#ReportingMania and Girl Power

In his introductory comments, Rajesh Chhabara pointed out that 50% of the speakers at the 2017 Asia Sustainability Reporting Summit were women. Which OF COURSE explains why the summit was such a resounding success. Not counting myself as Chair of the Summit, and the formidable women whom I have referred to in prior posts

• Kesara Manushree, President of the Stock Exchange of Thailand
• Jeannie Ong, StarHub Chief Strategic Partnership Officer
• Christy Wood, Chair of GRI
• Aditi Haldar, GRI South Asia Director

there were many other fabulous women who played an important role as speakers and delegates at this very special Summit. Here are just a few more, as we celebrate Girl Power and women's influence in sustainable development. 

Nguyen Thanh Hoa, Group Head of Sustainable Development, Baoviet Holdings

"We have a century working in Vietnam so we need to continue to think of the long term and how to move forward. Integrated reporting needs integrated thinking - we wanted to give a panoramic picture of our company from the past, the present and the future. We also have a standalone sustainability report . In 2016, we were honored with Best Report in the 2016 Asia Sustainability Reporting Awards and just last month we were ranked 18 in the world for our sustainability report by the League of American Communications Professionals (LACP). We encourage other companies to have a standalone report. We use GRI standards which is wonderful because it is easy and the structure is very clear. All the images in the report are made by the children of the employees  - we had a painting competition among the children of employees and these are pictures of sustainability in our report. We don't want to go our sustainability journey alone so we integrate more and more people along the way - this time it is the young generation."

Jeanne Ng, Director of Group Sustainability, CLP Power Hong Kong Ltd

CLP is no stranger to reporting and their 2016 Sustainability Report is the Group's 15th and the Group has consistently received awards for its high quality reports. In 2016, the Sustainability Report is framed around the six capitals that is used by the integrated reporting model. It includes a materiality assessment, developed using a proprietary Boundary Scoping and Materiality Identification (BSMI) methodology. In fact, this is one of the few companies that discloses a structured and credible methodology for defining materiality. Jeanne moderated a fascinating session on the role of sustainability ratings, rankings and indices on Day One of the Summit.

Ester An, Chief Sustainability Officer, City Developments Limited  

"In the building sector, we all know that we have a very high environmental impact - 30% of GHG emissions - and we started the green building journey very early in Singapore. We have been reporting on sustainability since 2004 and I think we are at the forefront of other sectors in the area of reporting. You have to integrate the frameworks - the Paris Agreement, SDGs and others into your business strategy and operations. Reporting is more about articulating the deliverables, the performance, but the most important thing is truly integrating this into your business and adding value to your business and to the community and the environment. You must truly believe in it."  

CDL's latest report is an integrated report and includes targets to 2030 supporting nine SDGs.

"Investors are more interested in current and future performance and not the past. They want to know how you are going to achieve sustained growth. You have to stay focused in the areas that are relevant to your business. We use our dedicated website with an update every quarter on our strategic goals aligned with SDGs. Investors are increasingly looking at SDGs. Ten years ago, my CFO returned the sustainability report back to me, no-one wanted to look at it. Today, there is more interest. In fact, they don't even need to ask questions, investors look at your listing on DJSI or FTSE4Good and they can assess your company without even telling you. Therefore, we might as well proactively communicate how we future-proof our business .. with data to support our claims." 

Jeanne Stampe, Head, Asia Finance and Commodities, WWF Singapore

"As an NGO we provide deep insight into sustainability issues. Sustainability reporting is not just for investors, it's for all your stakeholders including civil society. Assessing materiality without the right input can mean companies overlook possible risks. NGOs can help guide a company in defining what roadblocks are ahead. Investors are also becoming the target of civil society regarding whether they are aligning their portfolio with sustainable objectives. They are also under scrutiny. Your sustainability report becomes meaningful to show how you are staying on top of these issues and the resilience you display in a resource-constrained world. Good reporting requires good data and targets based on science. For example, we look at different sectors and ask how we can decarbonize the sector. This requires a scientific approach. Companies see that targets verified through scientific methodologies can make a difference to the way they understand their business and the way stakeholders assess them."  

Elaine Ng, Executive Director, MSCI

"I think if we want to talk about what data investors are really looking for we have to look at how investors have evolved across Asia. When I started talking about sustainability about two years ago, it was very much about educating investor groups. The concept of ESG was mainly about screening and limiting the investment universe to make it a little bit more ethical, focusing on certain investments and excluding those that don't align with your values. This is still a large part of how investment is done here - especially with religious investors. But what we are also seeing is that, over time, investors are more aware about ESG issues facing companies, not because this is something they haven't paid attention to in the past but because there is more data available. More companies are transparent and this can be packaged into usable information for investors. Investors don't want to waste time thinking about issues that don't make a difference to their investor performance so reported information must be material and relevant to your investment sector."

Gwen Migita, VP Sustainability and Corporate Citizenship, Caesars Entertainment

Gwen introduced the new People Planet Play citizenship framework for Caesars Entertainment and described how the company has embedded this approach throughout the organization. The evolution of several programs over many years of activity necessitated a new way of pulling it all together to align the language, messages and culture internally for team members as well as externally for guests. And Caesars has many citizenship initiatives that are industry-leading and award-winning and leading sustainability practice - including science-based targets on emissions. You can read more in Caesars latest Citizenship Report here. (And also in a post I wrote about this report, which I worked on.)

"In our communities, being an operator of choice is literally a social license to operate so that partners, licensors and governments will choose to work with us if we are good corporate citizens and we meet or exceed the goals we committed to in terms of economic development which usually means education and other social services. Are we protecting vulnerable populations? Are we giving opportunities to local vendors? Are we, overall, contributing to the economy as we said we would? People Planet Play is the result of our simplifying and refreshing our strategy for the coming years."

And responding to my question: What's in a name? Why is People Planet Play important?

"If you talk about corporate social responsibility, people don't know what you mean.  If I can explain it to my kids and their classmates at school, I think it passes the test. People Planet Play enables this. It's about what we do for People, our employees and our communities. It is what we do for the Planet that we call home. And we want guests to have fun but be responsible as they do so. Simplifying the meaning in a non-industry language - how we speak to our friends and family - makes it easy to relate to so that everyone can understand."

Bella Chhoa, Leasing and Management, Hang Lung Properties

Hang Lung Properties has been a multi-award winner of the Asia Sustainability Reporting Awards for two years running in different categories. This is largely due to the vision and efforts of Bella Chhoa, who start leading the reporting journey in 2012. Hang Lung's most recent report for 2016 can be found here.

As a judge in the Asia Sustainability Reporting Awards, I loved Hang Lung Properties' superbly creative report for 2014. (Included it in my Top Ten Reports of 2015.) Making sustainability fun is, in my view, a compelling way to engage and inspire. A fun report for me is evidence of a confident company that knows the true value of sustainability and has the freedom to try innovative approaches. If a company can report creatively, it can probably run its business creatively too. Hang Lung's 2014 Report is fairly iconic and the following year was equally attractive. It was interesting to hear the rationale from Bella Chhoa regarding the 2014 report and the new 2016 report which is less colorful although no less professional.

"We are getting better and better. I knew nothing about sustainability five years back so I started from a blank sheet.  Because I needed to understand, the first thing I thought was to make a report that everybody can understand. I was quite lucky in that I was responsible for the Legal function and the Human Resources function so I was in a position to make improvements. I dove into materiality assessment and learned every element. I also needed the cooperation of my colleagues. A good report needs substance. We also wanted to make it more engaging so we tried to think outside the box and make a fun report with cartoon characters. It was a bold approach. The second year we created a character for the report - based on a front line staff character to raise the pride for our front line employees. We want them to be inspired to give a better service. Now, I think we will go from a most interesting report to a more "boring" one in order to engage our investors. We try to create a very comprehensive report. It's an online version for our investors, but we can never forget the contribution of our employees, so we will have a supplement which will include 10 case studies of highlights that focus on people. If you want to do sustainability in the best way possible to meet your business model, you have to bring on board partners who don't understand sustainability at all. This is very clear from our discussions on materiality. In this years' materiality assessment, integrity takes first place."

Fabulous insights and contributions from the gals in Singapore. There were many more formidable women speaking and attending the Summit and I am just not able to mention them all, but I truly enjoyed meeting every one of them and was inspired by each. Thank you to all the women who created Girl Power at the 2017 Asia Sustainability Reporting Summit.

This is the last in my short series of #ReportingMania posts from the Summit in Singapore. I hope it has given you a sense of the productive and engaging platform it was for interchange of ideas, practices and debate. It certainly was fun! And right now, I am assuming that you are already ready to register for next year's Summit. You can join me in doing so.

NB: All photos from the conference courtesy of CSRWorks

elaine cohen, CSR Consultant, Sustainability Reporter, former HR Professional, Trust Across America 2017 Lifetime Achievement Award honoree, Ice Cream Addict, Author of three totally groundbreaking books on sustainability (see About Me page). Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen) or via my business website www.b-yond.biz (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm). Need help writing your first / next Sustainability Report? Contact elaine: info@b-yond.biz 

Elaine will be chairing the edie Conference on Smarter Sustainability Reporting  in London on 27th February 2018 

Comrades. It's all about jobs.

One of the most memorable moments in the 5th Global GRI Conference last week was when the Minister of State for International Development (United Kingdom), The Rt Hon Desmond Swayne TD MP took to the stage and opened with the greeting: Comrades! It's all about jobs. 

That woke us all up. Minister Swain continued to elaborate, loudly, deliberately and perhaps even a little flamboyantly, in the following way, more or less. (Apologies, I may have missed a sentence or two in my transcript below)

"Let me give you my take on the Sustainable Development Goals.. or as we must now learn to call them, the Global Goals. Fundamentally these will, of course, deliver the disappearance of absolute poverty by 2030, and in doing so, will have created a more prosperous more stable and safer world. But ultimately, these goals come down to one thing: It's all about jobs. It's all about jobs in the end. A livelihood, a job - being able to put a roof over your head, putting food on the table, educating children, providing healthcare, generating the tax revenue which governments require to provide social services - it's all about jobs and if you look at the world, you will see that people are going to enormous lengths to secure a livelihood, a job or a better job. 40,000 people a day are going to the extraordinary lengths of leaving everything they are familiar with, everything they know, leaving their homes in pursuit of a job. Even if we take those who are being driven primarily by conflict, just look at that behaviour.

"Let's take Zaatari, on the verge of becoming the world's largest refugee camp, look at the conditions - they're much better than in many cities around the world with security, safety, reasonable accommodation, sanitation, clean water, food which the World Food Program provides, UNICEF will educate the children. But these people will nevertheless leave because the one thing that it cannot offer is a job opportunity. For a job, these people will risk absolutely every penny they have. It's all about jobs in the end. The world needs 600 million new jobs over the next decade if we are going to avoid a growing army of frustrated, despairing and angry young people who are unemployed or underemployed - exactly the sort of raw material, the circumstances, that generate conflict and instability which is the enemy of any kind of employment. So it's all about jobs.

"Now, I confess as a young economic student to having been enthralled with a right-wing economics professor in my University and his catchphrase was: Well, after all, there's only one thing worse than being exploited by capitalists and that's not being exploited by capitalists. HaHa. He reinforced his ignorance with another of his catchphrases: After all, surely any job has to be better than the alternative, which is daytime television! showing his clear ignorance of circumstances in the real world. If only it were so. So it is not any job, comrades. What if your job literally enslaves as many jobs do in all sorts of different forms? What if your job is breaking your health, poisoning the air or water or the land in which your community lives? What if your job literally costs you your life?It's not any job. We require inclusive growth - those kinds of jobs are actually job destroyers because what they do is generate the very sense of grievance or injustice which is the raw material for conflict which is utterly destructive of any prospect of employment.

"So we need inclusive growth. From where is it going to come? Well, my ideological prejudice will tell you that it certainly won't come from governments. Governments create the circumstances in which there can be inclusive economic growth - by providing a relatively benign investment environment, the rule of law, contract law, light-touch regulation - all those things that are essential to Global Goal number 16 and the targets that underpin it. Equally, the greatest enemy of employment can be a government where there is no rule of law, where there is arbitrary and unpredictable taxation, where there is no creation of successful enterprise, where people get jobs because they are somebody's cousin rather than because they are efficient. Any number of things, I assure you, governments can screw up and drive jobs away.

"I only know of one engine that can release initiative, enterprise and hard work of ordinary people to generate jobs and that is private-sector-led investment - the only sustainable engine of inclusive economic growth. But how do we ensure that those enterprises spend as much time addressing the impact of their enterprise as they do maximizing profit? That is where organizations such as GRI come into being. I think it's a huge compliment, a huge achievement, that just recently the Japanese Stock Exchange has made the GRI standard a mandatory requirement of membership. A huge leap forward in this vitally important set of guidelines for promoting transparency and collaboration. That's why the Department of International Development is so passionate in our support for this kind of initiative.

"May I make three suggestions for ways that we can drive this agenda forward. Firstly, with respect to new technology - let us harness new technology to make those reporting standards ever more up-to-date, ever more relevant and drive that agenda forward. Secondly, let's find ways of ensuring that this agenda - the environment, human rights and these proper concerns of enterprise are brought into the main effort, the mainstream, the core of the enterprise and not tucked away in a compliance department or in a department that ticks the boxes to show that the enterprise is meeting all its requirements. Finally, and most importantly, how do we address and engage those who are not already in this room? The reality is I'm preaching to the converted, otherwise you wouldn't have come to this conference in the first place. How do we engage those enterprises and draw them into this initiative so they too can be transparent and accountable? I know our best brains are working on it."

The message is clear. It's all about jobs. Creating and maintaining jobs, I believe Minister Swain was saying, is the core of a corporation's social impact and therefore accountability. In G4, soon to be reborn as a standard, job creation is not identified as a core material Aspect. There are references to inclusive hiring - but that's about diversity (G4-LA1). There is a reference to jobs supported in the supply chain as part of an organization's indirect economic impacts (G4-EC8). But there is nothing about creating jobs, sustainable jobs, as a core objective for corporations. Should there be? Job creation is often the outcome of successful business, rather than the driver. Companies will tell you they do not do business to employ people but that they employ people to do business. There is nothing about layoffs in the GRI framework and most companies do not tend to report layoffs. Should this be a new performance indicator? In the U.S. in 2015, Forbes reports almost half a million job cuts. I recently heard a talk on a webinar by a Manager at social enterprise Greyston Bakery, whose mission is: "Greyston is a force for personal transformation and community economic renewal. We operate a profitable business, baking high quality products with a commitment to customer satisfaction. Grounded in a philosophy that we call PathMaking, we create jobs and provide integrated programs for individuals and their families to move forward on their path to self-sufficiency." Job creation is as central to Greyston's mission as baking cookies is central to their operation. 

In any event, I thought Minister Swain got his point across very effectively, while demonstrating a sound knowledge of the issues at stake and the global environment in which we live and work. Is it all about jobs? Maybe it is, and maybe it isn't. But I could add that it's not only all about jobs. It's also about an ecosystem that enables people to get to the jobs, develop and thrive, and, ultimately, enjoy an ice cream here and there. I'd like to thank Minister Swain for one of the most powerful speeches at the GRI Conference. IMHO.

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of Understanding G4: the Concise Guide to Next Generation Sustainability Reporting  AND  Sustainability Reporting for SMEs: Competitive Advantage Through Transparency AND CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices . Contact me via Twitter (@elainecohen)  or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm).  Need help writing your first / next Sustainability Report? Contact elaine: info@b-yond.biz