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HOW TO SET UP AND ORGANIZE YOUR CORPORATE CITIZENSHIP PROGRAM

Unless you’re one of the fortunate few with 20 or 30 people on your corporate citizenship program team (wouldn’t that be great?), you’ll probably be leading a team of five direct reports or fewer. Perhaps, like many, you’re a one-person department seeking to influence a large and diverse company. Even with a lean team, as long as you think carefully about how you use your social influence to mobilize people, you can drive change and generate important results. This chapter is about how to make the most efficient use of your resources to do just that.

THE IMPORTANCE OF NETWORKS AND INFLUENCE

So far we’ve talked quite a lot about how you start to create influence as a corporate citizenship expert within your organization. If you’re knowledgeable about your company’s purpose, goals, strategy, and processes, and your corporate citizenship strategy integrates with that of the business, you’re three quarters of the way there. Your next step is to figure out who can help you advance the environmental and social investments that will differentiate your company in a successful way.

Connecting your corporate citizenship strategy to business imperatives gives you a roadmap for how to build your network of influence. This is accomplished best by identifying the people who have a vested interest in achieving your objectives. For example, are you responsible for managing your company’s disaster relief efforts? If so you’ll need to check in with logistics, HR, and communications. Are you working on your company’s sustainability report? You should talk to people in many different operational units. Have you identified employee engagement as a citizenship business objective? Then someone in HR should be one of your first connections. Do you think you can reduce your water impact? Connect with your environment department, health and safety team, engineering group, and operations colleagues to get their buy-in and help. Is there a reputation or brand-building opportunity for you? Work with your communications and marketing team. You may not be leading an army, but you can mobilize one by connecting your objectives to their definitions of success. Building an engaged and motivated network will be absolutely fundamental to the success of your program.

These two diagrams (Figure 11) illustrate the interconnectedness of all areas of your business when it comes to implementing and experiencing your corporate citizenship program. The first uses the example of a disaster relief effort, and the second shows the network you need to build in order to implement measurement and report effectively.

Figure 11: Activating Nodes in Your Professional Network

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This figure illustrates how a single network may be mobilized to achieve different objective simultaneously.

The diagrams above illustrate how a single network structure can support two very different activities (sometimes simultaneously). If you have a strong network structure, you have a flexible and resilient team.

The reason networks are so successful is because each part builds on the strengths of the other; being flexible, they give an organization the stability it requires.

So it’s clear when you’re working out how to execute your corporate citizenship program that you have to think in a networked way. This is commonly referred to as “systems thinking.” There are five points you’ll need to touch, all of which link to each other:

If you make changes to one of these areas it has implications for all, so you always have to be thinking about whether you’ve organized things so you can achieve what you want.

In his book Designing Dynamic Organizations, Jay R. Galbraith created The Star Model(TM) to visualize how this works. For Galbraith, a strategy is basically a company’s formula for success, encompassing the organization’s mission as well as its business goals. Its purpose is to create competitive advantage, and to do that a company has to have superior organizational capabilities. The Galbraith Star Model™ highlights the multiple dimensions of successful strategy implementation (Figure 12). Galbraith’s model reminds us that it is not only about formal structures. It is about getting the right people involved, with the right incentives and processes to support the desired outcome. You can develop a Star Model for every program you have to ensure that you have a comprehensive plan that will yield the performance (what we have achieved) and culture (how you have achieved it) you are seeking.

Figure 12: The Galbraith Star Model — Organizing for Success

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This figure illustrates the dimensions of organization that your successful corporate citizenship undertaking should address.

Reproduced from Designing Organizations by Jay R. Galbraith. With permission from Jossey-Bass: San Francisco, CA, 2002.

THE RIGHT STRATEGY

We covered strategy and why it’s so fundamental to your success in the last chapter, so we won’t go into it again here in detail. But it’s important to remember that without the right strategy your corporate citizenship program is unlikely to succeed short term, and certainly won’t be sustainable in the years to come.

As an example of how this has played out in our own experience comes in Dave’s experience as Vice President of Corporate Responsibility and Chief Sustainability Officer of Campbell Soup Company. When he first arrived, he was asked to create a situational assessment and full strategic plan within three months, all without a team in place. He had a strong leader and a CEO who wanted a set of demanding goals; he also had a personal view of what success looked like, but knew from previous experience that it would take efforts from every part of the business to achieve it. The challenge he faced initially was bringing the executive team up to speed very quickly on the external environment, competitive landscape, and differentiating strategies he wanted the entire business to embrace — across the existing business divisions from healthy beverages to simple meals and baked snacks and biscuits. Understandably, the business presidents and functional leaders saw their consumer promise and bottom line priorities through different lenses; brands were delivering on specific consumer promises and internal functions had long-standing operational frameworks. Dave was hired to create a differentiating enterprise-wide strategy that brought together and leveraged strengths across these functions.

Having worked through complex global corporate citizenship challenges in the past, Dave was in a position to help bring in a broader perspective on outside issues with a much longer-term view. The CEO at the time, Doug Conant, proposed setting goals quickly and moving ahead. Dave knew that to drive real change, he needed to build consensus and a sense of ownership among the leadership team. So he went to those business leaders and brand managers and asked how he could help make them more successful long term. The answer was to translate what had to happen within each business unit and for each brand to make it the most competitive in the minds and hearts of consumers. Today’s food landscape continues to evolve to reflect consumer values toward transparency and real food.

The value that the team at Campbell sought to bring was a longer term guidance for how those brands and the full enterprise could prepare to be positioned in the same place as consumers were headed. The Campbell team built a strategy that integrated key business drivers and sought to prepare for the future. Campbell’s purpose and enterprise strategic plan now clearly reflects Real Food, Transparency and Sustainability as a core strategic imperative.

This is a tangible example of how a corporate citizenship strategy can work in tandem with other company leaders to have a long-term, positive and proactive effect on a brand and the parent company.

THE RIGHT PEOPLE

Getting the right people in your company on board is essential for the success of your strategy implementation. To start this process, you need to work out what your professional network is across the company, where the main corporate citizenship action will take place, and who might be best positioned to help you take action.

Here are the roles you should be considering when you’re creating your network:

Once you’ve identified your people, how do you go about recruiting them? The best way is to invite them to participate, and when someone raises their hand as an indication of interest you can consider whether they’re capable of doing what you need. If they are that’s great, but if not you can look at this as a professional development opportunity for the individual. Also, are you working with your leadership and development teams to ensure the person is identified as a good organizational citizen? Gaining recognition for enthusiasm and willingness to take on additional responsibility is a powerful motivator for many employees.

Suppose you have a requirement to improve the ethical sourcing in your supply chain. There’s bound to be at least one person in your company’s procurement department who’s sick to death of filling out forms, and would love to be involved in sustainability planning or sourcing more environmental-friendly materials for the company. Giving them the opportunity to interact with their peers on a topic they know a lot, and participation, provides them with several benefits: they broaden their professional network, they get more task variety, and they have the opportunity to demonstrate leadership. In return, you gain an enthusiastic new team member who will need guidance but is also willing to learn.

 

Notes from the Field

Working Through a Merger: Yours, Mine, and Ours

Marlene M. Ibsen, Vice President, Community Relations, The Travelers Companies, Inc.

Sometimes getting your team together can be more complicated than others. Travelers has grown not only organically but also through mergers and acquisitions. Experience has taught me that there are four practices to keep in mind when bringing two organizations together:

My most recent experience comes from my position in corporate philanthropy where, early on, we had to focus on merging two separate U.S. operations, and more recently are working with our colleagues in offices in Canada and the United Kingdom to establish common practices and priorities as a means of promoting the corporate culture internally and reinforcing brand identity externally.

It is important to understand the company leadership’s priorities in terms of cultural values and norms. For instance, are there key themes or values that the merged entity is focused on and communicating to internal and external stakeholders (e.g., expertise, customer service, innovation, etc.)? The cultural vision for the organization will provide the foundation from which you will build your department’s strategy in support of business priorities.

If you are in a corporate citizenship role, whether as the overall lead for ESG programs or sustainability or a subset of the whole portfolio, identifying the ideal state is a key step. What combination of programs, resources, advisors, and structure will support the company’s business goals while aligning with the corporate culture? From there, you can begin to develop a framework — with targets and objectives — to achieve that ideal, establish processes, and cultivate an environment to enable the work.

To create a corporate citizenship strategy aligned with company values, you must evaluate existing programs from predecessor organizations against your new framework and take a hard look at whether they are effective tools for developing and sustaining the culture of the merged organization. Institute a discipline of challenging your own assumptions and those of others. Ensure you are encouraging open dialog from all team members, to take advantage of institutional knowledge and individual expertise that contributes to a strategy that will yield positive outcomes for your department and company.

Once you have determined direction, strategy, and programs, create a communications plan that takes the concerns and potential negative (and positive) impact on internal and external audiences into consideration. First step: approval from senior management; it is important to get input and buy-in from the top to ensure your plans are supported if the impending changes result in concerns being raised through other channels within the organization. For all audiences, be ready to explain the business rationale, which should include why the chosen initiatives are important to the company and its character.

Building from the key values of the organization gives you the starting place, and you can then evolve through a continual cycle of evaluating results and getting internal and external stakeholder feedback to ensure you are staying on the right track.

You’ll have realized by now there’s a channel which employees always tune into in these situations: it’s called WIIFM (what’s in it for me). If you can work out what your opportunity offers them, not only will you engage them more readily but you’ll also broaden the network of people you can ask to work with you in the future.

THE RIGHT STRUCTURE

We’re moving onto the third point in your system now. How do you create the right structure for your program?

If you’re a department of three, for instance, you can’t realistically expect only one person to be responsible for the execution of a huge project for a major company. Therefore, thinking closely about the networks of people you recruit, and how you deploy them in a structured way, is vital.

Let’s look at an example. We’ve already mentioned how when Dave Stangis arrived at Campbell in 2008 he was charged with designing an overarching corporate citizenship strategy, complete with targets and goals in keeping with the values of this nearly 150-year-old company. The plan he developed was organized around four theaters of operation and leveraged a set of cultural norms that existed under previous CEO, Doug Conant, and a lexicon embedded within the culture at that time: environmental stewardship, interactions with customers and consumers, measurable community impact, and building an extraordinary workplace.

Each theater related to a theme built on “nourishing” (the company’s mission at the time was Nourishing People’s Lives, Everywhere Every Day): the planet, consumers, neighbors, and employees. They were also characterized by an audacious destination goal that was almost impossible to comprehend at the time, but which painted a clear picture of success. The goals were specifically designed to be clear and easy to understand, while also instilling creative tension and demanding change. In 2010, Campbell launched their original 2020 corporate citizenship agenda:

Campbell has continued to evolve with a new strategic framework anchored in its purpose — and its corporate citizenship strategy is evolving with it. No matter the point in time, you can see how important getting the necessary buy-in from a diverse range of business units and functions was in making the objective of good corporate citizenship just like any other business objective — one that would advance the company and deliver returns. Remember the purpose of a corporate citizenship strategy isn’t simply to do good, but also to drive competitive advantage.

While it was determined from the start that top corporate officers must firmly guide the execution of the strategy, Dave still needed to garner support from wider constituencies across various units and brands. To do this he used the Star Model we talked about earlier. A pivotal step in the implementation of his strategy at the time was the establishment of governing committees across each theater; he created four executive steering committees that included professionals from across the business units to set and achieve goals. These committees created accountability and fostered the process component: conversation and collaboration enabling Campbell to achieve its corporate citizenship goals. Recognize that your corporate citizenship strategy and any related governance structure will evolve, much like Campbell’s has over Dave’s tenure. He is now leveraging an entirely new framework in partnership with CEO Denise Morrison and Campbell’s purpose launched in 2014, Real Food that matters for life’s moments.

You’ll remember in the last chapter we talked about strategy being similar to generalship; it’s the same with structure, in that you’re marshaling resources to get tasks done. Effective structures provide the motivation for people to want to participate and support the processes for communication with them.

Many companies have created formal as well as informal governance structures around their corporate citizenship programs. Employee councils help provide feedback about the priorities you’ve set and, by consulting groups of employees in their arenas of influence, will provide feedback about what’s working and what’s not.

By the way, some of the best people to have in your governance structure are natural “boundary spanners” — employees who are well known across the company (often they’ve been around a long time) and have good relationships in different areas. If you connect with them regularly and ask them to contribute their ideas they’ll feel a sense of responsibility and ownership, as well as giving you excellent feedback on your plans and campaigns. Not only that, when they’re able to report successes back to your group, it helps reinforce your processes through comparison (a little healthy competition is never a bad thing).

 

Notes from the Field

Consider Corporate Citizenship Governance from the Beginning

Dave Stangis, Vice President of Corporate Responsibility and Chief Sustainability Officer, Campbell Soup Company

In my experience at Intel Corporation, later at Campbell Soup Company, and in multiple conversations I have had with my peers and other companies seeking to establish strategic corporate citizenship programs one key to success comes up time and again — that is to consider and establish a governance structure or structures that drive accountability and enable decision-making. Most companies, of course have organizations in place to manage human resources, finance, marketing, legal, operations, sales, etc., however the corporate citizenship agenda often cuts across many internal organizations and functions and almost always relies on decision-making and accountability outside of traditional organizational structures.

At Intel, I relied upon a management review committee (MRC) convention used at the company for many years. I established a Corporate Responsibility MRC that included key decision-makers and content experts from disciplines such as environmental health and safety, HR, legal, corporate governance, communications, government, and public affairs. This group was formally chartered with roles, responsibilities, and oversight functions. It met regularly and intersected with many other formal and matrix organizations across the company. It was critical in driving strategy, enlistment, and results — but perhaps most importantly, being able to weigh company opportunities and make decisions. This was also my sounding board and advisor group. At the time I put it in place, every member was my senior.

At Campbell, I built on those learnings and the Campbell culture to propose to formal governance structures: one at the most senior level of the company in the form of an ultimate steering committee, and one to oversee and drive the sustainability strategy. These team charters were drafted and shared with the General Counsel and CEO as part of my strategic plan proposal. These concepts were new to these Campbell leaders and they saw great value in the design. They asked me to create three more formally chartered teams that would help guide the workplace, marketplace, and community pillars of the corporate citizenship strategy for Campbell. Each of these teams also had formal governance charters, and were supported and staffed under CEO direction. While I directed the teams, the company’s top executives in charge of the various functions were assigned as partners with me. These formally chartered teams, combined with CEO buy-in and support were critical to jumpstart early action and momentum.

Over time, the governance structures evolved in both companies as corporate citizenship strategies and programs matured. No matter where you are on your corporate citizenship agenda — creating from scratch or taking over a mature program, you have to consider and build into your strategy a governance system to drive accountability and decision-making to fully integrate corporate citizenship into the business operations.

THE RIGHT PROCESSES

This is the fourth element of your organizational ecosystem. How do you get your work done? Processes cover every element of your corporate citizenship program implementation, including the steps you’re taking to recruit people to your team, how they’re going to carry out the tasks, how decisions will be made, how you’re going to communicate progress, and what methods you’ll use to document those processes so others can replicate them.

You may be wondering what we mean by processes. Think of them as being like the directions section of a recipe. The same ingredients can yield very different results, based on the processes used to cook them. Take the processes you use to cook an egg: the procedure for boiling an egg is very different to that for frying an egg. You need to decide the outcome you want at the beginning so you know the best process to achieve it.

Here’s an example. Suppose you work for a large retail chain that employs many workers who don’t have regular access to computers. If you want to recruit a large number of them to participate in your corporate citizenship program, your process would involve going into the stores to talk with managers and associates face to face, or communicating with them via their newsletters or message boards. Whereas in a high-tech company you would be expected to communicate through digital channels. You use different processes to engage the same number of employees, but it will look different, depending on the environment.

Communication processes are obviously critical, but there are also execution processes. Take, for example, the green teams we discussed earlier. If you have ambassadors from all over your company who have offered to be part of your initiative, not all of them will be capable of executing your plan without support. Let’s face it, many have probably never done anything like this before. So you’ll need to provide them with step-by-step directions for what you want them to do, and support them while they execute it. Your process might include a timeline and sequence of tasks. Say you’re instructing them to send an email to a certain group of people; it would be a good idea to include an email template for them to use. It could even be as detailed as telling them how to get onto the company’s internal email system if they’re not already (or providing the name of the person who can help them do that).

One of the processes Campbell has implemented to deepen employee involvement in their corporate citizenship program is to create an orientation module for all new employees as part of their regular onboarding. It begins by explaining what sustainability and corporate citizenship mean at Campbell, then goes on to provide information about how employees can become involved in the program and learn more. It’s seen as a simple, low cost way to make everyone aware of the corporate citizenship mission and opportunities. Without this orientation, many people would spend months or even years wondering how to connect with them, whereas now they know what to do from day one. Dave has a small team at Campbell, but they can tell you, one of his mantras is converting people’s passion to business process. It is the way to make corporate citizenship “stick.”

You’ll also need to decide where the lines of responsibility are drawn between your committees and yourself. Are you going to have meetings, and if so how often? Who is going to do what? Are they providing input, or are they decision-makers? Remember to document it so you know what works next time.

Which leads us to this: effective companies all have something in common when it comes to processes and procedures. Each time they create a new one they do an action review, asking “What did we do? What went well? What didn’t go well? And how can we improve?” They then record this information so they can avoid reinventing the wheel each time. This essential but often overlooked step in creating your processes will save you and your team hours of wasted time and effort.

THE RIGHT METRICS AND INCENTIVES

The people you’ve organized to implement your processes are more likely to stay engaged with your initiative if it’s clear to them how you will measure and reward success. Establishing agreed upon metrics is vital in that they communicate progress, so everyone can understand what’s been achieved. There’s nothing more demotivating than working hard on a project only to be left in the dark about what the end results have been, or even how it’s progressing as time goes by.

Incentives for performance are, of course, a little tricky when you’re managing people through influence (rather than by direct control) as you can’t necessarily give them financial rewards. There are other incentives you can offer, however. One is a job well done; intrinsic motivations like satisfaction can be a powerful incentive to continue, and people like to carry on doing things they experience success with. Public recognition for achieving milestones can also be a powerful motivator, especially when it’s conferred by your CEO or other key players in your c-suite.

Different employee groups are motivated by different things. If an early career employee who’s very interested in developing their professional network is publicly praised for their contribution to a corporate citizenship project, and as a result, it comes to the attention of a top level executive, they can perceive that as more of a benefit than being recognized by their direct manager. For a more experienced employee, the reward would be more likely to come from getting involved in something bigger than themselves, which allows them to leave the world (and the company) a better place. It’s part of their legacy.

This is good news for you, because you’re unlikely to have a budget to reward people financially, but you can reward them in other ways. As part of its reward structure, Campbell has put in place an array of employee recognition programs for work related to sustainability and social responsibility. These have included peer recognition programs, and handwritten notes from the CEO, along with praise at employee forums and in articles on the company’s intranet. There are also social responsibility components included in Campbell’s Greatness Awards, which are their highest recognition for work done by individuals and teams. The CEO and corporate leadership present these awards annually.

As you get more sophisticated and your program matures, you can think about pay incentives. Among managers and executives, compensation is a growing part of the reward structure.1

Metrics and Measurement

It’s worth taking a moment here to focus on how you’re going to measure the results of your program.

The first questions to ask yourself are: what would you like to measure, and what can you actually measure? Depending on your capabilities and resources, you may not be able to measure all outcomes or even impacts.

Start internally. What are the key performance metrics of your strategy based on the work you’ve done so far in this book? Will you be seeking to assess your company’s energy use, greenhouse gas emissions, waste generation and recycling, and water use? How about employee volunteer hours, training and development, and investments? Would you include product and service-related items, such as packaging improvements, sales from improved product lines, and consumer or stakeholder perceptions? Getting to the KPIs and baseline data for your company can be a major undertaking, so don’t underestimate the time you’ll need. You can, however, use some of these external resources to help you:

These three organizations provide standards and measurements for how companies are being measured against each other in their performance of the ESG dimensions of business. Each offers an indexed set of measurements that will help your company understand the state of current best practices in measuring ESG performance.

As discussed in the preceding chapter, no matter where on the trajectory of work you’re able to measure, you’ll create a better program if you decide the metrics and measures during the design phase.

THE ONLY CONSTANT IS CHANGE

And finally, remember one of the constants in business is change. A common reason why corporations seek our help at the Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship is because there’s been a change of top management and priorities are shifting. An alteration in strategy means you may need to adjust your whole organizational ecosystem for success (your star design) in order to address changes in personnel, strategy, or work processes. This can feel really daunting for a corporate citizenship director, and it can also be very unsettling for the team you’ve pulled together to help you execute your strategy. It may be a time when you pull back and focus on those elements of your program that are less aspirational and more focused on enhancing persistent operational goals, like keeping employees engaged or finding operational efficiencies. However, bear in mind every shift in organization or strategy can be a moment of opportunity.

Here’s an example of a company which has been through major change in its corporate citizenship program in recent years: Walmart. In the decade 2000–2010 this business was extraordinarily influential in developing sustainable packaging and plant management, bringing in products like the compact fluorescent (curly) light bulb. This created not only environmental but also business benefits, because less packaging meant they could get more products on their shelves, increasing their sales per square foot and reducing shipping costs with products which were lighter and less bulky to transport. However, just when they were getting some great recognition for this, the media began to shift their attention to income inequality. So Walmart went (in the media’s eyes) from being at the vanguard of the environmental movement to being seen as needing to address social issues in terms of their employment practices.

At that point they had to move their attention away from the environmental work (much of which was well embedded by then in any case) to the social side. Now they’re developing programs to bring their high-potential employees into online learning, and innovating with a whole raft of social initiatives such as promoting low-cost fresh produce to lower income people. Their focus had to change, which meant the structure of their program had to go with it, and the people who are now the ambassadors for their social initiatives aren’t necessarily the same people who were working on their environmental projects. As you can imagine, different capabilities were needed.

Alongside that, their metrics of success changed. Instead of being measured in kilowatts or tons of packaging saved, they’re now measured in more human terms. This means their processes have changed as well, because they’re now focused on the people who work for them, in addition to their products.

PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER

You can see the way to organize your plan is to track each of the five points of the star, because if even one of them is out of kilter you’re not going to be able to get the work done.

If you’ve got good people and a great structure, but you haven’t implemented a reward system, then you’re not going to keep those employees on board with your program. On the other hand, if you have the right people and structured rewards, but no process for communicating them, then your projects won’t be running effectively either. Each of the five elements is part of the network, and the good news is there’s much more stability in this five-point system and in the network you develop.

WHAT WE’VE COVERED

10 QUESTIONS TO ANSWER BEFORE YOU MOVE ON

  1. Have you drawn a map of your existing network — the people who can help you implement your plans?
  2. Have you identified the people in your existing network who will serve as workers, ambassadors, and sponsors? Do you have a healthy number of each, and in the right places? What can you do to get a critical mass in key departments?
  3. Have you worked out an influencing strategy for approaching and motivating the people in these new areas?
  4. Can you describe your corporate citizenship structure? Have you created an organization that allows for feedback and decision-making from key contributors? Do people understand their roles and the accountability they have to the project and each other?
  5. Can you describe the WIIFM for each member of your corporate citizenship network?
  6. Do people understand their roles and the accountability they have to the strategy/project and to each other?
  7. What processes do you currently use, and how could they be improved? Are they documented? Does everyone understand how they should be implemented?
  8. What metrics can you measure today? What metrics do you believe you need to measure that you can’t measure today?
  9. How will you communicate these metrics and measurements to your team?
  10. Have you defined a set of incentives that you want to use or create? Which are in place now and which are part of your future plans?

NOTE

1. The Boston College Center for Corporate Citizenship (2015).