ones who will influence others in powerful ways and help their organisations to achieve sustainability and long-term success.

Harvard Professor Ron Heifetz, the founding director of the Centre for Public Leadership at the Harvard J. F. Kennedy School of Government, is well-known worldwide for his pivotal work on the practice and teaching of leadership.

He has devised five strategic principles of leadership:

•  Diagnose the situation in light of the values at stake, and unbundle the issues involved;
•  Keep the level of distress within tolerable limits for doing adaptive work ("keep the heat up without blowing up the vessel");
•   Identify the issues that engage the most attention and counteract avoidance mechanisms such as denial, scapegoating, pretending the problem is technical, or attacking individuals rather than issues;
•   Allow people to take responsibility for the problem, but at a rate they can handle; and
•   Protect those who raise hard questions, generate distress, and challenge people to rethink the issues at stake.

“It is not the facts and events that upset man but the view he takes of them.” [Epictectus]

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