A new CSR standard in Safeguarding

Using the Datamaran Research Tool, I looked for how many companies are talking about safeguarding in their sustainability reports. It seems, that safeguarding can be applied to just about everything.

• Export Development Canada's 2016 Sustainability Report talks about safeguarding people and the environment 
• Piraeus Bank talks about open communication with employees and safeguarding their ongoing development and elearning for safeguarding of Human Rights and Equal Opportunities in the workplace 
• Wilmar International's 2016 Sustainability Report talks about safeguarding water quality
• Statoil's 2016 Sustainability Report refers to safeguarding people, communities and assets
• Stericycle's 2016 Sustainability Report refers to safeguarding sensitive information and helping protect against identity theft
• Motorola Solutions 2016 Corporate Responsibility Report includes disclosures related to machine safeguarding
• RSA Insurance Group refers to safeguarding customers' data and assets
• American Water Works Co Inc. talks about safeguarding the nation’s long-term water supply as water demand grows
• TDC goes for safeguarding trust and safety
• Macquarie Infrastructure Corporation includes references to safeguarding of storm drains, overfill controls, and extensive use of LED lighting
• SunArt Retail Group Limited includes safeguarding biodiversity
• L'Occitane International SA goes for another type of safeguarding -safeguarding the future of bees while helping to build communities.

In fact, safeguarding has become so popular that I am thinking of safeguarding my personal ice cream supply for the next five years. As you can see, safeguarding can apply to just about anything and the use of the term safeguarding is bandied around quite freely in CSR and sustainability worlds with no real accountability for what safeguarding anything actually means and how to measure it. Maybe this is a shame, because there is one use of the term safeguarding that is arguably the most important use of all: safeguarding vulnerable children, youth and adults. I happen to know a bit about this, as my niece, Sarah Carlick, (Yay! Proud Auntie) is a leading expert on safeguarding in the UK, and runs The Athena Programme, one of the best known and most active consulting and training firms dedicated solely to safeguarding in the important sense of the word. Sarah has just completed her doctoral thesis on safeguarding, so we shall be calling her Dr. Sarah in the very near future! (Yay! Extremely Proud Auntie). Read Sarah's insights into safeguarding in a corporate context later in this post.  

Some companies stand out in their approach to safeguarding vulnerable children and adults. Pearson's Sustainability Report for 2016 includes a commitment to safeguarding adults and children. 

As a company engaged in education and supporting learners all over the world in schools, training and learning centers and other teaching facilities, and even virtual classrooms, human rights risks and challenges are very real for Pearson and it seems quite obvious that safeguarding would be directly relevant to this company's business.

Another company that has a safeguarding focus, and also rather obviously so, is LEGO. With a business designed to engage children, LEGO partners with UNICEF to implement and globally promote the Children’s Rights and Business Principles developed by UNICEF, the UN Global Compact and Save the Children, and to promote the importance of play for early childhood development. LEGO's 2016 Corporate Responsibility Report also discloses what LEGO is doing to safeguard children.

LEGO's Digital Child Safety Policy was developed as an industry leading practice to ensure the welfare of children interacting with digital channels. The policy is implemented through mandatory training for employees who work directly or indirectly with children online and also applies to partners who deliver LEGO® branded experiences.

Online safety is relevant not only for companies in the education and toy development sectors. It comes up regularly as a key material topic for companies that provide internet or media content. For example, Liberty Global (whose reporting I have supported for the past several years) has invested millions in protection of children while online and watching TV (one of the company's most material impacts) through collaboration on the development of an entire set of resources for children at different stages of development and exposure, parents, teachers and schools. In 2015, Liberty Global joined the ICT Coalition for Children Online, which aims to help young people in Europe make the most of their digital life and be better equipped to handle the challenges and risks it may bring. 

There are more positive examples of safeguarding out there, enough to convince you that safeguarding is an essential element of corporate responsibility. (For those who want a fascinating and sobering read on this subject, see also Joel Bakan's Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children). Many companies, especially food companies, have responsible marketing policies where the aim is not to market directly to children under age 12 - though in practice, exposure of children to marketing in all its forms today is impossible to monitor, I believe. Most companies today explicitly prohibit child labor in their supply chains. That's an obvious one in modern times, I guess, even though there is still much work to do to achieve safe supply chains. But there are endless, not so obvious other ways that children are exposed to and are potentially at risk from the practices of corporations. This may be unintentional but it should not be unknown. Corporations have a duty of care to understand the impacts of their activities on children. I believe, however, that this topic in the broader sense of safeguarding vulnerable children and adults has flown largely under the radar and is not explicitly included in sustainability frameworks and standards such as GRI or SASB, beyond responsible marketing and avoidance of child labor. I think this could be a new area for a potential performance and reporting standard.

I want you to hear from the expert herself, Sarah Carlick, Founder and Managing Director of The Athena Programme.

Why did you choose safeguarding as your area of specialist expertise?
"Safeguarding was my background as a social worker and probation officer which I was drawn to because of my passion for helping and protecting vulnerable people. Through my work and experience of safeguarding at both a national and international level, I am now able to incorporate all areas of this important and complex topic under one umbrella which I think is the most effective way of achieving results to benefit those that are vulnerable or at risk of harm."

In a business context, what are the connections to safeguarding? What are the key safeguarding risks for companies? 
"Governance, compliance, reputation, recruitment, social media communications, customer relations and interactions are all areas where safeguarding is a relevant potential risk that must be proactively managed. For companies or organizations that have services that are used or may be used by children, families or vulnerable adults, there may well be legal compliance issues (in different countries) as well a range of potential risk areas that are not currently legislated. While businesses often look outside for the impacts of safeguarding (for example, with services used by children), there is also an internal aspect. How do companies support their own employees who may be victims of domestic abuse, for example? I think there are many connections between the practices of business and corporate responsibility to protect vulnerable children and adults, and some may not be so obvious."

Does every company need a safeguarding policy? Can you give some examples of where such a policy might be needed?
"Not every company needs a policy, but some are required to have a policy and set of procedures, for example, those that are regulated or inspected, those that apply for external funding, or those that have residential services, schools, a charitable arm, or where they employ apprentices, teachers, mentors, nurses, dentists or manage learning environments, to mention just a few cases."

In what context is it important to train company employees in safeguarding?
"It is important as safeguarding is two-fold - both protecting and supporting your staff and as well as protecting and supporting those that use your services. There are many areas that come under safeguarding, for example, modern slavery, child sexual exploitation, on-line grooming and emerging risks such as prevention from radicalization."

What can you and The Athena Programme do to help companies practice effective safeguarding? 
"Whatever your needs, Athena can help any company with everything to do with safeguarding children and/or adults at risk. If it’s about safeguarding – we’re the experts. A first step we can help with for many companies will be to map the nature, scale and impact of their activities and identify the safeguarding hotspots - immediate and/or significant risks that need to be managed. From there, we can help companies develop tailored policies and procedures, formulate communications packages, deliver training for all staff and put in place monitoring and reporting tools. For companies who are not sure, we can or simply come and speak to your management, or deliver a lecture on what to watch for. We are always happy to listen to the challenges companies face, or help them decide what the challenges are and minimize potential risks. We have strong credentials from our work over the past 10 years, so we are confident that we can help companies do better in this area."

If you are interested in exploring more, contact Sarah here. Either way, I think we are going to hear a lot more about safeguarding, and not just safeguarding anything, but safeguarding those who matter most, our children and our youth and our friends and families and communities who may not be able to protect themselves. If that's not CSR, what is?




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

The Sustainability Crystal Ball

Don't you wish you could have a crystal ball that would tell you what sustainability issues are coming up to hit you in the glabella? Or somewhere else even more painful? Wouldn't you like to know the issues before your stakeholders turn you into mush? Wouldn't you want to prepare your sustainability strategy knowing that you have covered all the angles and not left materiality to fortuity? Wouldn't you want a little materiality certainty rather than a lot of materiality perplexity? 

The answer to all your wishes just may have come true with a little big thing that calls itself the Datamaran^TM. Yes, that's Datamaran, not catamaran. Catamarans are characterized by light weight, high stability, reduced drag and comfort that get you where you want to go. That's kind of what you want from technology too, so the selection of the name Datamaran for a dynamic, interactive, real-time personalizable database of sustainability issues is apparently not entirely coincidental.

Datamaran is the new little big thing for companies who want to be in control of their sustainability journey. With sustainability, there are so many variables that it's hard to stay in on top of what's most important. If you can't see the forest for the saplings, then you might need to cut through the undergrowth. (Am I mixing metaphors?)

Datamaran is the brainchild of startup eRevalue. Marjella Alma, founder of eRevalue, explained it to me: 

"Sustainability closes doors. People look at frameworks and numbers. We should take a step back, relax and then come back to see how the land lies. The frameworks that we use such as GRI or SASB should not be treated as forms you fill in and tick the sustainability “box”. Companies must first and foremost take responsibility for their impacts – “know your business” - regardless of the framework and their prescribed KPIs. But how do this when there’s many initiatives, various opinions, regulatory pressures… and you have a complex value chain?

We wanted to create a tool that would help companies understand and navigate the issues so that they can talk about what's really on the table, not reduce this important effort to “selecting from a set of generic givens”. We asked ourselves how we could put this in front of companies to help them identify emerging issues by country, by sector, by competitive landscape and by regulatory pressures. 

We wanted to help companies know what to talk about and how to establish the right kind of KPIs that are relevant for them, and early enough in the process so that companies are not caught unaware." 

HQ'd in London with a team of 25+ ESG experts, lawyers and data scientists and growing, eRevalue's Datamaran is set for a long and meaningful navigation through sustainaland.  

Marjella makes a lot of sense (She usually does. I've known her for quite a while!) We are being plied and prodded with more frameworks and regulations than we can ever imagine and more and more companies are asking, how can we cut through the clutter? More companies are looking to filter out the noise, as the folks at eRevalue say. Datamaran conjures up a set of emerging issues to be aware of as you assess what's material for your business and for your stakeholders. The issues are driven by what people are really talking about out there, as it happens. The conversations that suddenly explode into viral megaphones are caught at an early stage in the Datamaran clutches, letting you know who's doing the talking and how loud everybody else is shouting. Ultimately it becomes a real-time materiality funnel, shaping the relative force of the issues as the conversations on the radar vary in intensity.  

Datamaran works with complex search algorithms across a taxonomy of 6,000 search terms relating to 120 issues on the sustainability radar, hunting down references in corporate websites, Sustainability Reports, SEC filings, Annual Reports and increasingly, media and social media, starting with Twitter. There is also a regulatory platform where all the regulatory frameworks relative to a particular issue magically pop up, and even indicate emerging regulation that is on the radar. In short, all the things that your materiality analysis needs as you create it and as you revise it. 

For reporting, Datamaran helps you understand what's current right now. Suppose you are a company and you are about to prepare your next Sustainability Report. You have your overall strategy and materiality framework mapped out, but you are interested to know what is on the radar right now for your peer group. 

I couldn't resist having a little play around with Datamaran. (Fortunately it's not catamaran, as I am prone to seasickness). I imagined I was a large pharmaceutical company. I selected in my profile the issues that are currently on my radar and I benchmarked these against global and regional issues for my peer companies in relation to what they report in sustainability reports.

At a global level, I see that occupational health and safety, environmental issues and employee issues are picking up the most noise in terms of what pharma peer companies are reporting in their sustainability reports.    

Drilling down, I was able to get a view of how these issues play our in different regions and the relative noise created by each issue in the current landscape. When I separately benchmarked Europe, Americas and Asia, I got different rankings.

Europe

Americas

Asia

Globally, I can see that 91% of my peer companies mention waste in their sustainability reports - a sign that I had better ensure I'm on top of that too. 

Broadly speaking, the top 20 issues don't change significantly across regions - as I would not expect them to do - but in the Americas, waste comes out top; in Europe, occupational health and safety comes out top and in Asia, workforce diversity and inclusion tops the list. While these results might not be significant enough for me to entirely redraw my materiality matrix, it's certainly interesting enough for me to check out who's saying what in the different regions and why. On the subject of waste, for example, we can see the regulatory landscape of current and emerging legislation quite clearly and for each issue, Datamaran can take us back to the source legislation. 

There are a million other ways Datamaran can be useful.. I have only scratched the surface. In my chat with Marjella, I understand that the busy bees at eRevalue are technologizing away really really fast to expand the applicability and personalizability of the system to make it even more useful. This is apparently the only tool of its kind around to support sustainability material decision making and low-noise focus. 

As with any database, what comes out is only as good as what goes in, and the way the program functionality is constructed. So as long as Datamaran keeps its legs on dry land, it seems that it could be quite useful. I'll certainly keep this radar on my radar....  I always wanted a crystal ball.   

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