If sustainability is about benefitting people in the long-term, community engagement must play a central role.
Sustainability, CSR, or whatever you wish to call it is made up of a range of critical business considerations. The traditional model includes the broad pillars of workplace, marketplace and environment. Workplace speaks of topics such as equality, diversity, skills and employee engagement. Marketplace includes – but is not limited to – supply chain issues and the impact in society (positive and negative) of products and services. Environment refers to global concerns around natural assets such as carbon and water.
All of these issues are to be taken seriously by business. But there’s something else. Community engagement is the fourth pillar of CSR, the poor cousin, a nice to do alongside those critical business issues that make up the first three pillars. After all, volunteering (cue clichéd images of teams with spades), charity fundraising and working in schools are “nice” things to do. But it’s time to challenge this model in which the first three pillars are critical and the fourth is discretionary. Despite the fact that many companies have poured more resource into volunteering – often for employee engagement and reputational purposes – community engagement is still not associated enough with core business concerns. But to view it as the additional bit is wrong, and here is why. In order to do well in the “core” sustainability areas of workplace, marketplace and environment, companies must adopt an external outlook and understand the social and environmental issues of most relevance to their business. For example, a push to create a more diverse workplace surely involves engaging with sections of society which are under-represented in the employee base. Doing a better job for vulnerable customers, such as the elderly, is difficult to do if you don’t have an understanding of that particular marketplace.
Addressing supply chain concerns around labour and human rights involves developing relationships with key stakeholders on the ground. If it is vital that companies engage in and understand critical external (or material) issues, how best can they go about it? Carry out market research? Engage an academic? Bring in expert consultants? Put these traditional approaches aside and consider this: community engagement is a way to understand, engage in and act upon critical workplace, marketplace and environmental issues. It is not additional; it is central. It is not about being nice; it is about addressing business objectives. And it is definitely not about ‘giving back’; it is about companies being part of, not apart from, society. Three brief examples illustrate the point. When Legal & General recently wanted to learn more about the ins and outs of employing visually impaired people (a workplace issue), they carried out a major volunteering project that involved HR professionals running employability workshops for blind and partially sighted people, in the process learning a great deal that will inform their approach and policies to employing people with disabilities.
Sky engaged a group of future leaders on a two-day leadership development project with internet child safety charity Childnet International, not just to share business skills. The idea was to engage a group of influential employees in the topic of internet safety, which is a material issue for any internet service provider. GSK’s PULSE initiative is ostensibly a volunteering programme that matches skilled employees with six-month volunteer positions “in the field”. Yes, it is about supporting NGOs and communities, but it is also about gaining critical market insight by, in GSK’s own words, “bringing the ‘outside in’ and enabling us to stay in step with society”.
The result is a series of innovations that any R&D function would be proud of. If sustainability is about benefiting all stakeholders in the long-term, then community engagement can play a central role, helping companies and their people to understand and embrace issues, ensuring a positive impact on all stakeholders. Community engagement is not so much the poor cousin of CSR, but the esteemed grandfather. Treat it like this, and nobody will ever be accused of doing ‘nice things’.
Jan Levy is managing director of Three Hands
This article has been taken from here.