Archive for June, 2021

Putting people at the heart of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)

Sunday, June 27th, 2021

Photo by Alexander Suhorucov

Written by Zeng Han Jun

 

Enabling a people-first approach in all aspects of business, is one of the pillars that promotes and enhances Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) values. If carefully utilised, it can build trust among the staff members, serve as an important tool for handling feedback internally and act as an enabler for attracting more business and talents. 

In a way, smaller companies have it easier because most of their operations are within the span of control of the senior executives. It becomes more challenging when the oversight goes beyond the span of control due to factors like growth of operations, work extending to different geographical locations, tasks becoming more complex, increasing administrative processes, etc. 

Inefficiencies and informal work processes could unknowingly leeched onto official work processes, and all these could translate to unnecessary and unexpected increases in business cost.  In a recent example, a company had extended its direct distribution network to another foreign country. Shortly after that, one of their local senior managers started to make use of the company’s distribution network to distribute his own products. The local senior manager’s act was found out later because one of the staff members complained about it. 

In this case, it was the people’s trust in the company’s system, company’s strong investment in its people, and the transparency in communication between all levels that allowed for a swift and clean end to this.  

This is not new. Variations of similar situations could happen in different sectors. Let me just cite another recent example. This case is not about bad corporate governance within business processes but concerns with basic human rights in the workplace; A senior manager in another company was verbally abusing his staff members and behaved inappropriately with them as well. Following his actions, one of the staff members set out to record the senior manager’s behaviour on her handphone and uploaded the video on a social media platform. The video became viral and people started boycotting against the company’s products. 

In this case, it was the lack of trust in the company’s system, company’s lack of investment in its people and lack of transparency in communication between all levels that led to this unfortunate event.

I felt that it was important to spend some time to think about both cases; why it happened the way it did, what the companies had done to produce such outcomes, how did the outcomes affected both companies and if the outcomes were negative, what could the companies do to improve?

In the two examples that I have surfaced earlier, the outcomes were triggered by releases of information. In the case of the distribution company, a staff member provided feedback to the senior management. In the second case, the staff chose to stay clear of the company’s internal feedback procedures and relied on social media platforms to whistle-blow on the senior manager’s abusive behaviour. 

Technology has made it so easy to share information, to the point that it has become increasingly challenging for companies to control information flow. Additionally, the growth of supposedly neutral websites and applications makes them far more appealing as platforms to air feedback anonymously. Companies must work harder to convince their employees to stick to guidelines and use the company’s feedback mechanisms. 

A feedback mechanism can be as simple as providing an email address that staff members can send their feedback to. Some companies establish clear guidelines for handling feedback and encourage their staff to stick to it. Those who fail to stick to the guidelines, may face drastic measures. Others help their employees feel like they are part of the company so that they feel responsible for the company’s well-being. 

The latter approach is what I called putting people at the heart of ESG. Ensuring a people-first approach towards staff members so that they would in turn adopt a company-first approach towards the business. 

I organised three key ideas that underpin the people-first approach: 

  1. Trust in the system; 
  2. Investment in people; and 
  3. Sufficient transparency in communication between all working levels.

Trust in the system

Companies can have the best system in place to handle feedback but does the staff member trust the system enough to make use of it? Do they believe that their feedback will be considered and fairly dealt with? If not, the staff member might resort to external platforms to air their grievances. Winning the trust of staff members is not an easy task and can only be established through repeated positive actions. In fact, nothing beats walking-the-talk because it is very difficult to dispute the facts. 

Well, even though it is very difficult to dispute facts and data, it is still wise to adopt a human-centric approach when working with data. Strangely, the use of facts and data can result in unexpected negative outcomes if handled in the wrong way. That is why many companies use data to showcase their achievements and additionally seek consensus with their employees before including that information in the ESG report. 

For example, when using a data chart to show the increasing trend of learning opportunities for staff, some companies are also including surveys of employee’s satisfaction with the learning opportunities, their perception of access to such learning opportunities, their perception of the fairness in allocating these learning opportunities, etc. 

People engagement combined with concrete data can lead to very meaningful insights. In reality, it is challenging for a very small number of people to publish less-than-stellar results but that is what transparency is all about. It forces one to acknowledge the current position and then commit to continuous improvement. This is the first step to building trust. It is very difficult to shake the foundation of a company that has earned its social capital through organic trust building..   

Investment in people

The key is to make the staff feel like an important part of the company. Invest in people so that they are invested in the business. People who are invested in the business, are genuinely concerned about the business. Training opportunities, new projects, new portfolios, etc are just some of the many ways to invest in people. In my first example, the local senior manager’s misuse of the company’s resources was surfaced quickly because a staff member felt that it was his responsibility to escalate this issue to the management. Obviously the company invested enough in this staff member for him to respond in this way. 

Companies should try their best to provide sufficient training on identifying bad corporate practices, encourage employees to use internal feedback mechanisms and provide the reasons for staff members to believe in the integrity of the system. The staff members must be sufficiently invested in the company to be bothered with providing any feedback. Investing in people is about putting people at the heart of ESG. 

Sufficient transparency in communication between all levels

This is an extremely tricky topic and must be handled with utmost sensitivity. Most would agree that transparency is good and want it in communication at all levels. Easier said than done. Let me explain why. 

Some managers maintain control, prevent information overload and help the team to focus on the tasks at hand by allowing staff to access only relevant and sufficient information, and encouraging communication to take place within allowed parameters. For example, staff only need to access enough information to perform their work. Reports should be directed at the next higher level and the immediate supervisor has to decide whether or not the information should be released in its entirety to the next higher level. This is to prevent “skip-level” communication. It is an important management technique that has worked well for many large organisations, especially those that span across different geographical locations and employ people who possess diverse skills with large variances in expertise. 

Nowadays, it is common for the younger generation of workers to celebrate the flat company structure, preferring its open structure that allows for quick decisions, open communication and equal collaboration. A few younger workers are even ditching hierarchical company structure to work in flat company structures, simply for its open and flat work environment. Then again, it is not realistic for every company to adopt a flat company structure like what some technology companies have done. We have to accept that hierarchical company structure will continue to exist and expect to work with it for quite some time. 

Many studies have showed that open communication across all levels within a hierarchical company structure, actually incentivises the manager to hire workers who are less qualified and less productive than himself. Managers are also human, and they are also afraid that open communication might cause them to be displaced by their subordinates who may be equally or even better qualified. 

To this, some companies actually restrict skip-level communication (conversations between subordinates and senior management) and this is to encourage managers to hire well-qualified workers. Other methods include promotion by seniority, giving superiors employment guarantee or promoting employees into other business units (Raith, Friebel, 2001). 

Even the popular open-door policy has proved to be disconcerting to many managers who have substantially much control over their workers. Because of this, some managers are extremely concerned about their subordinates’ conversations with senior management and how it might affect the managers’ working relationships with the subordinates.   

The funny thing is, and well-documented in many studies, that high performers are attracted to a work environment that promotes open communication (Martel, 2003). This is also one of the reasons why some technology companies have gone all out to attract the best talents by ensuring transparency in communication between all levels and adopting a flat hierarchical company structure. 

Transparency in communication between all levels is a very tricky topic and the solution must be carefully crafted according to the situation on hand. It is significantly much easier to pull this off in a flat company structure that employs staff who are used to such management style. As for a hierarchical company structure, it is important to enable sufficiently open communication, enough to allow for feedback but not so much that managers lose their authority to carry out their work. Careful balancing is required because tipping on either side will result in bad politics within the organisation. 

People are the company’s greatest strength and adopting a people-first approach is to amplify that strength. The foundations to building a people-first organisation is to; (1) help staff members to trust the system, (2) invest in people so that they adopt a company-first approach to their work and (3) foster an environment for sufficiently open communication between all levels. A people-first approach is to put people at the heart of Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) values and is one of the keys to building a competitive company. 

References

Martel, L. (2003). Finding and keeping high performers: Best practices from 25 best companies. Employment Relations Today, 30(1), 27-43. doi:10.1002/ert.10072

Raith, M. A., & Friebel, G. (2001). Abuse of Authority and Hierarchical Communication. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.280010

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Paying more attention to the governance aspect of the Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) equation

Friday, June 18th, 2021

Photo by Alexander Suhorucov from Pexels

By Zeng Han Jun

Through market dynamism and awareness, some companies have already restructured their business operations with the aim to align with Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) values. Other than that, some are doing it because they are concerned about their business sustainability in the next 5 to 10 years. 

Then again, I must acknowledge that charting a new direction can be very challenging to some and not all companies can stomach it. That is because true transformation goes beyond reporting and involves securing buy-ins, setting aside time, allocating sufficient resources, exerting strategic effort and importantly, instilling the discipline to stay on course and not drift. One cannot simply believe and hope for the best. 

By discipline, I mean to foster a system that is motivated to sustain itself, keeps itself in check and continually driven to value-add. That is why companies have to ensure that proper governance is in place to ensure that ESG policies, processes and procedures are continually updated at the strategic level and implemented at the operational level. It is easy to say this but difficult to achieve. 

First, strategy must be sufficiently rooted to the larger ecosystem in order for the ideas to be practical, yet it should not be overly-burdened with operations such that no real changes can take place. 

Second, operations are fundamentally the manifestation of policies. It involves processes and procedures that comprise multiple classes of assets, systems at different stages of growth and people with varying levels of training. Ideally, operations should be designed to be nimble and flexible enough to adapt to changes. In reality, action plans can deviate a fair bit from the plans and not easy to change once implemented. 

Clearly, there is a gap between the two domains and the challenge is to ensure that sufficient and fairly accurate insights flow seamlessly between the two domains, in order to facilitate  informed decisions and timely actions. 

You might already know that ESG is quite different from other traditional corporate functions like finance, technology, human resource, etc. Most traditional corporate functions can be organised under a single department. For example, the recruiting function will most definitely be a subset of the Human Resource (HR) department and not under any other departments.

ESG is a little bit different. It is pretty strategic in that its principals influence policies that impact the processes and procedures of other traditional corporate functions. It is not wrong to say that the ESG function has a stake in almost every other corporate function. 

It changes the way a company does its recruiting, investing, auditing, procuring, marketing, administrating, engineering, managing, etc.  On top of this, encouragement by international organisations, governments and exchanges seem to suggest that it is going to be very important in the future. It is important to be aware of these developments because it will affect organisational development. 

Recently, I also discovered that there are broadly five ways companies go about implementing ESG policies internally. 

First scenario – Company ensures that all work processes eventually go through the ESG office for endorsement. 

Second scenario – The ESG office supports every other function in the company. 

Third scenario – Company outsources the work to an external vendor. 

Fourth scenario – Every department will have an ESG champion to ensure ESG policies are implemented within the department. Depending on the seniority of the chosen ESG champions, they could be a part of the executive committee or part of a working level group. 

Fifth scenario – a hybrid of two or more of the above scenarios. 

Personally, I feel that the first scenario signals the strongest commitment to ESG values. If the board is really committed to business sustainability, they must ensure that their staff are sufficiently empowered to perform their duties, otherwise their legitimacy could be undermined by other departments that have more political clout. Without sufficient support, business focus will start to drift away from ESG values. The negative effects could also extend to staff retention and become an impediment to attracting the right talent.  

Attracting the right talent for ESG work is very tricky. The ESG umbrella concerns itself with many topics. It can include science, finance, engineering, research, politics, human rights, fair work practices, equal hiring opportunities and the list goes on. Putting out a job description for an ESG specialist and expecting the staff to handle such a wide range of domains, is fundamentally against the principles of ESG.   

Also, drifting could happen if companies do not have the right talents. They are the ones who are overseeing the governance of the ESG policies, processes and procedures. Apart from staff having useful attributes like qualifications, skills and experiences, most ESG standards additionally recommend for companies to include diversity and inclusivity as part of hiring practices and board composition. 

Companies can show commitment by kickstarting diversity hiring with the ESG office. In fact, many companies are already doing it. Workforce diversity is not a new topic. Numerous studies on the aging population, the trade economy, advanced technology and how these will impact the future of work started very long ago. Workforce diversity was then suggested as one of the many tools to improve productivity, reduce blindspots and gain competitive edge.  

Over the decades, the diversity concept has expanded to include BIPOC and extended to people of other sexual orientations too. Other companies are going further, venturing into the return-to-work concept and helping individuals who have been away from corporate life, to return to the workforce. In a good way, diversity promotes new perspectives and reduces blindspots during discussions, sparks new insights and solutions that could be essential to companies’ long-term survivability (Kirchmeyer & Mclellan, 2009). 

What are blind spots?

Blind spots are mental habits that our brains use to process information quickly and studies have shown that people with the same background tend to think alike/ have the same types of blind spots.   This is why removing these blind spots is extremely important for effective strategic decision making and governance of ESG policies. 

Policies, processes and procedures can change over time, depending on the environment and to a certain extent, the people who are overseeing and managing it. That is why, in addition to ESG policies, processes and procedures, companies also need to have the diversity to keep itself in check, oversee the execution, monitor variances and see if there is a need to tweak the policies. If that is not possible, at least have a mechanism to allow a diverse group of people to review the policies periodically. 

Honestly, diversity might cause some people to be uncomfortable. Issues that were once considered taboo, are now being discussed frankly. People of different backgrounds, who seldom interact much in daily lives, are interacting much more in a diversified work environment. Then again, differences in perspectives supported by open-minded communication, really can help teams to overcome blind spots and are integral to developing a risk-aware approach to business decisions.

Commitment to ESG values without proper strategy can result in a lot of inefficiencies and miscommunication with departments. It is expensive and becomes increasingly difficult to rectify when informal work processes entrench in traditional work functions. The complexity of reengineering multiplies manifold when exchanges start to regulate ESG reporting. 

The key is to first create a proper governance structure that is supported by the right talents. It may not be perfect the first time but we can always improve on the system along the way. 

Maybe there will be an increase in operational cost due to more hiring or increased workload due to extra duties imposed on staff. Can we benchmark the increased operational cost to the long-term benefits/ returns? Maybe the cost/ benefit ratio does work out? Can we streamline the outdated work processes and explore redesigning existing staff work. Maybe there are opportunities to improve efficiencies within pockets in the organisation? 

Apart from these options, companies can also consider organising periodic focus groups for a diverse audience and use the findings to refine their ESG corporate roadmap. Or appoint independent directors to shake things up a little bit? 

Anyway, many companies are just beginning to jump on the bandwagon and are still trying to figure things out along the way too.

The question is; how are you going to do it?

References

Kirchmeyer, C., & Mclellan, J. (2009). Capitalizing on Ethnic Diversity: An Approach to Managing the Diverse Workgroups of the 1990s. Canadian Journal of Administrative Sciences / Revue Canadienne Des Sciences De L’Administration, 8(2), 72-79. doi:10.1111/j.1936-4490.1991.tb00546.x

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The Development of Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) Criteria and What This Means for Businesses in the Future?

Wednesday, June 9th, 2021

 

By Zeng Han Jun

 

Development of ESG criteria

Governments are increasingly incorporating Environment, Social and Governance (ESG) criteria into mandatory financial disclosures as part of their efforts to achieve net zero carbon and contribute to the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). What does this mean for businesses, though?

Over 20 years ago, ESG principles were established, primarily to support selective investment and as criteria for reporting sustainability credentials. ESG disclosures were previously voluntary. Companies used them to differentiate themselves and add value to their businesses for investors and the general public.

Following the Paris Agreement (2015), governments have implemented policies to reduce carbon emissions and contribute to the SDGs. Among these regulations is the requirement for companies to make ESG disclosures.

ESG policy to drive the nett zero transition

For example, the European Commission has published or revised regulations aimed at incorporating sustainability into its financial policy framework. Regulation 2019/2088 on sustainability related disclosures requires banks and its financial advisers to disclose ESG information to their customers, and Regulation 2019/2089 (also known as the Low Carbon Benchmarks Regulation) aims to improve transparency and consistency in low carbon indicators.

The EU Taxonomy Regulation, enacted in 2020, contributed to the establishment of an EU classification system for sustainable activities. Furthermore, Directive 2014/95 requires large public interest companies to publish reports on their environmental protection, social responsibility and employee treatment, respect for human rights, poor corporate governance and diversity on company boards.

In 2017, the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (TCFD) issued its final recommendations on reporting on climate impacts and action. It established a framework for businesses to create more effective climate-related financial disclosures using existing reporting processes, allowing for more reliable cross-market comparison.

New Zealand was one of the first countries in 2020, to commit to mandatory climate risk disclosures that are aligned with the TCFD recommendations for publicly traded companies, large insurers, banks, and investment managers.

The 2019 Streamlined Energy and Carbon Reporting Regulation (SECR) in the United Kingdom also introduced mandatory disclosures related to energy consumption, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, and energy efficiency actions for selected companies as part of their annual reporting.

Singapore also published its sustainability reporting framework in 2021, with climate disclosures playing an important role in transforming finance for a greener future. Singapore has been building the green bond market for years, including under a “Sustainable Bond Grant Scheme” from 2017 that has propelled the issuance of almost USD$8.3 billion in green, social, and sustainability bonds. That included a $1.1 billion set of green bonds issued in 2020 by Star Energy Geothermal Group, used in part to finance geothermal energy generation facilities in West Java, Indonesia.

The impact of mandatory ESG disclosures on businesses

Companies will face increased scrutiny regarding the sustainability of their activities in the future, as well as due diligence, with ESG criteria serving as a key requirement for investment decisions. Companies must measure and manage their environmental and social impacts, as well as have in place a governance structure to support this, in order to comply with mandatory ESG disclosures.

Although this may be overwhelming for some businesses that have not yet embarked on the sustainability journey, focusing on these aspects now can help businesses mitigate future compliance and climate risks. Companies should view incorporating ESG criteria as an opportunity to improve their businesses, create positive impacts in their value chains, and improve investor relations, not just any desktop exercise.

Companies should evaluate their businesses and create a roadmap for incorporating ESG criteria into their operations. While this will almost certainly necessitate short-term investments, it would almost certainly provide long-term value. Some research have showed that companies that have incorporated ESG into their operations consistently outperform their peers and may even benefit from lower-cost financing. Investors, for example, are becoming more aware of the risks that climate change can impose on traditional financial assets, and they may be willing to accept a lower return on investments linked to more sustainable activities.

What comes next?

Businesses should begin to think how they should embark on their ESG journey and gradually adapt and prepare for the more stringent disclosure regulations. They must also anticipate the higher level of rigor that investors and financiers will emphasis during due diligence. Integrating sustainability into corporate practices and reporting today would ultimately increase business value and allow businesses to contribute to a more sustainable future.

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