Three Big Ambitions at Tesco

I love retail. It's fascinating - so varied, so full of so many different ways of impacting and influencing our lives. So many different priorities and so many opportunities to drive change. The retail sector is highly visible and constantly in the public eye. Not surprisingly, as most of us interact daily with the retail sector for the products we consume, ranging from food, to personal care, clothes, home appliances, furniture and almost everything else. The choices that retailers make affect millions of lives each day.

The retail sector is no stranger to scrutiny and it's probably true that corporate responsibility and sustainability leaders at the large retailers have a job that is anything but boring. Such is the case with Josh Hardie, Group Corporate Responsibility Director at Tesco. Today is one of those totally non-boring days:

First, Tesco announced it is to remove sweets and chocolate from checkouts across the full range of its stores by the end of the year. Tesco found nearly two thirds (65%) of customers said removing confectionery from checkouts would help them make healthier choices. Just over two thirds of parents (67%) told Tesco that confectionery-free checkouts would help them make healthier choices for their children.

Second, Tesco released its annual corporate responsibility communication, the 2014 Tesco and Society Report. More about that later. First, I was pleased to have the opportunity on this non-boring day to chat to Josh and hear his insights about what made today not boring. Josh has been in his role for around 18 months, having managed Tesco UK Community activities for three years prior to that.

Me: Well done on getting rid of sweets at the checkouts.....
Josh: Yes, we believe we are the first in the industry to do this. It's an absolute fit with our approach to helping people manage their health, and their family's health, by not creating temptations that don't support a healthy lifestyle.

Me: And this on the day you publish your Tesco and Society Report...
Josh: We are working all the time to advance our objectives and make a positive impact. The news is not the publication of the report. It's about how we are fulfilling our role in society. This is a fundamental change. In the past, it was all about the report. Anything you wanted to know about CR at Tesco, you would have to go to the report. Now we are trying to make this much more of a continuous communication, updating our website, much more real-time. While the report is important, it should not be the only way we communicate.

Me: CSR at Tesco has been changing  ....
Josh: Essentially, around 18 months ago, we realized that the way we were approaching CSR wasn't really doing the job, and was rather fragmented. Apart from carbon management, where we had done some great work and achieved impressive results, our overall CSR activity was not having the measurable social and commercial impact that we aspired too. Therefore, we took a long, hard look and what was going on and tried to reframe how to move forward.

Me: And Tesco and Society was born....
Josh: Yes, we learnt from what we did in the carbon area. It had been entirely embedded in the business, and all parts of the business had a role to play. It was managed integrally, rather than just being a project lead by community managers. We decided to take a proper look and adopt a more issues based approach, focusing on the issues Tesco people care about. We had hundreds of conversations internally and externally, and came up with our three big ambitions around reducing food waste, improving health and creating opportunities. These issues truly resonate with Tesco employees and they also meet pressing social needs.

Me: But that's not all ....
Josh: Of course not. But the rest is completely non-negotiable. Trading responsibly, reducing our impact on the environment, being a great employer and supporting communities - these aspects of doing business are now so fundamental that they are just part of the way we work. We need to maintain and improve our performance in all these areas. However, the three big ambitions are the areas where we can take a leadership position, given the size, scale and impact of a business such as Tesco. This can lead to truly meaningful change.

Me: And a culture change......
Josh: Yes, this is the hardest part. You can't change culture in a day. It takes time in an organization like Tesco. Refocusing the way we think about these issues, and our role in advancing solutions, and truly embedding them so they become part of the work that people do all the time and not just a project here and there is a really major transformation for our business.

Me: Aligning with global directions in sustainability...
Josh: We have learnt from what other companies are doing in sustainability, especially the companies that have broken the mold such as Nike. Our approach aligns with the way materiality is driving big change, based on a more holistic view of our role in society. We have flipped the way we are thinking, and this is the start of our new journey.

Me: But I didn't notice any targets...
Josh: Work in progress. Changing the way we think and identifying the big issues we will address has been the focus of our energies so far. Also, setting targets in some of these areas is a real challenge. How do you measure the impact we have on customers' health? Do you look at the healthy content of shopping baskets, or calorie content, or something else? We are reviewing the way we can measure our impact across all our CR performance areas, especially our three big ambitions, and plan to have firmer targets developed by the time our next report is published. We have a new advisory panel that is helping us in this area as well.

Me: I also didn't notice G4 showing up...
Josh: We take guidance from the Global Reporting Initiative framework, but we have chosen not to apply the framework in full. We feel that it's a very useful guide and has challenged us to improve our materiality and disclosure, but prefer the flexibility to do this in a way that is specifically relevant to our strategy.

Me:  What else isn't in there?
Josh: All the answers. We have tried to reflect our approach and performance in a modest way, focusing on the issues, expressing the start of a journey and the challenges ahead in a more realistic way than just saying how wonderful we are. One of the most difficult things is going out to the public with a declaration that we plan to do something in the area of food waste, health or anything else, when we don't have all the answers. Whatever we communicate triggers a debate. With this report, we have had to have the confidence that we mean what we say and that we will work toward delivering our promises, even though we can't provide all the detail today.

Me: And the next report
Josh One thing we might do better in the next report is reflect the different pace of progress in our three ambitions. In this report, we have given all three fairly equal weighting when in practice, we are far more advanced in the area of food waste, we are starting to motor just now in the area of improving health, and in the area of creating opportunities, we have some way to go. In the next report, we should try to reflect this in a way that gives each issue a more appropriate weighting.

Me: Not going to be a boring year, then...
Josh: Anything but.

And now.. to the Tesco and Society 2014 Report 

As Josh Hardie mentioned above, this report is designed around the Tesco and Society approach that was developed last year and introduced in the 2013 report. Despite this not being a G4 report (you all know how I love G4!), the report has a priority-issues-based structure that enables us to clearly navigate to what Tesco is doing in the areas that matter.

The three big ambitions take center stage, and are well explained. At this point, as it is still early days in the "scale for good" journey for Tesco, it's as much about intention as it is about performance, and time will show how Tesco progresses in future reports. This report is very appealing to a wide readership - clear narrative and infographics galore - it might even appeal to Tesco customers. Maybe Tesco should place copies of this report at the checkouts instead of sweets :) Haha. Just joking. I think.

For the more professional reader, the report is rather light on 2013 performance data in areas I would expect a large company sustainability report to cover, such as, for example, employee diversity (other than gender), health and safety, and water performance relative to prior years. Also, while the focus on the three big ambitions is valuable, other issues that we might expect to be discussed in a corporate responsibility report of a major grocery retailer didn't hit the radar - socio-economic impact of store location and placement, construction and green building, sustainable agriculture, supplier diversity, sell-by dates, product labeling and all the other businesses that Tesco is involved in from mobile phones to banking services to petrol filling stations and more. However, the Tesco website contains a wealth of additional information including a catchy business model animation and deeper dive reports into specific issues.  

In the meantime, Tesco is doing more than reporting. It's driving a culture change throughout its business, and that's infinitely more challenging. This, of course, is what will make a difference to the lives of the half a million employees of the company, and the many more millions that go to Tesco to shop in several countries. Reporting about it reinforces and leverages that culture change. I am cautiously optimistically looking forward to the next report already. 

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, award-winning 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 at www.twitter.com/elainecohen   or via my business website www.b-yond.biz   (Beyond Business Ltd, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

My personal sustainability trip

My mother is 87 years old and having lived through years of wartime and austerity, she tends to know what sustainability is all about. Leave a light on, throw out a morsel of good food, buy anything more than is strictly necessary and you always got a lecture which oddly resembled the anti-consumerism and environmental stewardship themes of our current times. My childhood seems to have been one long sustainability education. Everything was reused, nothing was surplus, nothing was extravagant, nothing was unnecessary. Somewhat fixed in her ways, these habits have lived on and every time my kids leave a light on in our home, I hear my mother telling them to switch it off, even though we now live thousands of miles away. My mother lives in Manchester (UK), and visiting her this week, I realized that, not only is her old-style sustainability as relevant as ever, but she is also taking up Manchester's new style sustainability with gusto. Recycling, rubbish and waste in Manchester is now a regular topic of conversation.  Each household has four refuse bins : green for paper, brown for glass, tins and cans, blue for plastic and black for organic.

Photocredit : http://uclanhannahgw.wordpress.com/

All waste in my mother's home is now sorted so that it can get disposed of in the appropriate bin. During the few days my daughter and I visited with my mother, we made several trips to throw out the garbage. Every trip was preceded by a twenty minute explanation of which rubbish to throw in which bin. Every meal we concluded ended in a debate about some of the waste and which colour bin it should end up in. And even over a family dinner on Friday night at my niece's home, the main topic of conversation was the new organic waste caddy she had just received, for making food left-overs collection in the home more practical. Although none of my family have yet signed up for home composting master classes, there is certainly a new culture of waste disposal and recycling which has gripped the city and even my 87-year old mother is doing her bit.  

My mother and my daughter Eden - the garbage masters

Another sustainability experience in Manchester was our trip to Tesco's supermarket, where I always stock up on Tetley's tea bags and Bisto (see blog from another trip!). However, this time, we enjoyed earning extra bonus points  for my mother's Tesco Clubcard because we used our own shopping bags. At the checkout, the checkout-lady asked us how many of our own bags we had brought and duly recorded them in order to ensure my mother got a bonus for environmental awareness.

My daughter Eden with our Beyond Business shopping bags outside Tesco supermarket

Finally, the end of our trip came all too soon and we found ourselves in Manchester airport awaiting the flight home. Even here, sustainability was the theme of the day as we entered the Environment Zone:



Manchester Airport gets it!



The airport  has a Vision for Sustainability and has published a Sustainability Report in 2011 (GRI B level, GRI checked). It looks pretty good, too, demonstrating a range of energy-efficiency schemes and  a carbon challenge for all onsite businesses to reduce their carbon footprint.

Overall, I was impressed with sustainability in Manchester, both in the way it penetrates the home and urban living culture, raising awareness and changing people's habits. In fact, I was so involved in sustainability issues during a brief family holiday, that I am wondering if I can charge my travel as a business expense! haha.

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices   Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en  (BeyondBusiness, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Wasting paper #CSR #FAIL

I have finally gotten around to speaking out about a pile of paper that arrives in my mail each month. It's my cellphone invoice. Well, it's all my cellphone transactions. We have three active phones (me, my husband, my daughter), one cellular modem for my laptop and one micro-sim for my iPad. All these charges are paid from my one account. I need at least one printed invoice because my accountant says I cannot submit an electronic version for my business accounts, and my phone and peripherals are a business expense. So, in a normal, reasonable, environmentally conscious world, I would expect to receive one envelope, with one piece of paper listing all the charges that will be deducted by standing order from my account.

This is what I received from my provider, Pelephone:

Seven envelopes and eight pieces of paper.

All for one account.

Every month.

Paper, ink, postage, handling ... seven times more than required. Multiply this by hundreds of thousands of subscribers and the amount of resource wastage is mind boggling.

This is despite a declaration on the Pelephone website that they are committed to environmental protection, although this is as minimal as you can get.

I wrote to Pelephone, asking what they could do about this wastefulness but have yet to receive a response (after 24 hours). An email query promises a response within SEVEN working days while a query on the Pelephone Facebook page promises a response within TWO working days. I decided not to wait. This is the age of instant.

Israel is often cited as having one of the highest per capita usage rates for cellphones worldwide (this may be explained by the link to security concerns and many schoolchildren carry cellphones for this reason). There are three main cellular providers in Israel: Cellcom, Partner (Orange) and Pelephone. It's hard to say that any of them present a good option for sustainability. All have been taken to task by the Israeli government in the past year for anti-consumer policies including prohibitive interconnection charges, lack of transparency regarding fees and connection speed rates, grossly high prices and lack of customer responsiveness. Service is abysmal at all three companies (and I have been a customer of all three at different times). I believe the telecommunications industry is one of the least trusted in the country though, regrettably, one of the most indispensible. As far as sustainability is concerned, Partner, with 32% market share, has produced two sustainability reports, the last one covering 2009. Cellcom has produced one sustainability report covering the year 2008, and Pelephone has produced zero sustainability reports and is the least transparent in all respects of all three companies. 

However, even without a commitment to sustainability, saving resources just makes common sense. Perhaps that's the secret ingredient that is lacking in our celluar industry in my home market. Perhaps common sense is the more difficult thing to achieve than improvement in 3G connection speeds.    

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainability Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices  Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en  (BeyondBusiness, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Praise for sustainable packaging: HP

My kids had been wanting a printer (for absolutely essential and non-negotiable-needs-to-be-printed homework for educational purposes only) so I invested in a small HP deskjet printer. I was pleasantly surprised on unpacking the box to see the ecologically conscious and creative way the printer was packaged. The printer was NOT packed in big blocks of environmentally-yucky expanded polystyrene as shown in the pic below:

Insteead, HP now pack using  board made from post consumer recycled waste and industrial paper waste and place the printer itself in a reusable shopping bag. See pics below:

See what HP say about packaging in their 2009 sustainability report and the reductions of packaging levels per product. Not only did I gain a printer, I also gained a bag for my shopping to add to my weekly shop collection, and I have less stuff the throw into my garbage. 

Well done to HP! Thanks for being environmentally conscious and helping me to be too!  

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en  (BeyondBusiness, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Is reporting waste a waste of time ?

One of the biggest issues, I believe, in GRI-based reporting is that of comparability, which is the ability to compare performance across companies. Included in the ambitious vision of the GRI was the aspiration to become a platform to enable company and sector comparisons of key sustainability performance metrics. Whilst on a broad scale, some degree of comparability is possible with companies who report with a high level of transparency, there still remain vast gaps in the quality of reporting against individual indicators. Because the GRI check is limited only to a sampling of indicators reported, these gaps are not necessarily picked up by the GRI application level check.

To explain how this shows up in different reports, I took a look at Performance Indicator EN22 which is all about something we all create (ha-ha some more than others): waste. The GRI indicator requests details of hazardous and non-hazardous waste created by the organization's operations by disposal method, reported in tonnes. Companies are asked not only to detail what they waste but also what they do with their waste. This is as important to the financial sustainability of the company (waste is money) as it is to the sustainability of our environment. It sounds like a fairly simple thing to report, right ? Well, perhaps not.

Arizona Chemicals Sustainability Report 2009 

First report from this company, published in 2011, GRI Application Level B  GRI Checked. This company has published a printed report summary. The GRI index appears online only. Indicator EN22 is noted as fully reported. In the summary report, we learn that Arizona generated approximately 2.5 million pounds of hazardous waste in  the USA in 2009 and less than 10 million pounds in Europe. Over 98% of hazardous waste is sent for off-site incineration and the remaining waste at 2% is landfilled or recycled as required by law. Solid waste, which is not hazardous, is landfilled (80%), incinerated (13%) and recycled (3%). And that's it. Total amount of waste is not reported, I have to really search for the relevant data and also do some number-crunching to understand their hazardous waste levels in tonnes, and frankly, I really have no idea exactly how much this company is sending to landfill each year. EN22 is not reported in full.

Hoffmann la Roche Annual Report 2010

GRI Application Level A+, third party checked and GRI Checked. This report is an annual report which also confirms to GRI A+ Application Level. The GRI Index is a PDF which has to be downloaded separately and not part of the printed report. Indicator EN22 is noted as fully reported.  In the printed report, we learn that Hoffman La Roche generates waste to landfill (inert waste 1,226 tons; construction waste, 14,900 tons; reactor waste 7,208 tons) and separately we are told that the organization generates 27,249 tonnes of general waste and 29,020 tonnes of chemical waste. Now, it gets more complicated. The PDF download GRI Index also has embedded downloads, such as this one one the subject of waste. In this third download, we are told that 95% of chemical waste was incinerated and the rest was  landfilled. Then there's this: In addition, 4279 metric tons of residual substances could be sold as valorised socondary products. Another 16,369 metric tons consisting of mainly solvents were recycled. As regards general waste, 19% of the 27,429 metric tons noted above were incinerated and the rest landfilled. 14,900 tons of this was rubbish from demolished buildings. In addition, 92,141 metric tons of residual materials were recycled. So, by this time, I am totally confused. Is Hoffman's total waste 1,226 PLUS 14,900  PLUS 7,208 PLUS 29,020 PLUS 4,279 PLUS 16,360 PLUS 27,429 PLUS 92,141 =192,563 tonnes ?  How much of this total waste, whatever total means, is hazardous ? The report does not distinguish between hazardous and non hazardous.  In addition to having to download three documents, try to make sense of non-sensical figures and add everything up myself, I still remain perplexed as to the total waste levels of this company, despite their pride at having reduced waste levels, so they say, during the past five years.  Here we have an A+ report checked by two separate external parties, and I can't even get a simple figure such as total waste. EN22 is not reported in full.

UltraTech Cement Company, India

This is an Application B+ level report, checked by the GRI. In this report, the GRI Index is part of the report (whew!) and EN22 is noted as fully reported. And lo and behold! We have data. See  this:

Here we have clear reporting. Hazardous and Non-Hazardous waste separately recorded, split by type and tonnage. Great. Now, where did all those millions of tonnes of waste end up? Oops. Who knows? This is not reported, as far as I can tell. So, all in all, whilst I have a much easier time getting to clear numbers about waste generation, I still do not know how the Company manages waste disposal and Indicator EN22 is not fully reported.  

How should Companies report this indicator?

Let take a cue from Vestas Sustainability Report for 2010

Clear numbers, clear narrative, clear graphics, clear reporting, in conformance with EN22 performance indicator. At a glance, we know how much waste, the split between hazardous and non-hazardous, and what happened to it. Well done Vestas!

So, at least there may be light at the end of the tunnel, as one out of four reports I randomly reviewed appears to be able to get it right. As I often say, the GRI guidelines are good. The problem we have is adherence to the GRI guidelines in a rigourous way. Despite checks and verifications, comparability evades us because reporting companies are not applying the correct degree of rigour in their reporting. What's worse, they are telling us that they are. In the meantime, therefore, let's not add to overall waste levels by making reporting waste a waste of time, as time, as we all know, is one of the most valuable non-renewable resources of all.

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en (BeyondBusiness, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)

Adobe. Packaging. Green. Fail.

The WAIP (Wasteful and Irresponsible Packaging) Award this week goes to ..........

ADOBE SYSTEMS.

I decided to invest (having moved to a new laptop and upgraded all my other hardware and software), in the new Adobe Acrobat X, which has several improvements over previous versions. I took delivery of the product today, and love the new program! BUT.. the pagkaging really turned me off. This is how Adobe Acrobat X is packaged:

And this is the product that all this lavish cartonboard, lamination, gloss and ink actually houses:

Aside from the wasteful packaging, just think of all that extra air that is being transported all over the world in this box, and all the extra weight that requires all that extra energy to move around.  And the extra cost to me, the consumer, for all of this cost the company is incurring. In a company with an embedded sustainability culture, this wouldn't happen.

Adobe claim to be environmentally conscious and environmentally responsible.Their 2009 CSR summary report proudly notes that Adobe was recognized by Newsweek as one of the 20 greenest companies in the world (This was in 2009. Actually, they ranked #7 in 2010) . Adobe writes "we highly encourage and promote conscientious environmental stewardship among our employees and our business partners." The summary report doesn't refer specifically to packaging, and I couldn't find anything on packaging initiatives on the  Adobe CSR website.  

All in all, a major FAIL for ADOBE in packaging sustainability.
 

elaine cohen, CSR consultant, Sustainabilty Reporter, HR Professional, Ice Cream Addict. Author of CSR for HR: A necessary partnership for advancing responsible business practices Contact me via www.twitter.com/elainecohen  on Twitter or via my business website www.b-yond.biz/en  (BeyondBusiness, an inspired CSR consulting and Sustainability Reporting firm)