Edition No. 16

Achieving Transparency from the Inside Out

Using employees as ambassadors to enhance social and environmental communication at the local level

by Jane E. Obbagy, Vice President, Cadmus Group

The relationship between industry and the public has evolved rapidly in recent years. Today’s public places sophisticated demands on corporations for information about environmental and social performance. Industry has responded to this challenge by increasing the volume of information that is available via websites, annual reports and stakeholder meetings, designating key facility and company personnel to communicate with the public, and so on.

Also in this Issue...

Six Steps to Developing a Successful EHS Training Program

Creating a Sustainable Future

Several forces are driving this phenomenon. These include the public’s resolve to seek greater corporate accountability in non-financial aspects of industrial operations and their desire to examine all dimensions of a company’s environmental and social footprint, particularly at the local level. Many companies pursue strategies to increase stakeholder satisfaction by improving processes to deliver better results without a significant expansion of resources. This article explores one such approach: advancing stakeholder communications at the local level through employees to achieve transparency from the inside out.

Leveraging employee engagements

Companies across the globe and in almost every industry sector have established goals and objectives related to improving relationships with local communities, frequently framed in terms of achieving more favorable results in local community surveys, fostering greater understanding among community members to ensure their needs are being met, or ensuring that the investments made by the corporation contribute to long-term community enhancements. To achieve these aspirations, companies provide the communities in which they operate with economic support through local purchasing practices and investments in hospital, school or educational improvement programs; conduct surveys to assess needs; and attend community meetings to strengthen community relationships and dialogue.

Key Points

Community relationship-building tactics have become part of the everyday activity of running a business and provide important information about broad-based community needs.
	Strengthening communications programs at the local level involves building on the role of employees, who act as ambassadors for the corporate brand as part of their daily interactions with customers and other companies.
	Companies that are committed to corporate citizenship recognize that the pathway forward requires thinking beyond compliance and engaging with key stakeholders such as employees and community residents.
	An organization benefits from an employee-stakeholder dialogue program when the knowledge held by individuals becomes company knowledge and is codified in a manner that is easily understood and shared.

To a large degree, these community relationship-building tactics have become part of the everyday activity of running a business and provide important information about broad-based community needs. Developing a clear sense of community perspective, regarding the company as a responsible and accepted local resident, has been a more challenging endeavor.

If developing an accurate community perspective is a function of gathering and interpreting data from a broad spectrum of viewpoints, employees have a clear and compelling role in obtaining information to help a company decipher community perspective as part of its overall approach to building and sustaining community relationships and corporate reputation.

Employees interact with the public on a day-to-day basis in ways that go well beyond corporate activities. They participate in corporate-sponsored community programs, are seconded to special projects involving suppliers, join local governance committees or boards of health, take part in parent-teacher programs, attend church groups and local community meetings, visit libraries and supermarkets, enroll in night classes and become members of local or national advocacy groups. Through these engagements employees establish common ground with local residents and become sources of company information when local residents ask first-hand about the company and its practices. Their ability to dialogue with community members on an ongoing basis makes them ideal candidates to promote and help achieve greater transparency at the local level.

Extending the corporate brand

Corporate environmental communication strategies tend to communicate broad performance and sustainability results to address an expansive stakeholder population.
A successful strategy for adding value to environmental and social communications programs strikes a balance between stakeholder needs, providing both global and local stakeholders with pertinent information.

Strengthening the communications program at the local level with little additional effort involves building on the role of employees. In many ways, employees act as ambassadors for the corporate brand as part of their daily interactions with customers and other companies.

From an organizational perspective, the potential benefits of leveraging employees in advancing community dialogue are many:

building trust with community members and leaders on a different level;
creating a different platform for dialogue with local, and perhaps national, opinion-formers;
providing an informal mechanism for gaining information about emerging social and environmental trends that may impact the business, as well as feedback on ethnic diversity and community projects;
exemplifying expectations that the company is a good local corporate citizen;
enhancing relationships in local markets because of enhanced image;
providing a portal for communicating with stakeholders that may not be reached through traditional means;
providing another tool for assessing whether the materiality of data reported by corporate is understood.

Engaging employees as frontline communicators also provides a tool for reaching out to the young. Young people provide a fresh and new perspective on business and sustainability. Many of them will be the leaders of tomorrow and communications about a company at an early stage can help attract the best of them or ensure the development of points of view whereby a company’s economic contributions are balanced with social and environmental achievements.

Defining the right pathway

When done well, employees communicating productively – obtaining feedback on a company’s progress in meeting environmental and social goals and providing information to local constituencies on an informal basis – can support and strengthen the business and reinforce values in action. To extract value from this endeavor, a boldly structured, four-step approach for moving forward is needed.

Step 1: Understand the issues

Anecdotal information suggests that employees have broad but not very specific information about, for example, the types of financial support provided to local communities, the company’s investments in environmental impact reduction, or the specific projects undertaken to increase the sustainability of the company’s products and services.

Therefore, deciding what is achievable in establishing and implementing the correct communication pathway requires understanding what employees really know about corporate and plant-level environmental and social performance. This can be done by implementing several activities such as:

examining internal communication methods such as newsletters, staff meeting agendas, bulletin boards and the intranet to assess the types of environment and social program information being communicated to employees;
administering a scorecard to evaluate employee knowledge and perceptions about environmental and social programs;
conducting focus groups to develop an understanding on the part of the employees as to the role they want to play in achieving transparency from the inside out; and
analyzing this information relative to feedback received regarding the company’s overall stakeholder dialogue and outreach program.

Companies that are committed to corporate citizenship recognize that the pathway forward requires thinking beyond compliance and engaging with key stakeholders such as employees and community residents.

Step 2: Establish a vision

Based on the data on employee knowledge, an organization can further define the employee role in advancing corporate transparency. For example, the data may suggest that it is more useful to have employees simply listen to comments being made about the company and forward informal feedback on environment and social performance to corporate staff for evaluation and action, or that employees should actively communicate information about the company’s environment and social performance to reinforce corporate messages.

Step 3: Enable employees

The next step is to select employees to participate in local stakeholder communications. The choices span the organization and can include plant-level environmental, health, and safety staff, employees participating in voluntary programs, supervisory-level employees, human resource staff, or all employees. Employee characteristics that are particularly useful for this role include:

the ability to understand information communicated through conversations and to summarize it accurately;
accessibility and openness to conversation, discussion, or meeting with representatives on a regular basis;
being perceived as sincere, upright and equitable;
the ability to explain technical issues or programs in terms that children as well as adults can understand regardless of education level.

In addition, motivation should be considered in selecting employees for this role. Success will in part be determined by enlisting employees who view the opportunity as a means to further develop capabilities and are aligned with the company’s desire to advance local stakeholder communications.

Deciding how to prepare employees for this new role involves several steps. To initiate the process, a team should be created for gathering information about training/educational services and delivery methods and developing implementation recommendations. Next, the results should be presented to a select number of employees and management to capture feedback critical to overall acceptance and implementation of the proposed training/education program. As a final step, the team should develop and implement a strategic plan including a description of the training to be provided, the roles of management, trainers and others in implementing the program, and the timeframes for completion.

Step 4: Extract insights

An organization benefits from an employee-stakeholder dialogue program when the knowledge held by individuals becomes company knowledge and is codified in a manner that is easily understood and shared. The types of feedback that may be quite important for obtaining a better understanding of the community’s perspective regarding the company as a responsible and accepted local resident include:

the volume of goods and services purchased from local merchants/businesses;
the number/frequency of local residents seeking employment opportunities with the company;
the extent to which funds provided by the company for the development and maintenance of community infrastructure have value to the community beyond their value to the local facility or company;
whether funding of community projects was based on a consultative process with the community;
the types of activities engaged in or financial assistance provided to promote local enterprises and to create work outside of the company operation;
whether company hiring practices provide opportunities for women or minorities in the workplace;
the level of understanding community members possess regarding the environmental performance of the local facility and any timeframes for improvement actions.

The collective feedback from disparate community sources may point out perceptions that need to be addressed or changed, better ways the corporation can work with local communities, or acknowledgement that the facility is having a positive impact on the local community (see Figure 1). Analysis of the data will ultimately result in modifications to the process for building and enhancing community relationships illustrated in Figure 2 (below), as well as a set of actionable items to decrease the difference between expected outcomes (acceptance of the company/facility as a responsible community resident) and actual outcomes.

Figure 2

The demands for environmental and social transparency will not go away. The public desires more and more information to evaluate industry’s non-financial business impacts, such as sustainability, downstream product stewardship and employee health and safety. If leadership and accountability in the world includes obtaining feedback, understanding community perspectives and communicating honestly and candidly about potential risks and benefits, then leveraging the employee communication connection to the community makes eminent sense.

"Achieving Transparency from the Inside Out," written by Jane Obbagy, (jobbagy@cadmusgroup.com) was published in the October/November 2005 issue of Corporate Responsibility Management and is reprinted with permission from the publisher, Melcrum Publishing Limited.