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From paper to practice: Creating a corporate culture rooted in sustainability

Practical recommendations for transforming your corporate culture and integrating sustainability into everyday work behaviors and business practices.

Corporate sustainability goes beyond setting a target for lower carbon emissions. It’s more than publishing an annual report showcasing increased gender diversity in senior management. And corporate sustainability certainly does not refer to philanthropic activities such as sending employees to paint schools in underprivileged neighborhoods.

While these actions are commendable and contribute to respecting people and the planet, they alone do not define an organization as sustainable.

Sustainability is not a one-time task or a legal obligation to be fulfilled once a year. It represents a fundamental shift in how business is conducted – an approach to how a company interacts with the world. It necessitates a longer-term transformation that requires a mindset open to change and an adjustment of conventional business practices.

Fostering sustainable and responsible corporate behavior throughout operations and across value chains requires embedding respect for human rights and environmental rights into corporate governance, policies, processes and culture. It involves ensuring fair labor practices, promoting diversity and inclusion, supporting community development, establishing equitable sourcing practices and ethical business models as well as actively reducing carbon footprints, minimizing waste, conserving resources, and protecting ecosystems. It requires identifying and addressing the risks and impacts a business may have on people and the planet through the integrating of a sustainability perspective to the company’s risk management system.

However, to shift the word “sustainability” from a mere buzzword in investor pitch decks or code of conduct documents to actual practice, an organization must first transform its corporate culture to one of sustainability.

Let me explain what I mean by a corporate culture of sustainability? 

Culture is the unwritten rules of “how things are done here” and what here means varies depending on factors such as the country, the organization’s history, its ownership structure and the leadership style at the top. While a company may have an impressive vision and a comprehensive sustainability strategy to realize that vision, a company culture is not what is written on paper. A corporate culture is shaped by how people in your organization act and treat each other every day at work

You may have great words to describe the three or five corporate values, but if your people do not internalize those values and do not live by them, they remain just words. Becoming a sustainable organization therefore necessitates creating a sustainability culture first – one that is connected to the organization’s purpose and strategy and creates longer-term sustainable value. Only then will the company be able to implement that comprehensive strategy and achieve that impressive vision.

To transform your corporate culture into one of sustainability, you will first need to conduct a cultural assessment to determine the current and desired corporate cultures and identify employee values, behaviors and practices as well as the resistance levels of people in different locations, business units, and functions of your organization.

Obtaining the endorsement and ownership of the board and executive leadership, who will set the tone and repeat it on every occasion, and finding sponsors among people leaders at different levels that wholeheartedly endorse the sustainability culture and lead by example are two key factors of a successful cultural transformation process.

Change agents, a group of early adaptors that are enthusiastic about sustainability and that will radiate the sustainability culture among peers, need to be identified early on and motivated to own the transformation into a corporate sustainability culture.

Above all, however, the sustainability team must be empowered by an adequate governance structure with the necessary reporting lines connecting the head of sustainability or the chief sustainability officer to the top decisionmakers and with adequate people and financial resources so the sustainability team is well-equipped to drive the sustainability culture forward.

Once these prerequisites are in place, you can build the roadmap to achieve the sustainability culture needed to align your “talk” with your “walk”.

Transforming company culture into one that is inclusive, fair and respectful of people’s rights and the environment demands some level of involvement and ownership from every employee. This means you must speak to the head, heart and hands of your people, using their language – both literally and figuratively – and acknowledging their concerns about changing the status quo or their acceptance of sustainable practices and relating the need for a sustainability culture to those considerations.

The roadmap to reach a sustainability culture should therefore incorporate awareness and capacity building programs addressing the different reasons and levels of resistance among employees and tailored to their roles and everyday work realities. These should be supplemented by regular communication and various opportunities to discuss and internalize sustainability.

Corporate culture is dynamic; it evolves according to changes in leadership, shifts in industry trends, and the evolving values and expectations of employees and stakeholders. A sustainability culture is a continuous change management process that must be regularly assessed against the changing values and behaviors of employees and adapted accordingly. This process requires the involvement, to varying extents, of all people in an organization.

If planned and executed in the right way, a corporate culture rooted in sustainability has the power to drive employee motivation, competence and satisfaction by fostering a sense of care and recognition among employees and connecting their work to a broader and meaningful purpose.

Transforming organizational cultures into respectful and responsible ones is my passion. If you’re seeking to develop a roadmap for establishing a sustainability culture in your organization, I’d love to chat: serra@peopleatcore.com.

Serra for the CORE team

Meet the CORE team!

The members of the CORE team have been working together for almost a decade, helping companies navigate the intersection of business and human rights. Now under the umbrella of CORE, they deliver sustainable and ethical solutions for clients.

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