Going Green in the Corporate World

Since environmental issues and awareness started leaping to the forefront in recent news, many companies have felt the social pressure to “go green” in some way, shape or form, or at least speak up and do their part by communicating a pro-green attitude to their customers. Joel Makower, in his article, Green Corporate Communications: The Unstoppable Urge to Talk the Talk, asks this, “In a world gone green, how does a company make itself heard, credibly and authentically?”

Good question. I started thinking about the different ways that companies can “go green” without seeming that they were simply pressured into the trend of changing their logo colors to green and yellow, or giving money to an environmental group somewhere; and how can companies do their share in truly advocating an environmentally friendly message to their consumers? The article outlined this dilemma as one that is not easily resolvable. If the public is eager to look up to someone, then who will be the leader in truly, authentically, transparently going green without getting completely lost in “self-congratulatory backslapping”?

A report titled, Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability Communications had some suggestions:

1. Corporate Responsibility (CR) must be a priority emanating from the top.
If the CEO and top management take active interest in CR, provide resources and insist on accountability, a company’s CR efforts and communications will be significantly more effective and credible. For a company’s CR mandate to have teeth and be integrated with company values, senior management must demonstrably support and encourage CR efforts. Only then does social and environmental accountability become internalized to the point where CR communications and reporting is taken seriously as an essential component of the company’s benchmarking and goal-setting—and not viewed as an empty communications exercise.

2 . Stakeholders often find communicating with companies to be difficult
Companies now grasp the business case for effective stakeholder engagement and are working hard to improve communication lines—whether it’s through direct stakeholder contact, new web-based CR reporting, or other channels that allow for greater responsiveness to stakeholder issues and recommendations. Yet stakeholders
of every stripe—NGOs, SRI fund managers, journalists, internal audiences—have criticized CR communications and engagement.

3 . Stakeholders expect companies to lead—not just manage risk—on key issues
Society’s lack of confidence in governments and public institutions to adequately address key global issues such as climate change, human rights, and poverty alleviation has resulted in increased expectations for the business sector to take the initiative. No longer are stakeholders content with reactive corporate responses to the world’s problems. Rather, they view corporate actions such as offsetting CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions or providing access to medicine in the developing world as litmus tests for trust in the private sector. With considerable media coverage of environmental and social issues, companies have an opportunity to align their brands with positive values and earn credit for their improved records.

4 . Employees and socially responsible investors have emerged as key CR
communications audiences
Business leaders are recognizing the valuable relationship between employees and CR performance. With that in mind, leading companies are increasingly engaging in dialogue with their employees and subsequently making positive changes on issues like diversity, labor relations, and human rights. This surge of discourse with employees is matched by a similarly vigorous courting of SRIs. The corporate world has woken up to the growing
ability of socially responsible initiatives to mitigate risk and create new opportunities—which directly affect their stock prices. SRI ratings matter to the extent that they influence the big institutional shareholders as well as potential business partners.

5 . Companies often neglect an important CR communications audience: prospective employees
While corporations are actively and successfully engaging employees on CR issues, they are not adequately courting prospective employees to the same degree. Companies do not consistently integrate CR messaging in their recruiting because they underestimate the importance a prospective employee places on a company’s CR programs. Prospective employees seek to make informed career choices and having access to a potential
employer’s CR performance data is essential to the decision-making process.

6 . Transparency is a key indicator of a socially responsible company
Although philanthropy spawned many CR programs, today philanthropic activities and donations are the baseline that stakeholders expect all companies to meet. What stakeholders care most about is how honest and open are companies being and how are they treating their employees.

In conclusion, it is important to remember that even though consumers eagerly look for thought and social leadership from companies, they demand authenticity. These suggestions are great to draw upon as guidelines to reaching out to consumers in an honest, trustworthy way, while still communicating corporate responsibilities.