As sustainability becomes more and more embedded in the day to day running of foodservice businesses, engaging stakeholders is the next step in implementing your sustainability plans and achieving success. The Footprint Forum on 6 October – Advantage Through Stakeholder Engagement – focussed on how stakeholder engagement can improve Corporate Sustainability Performance and bring benefits beyond social and environmental responsibility.
Stakeholder engagement might be seen as the shiny Russian doll of the business world. As you crack open each layer there is another waiting to greet you be it employees, suppliers, customers, investors or even yourself. The idea of stakeholder engagement can be seen evolving from the early autocratic motivational theorist Frederick Taylors Scientific Management (1911), through Abraham Maslow and his Hierarchy of Needs (1943), right up to today with the McLeod Report (Download the report from our resources above) and the Q12 Survey (a survey of Standard Chartereds employee engagement) further proving that an engaged stakeholder is a more productive member of your organisation as seen firsthand by the Footprint Forums keynote presenters Thomas Jelley, Corporate Citizenship Manager at Sodexo and Mike Kelly, KPMGs Head of Corporate Social Responsibility.
With over 40,000 employees in the UK & Ireland Sodexo is a vast organisation that operates a diverse portfolio and they have found that engagement is key to the success of their business. Sodexo have adopted a top down approach to engagement with their Better Tomorrow Plan as they see both sustainability and engagement needing management and leadership. To offer this structure Sodexo develop a narrative that reflects the companys culture and goals, and which can then also be defined in a way thats central to the organisations success before opening it up to the stakeholders through a variety of platforms. One such platform has been GreenSpark which asked employees to submit their ideas on how Sodexo could become greener, which ultimately saw three ideas implemented and has helped to contribute to an enviable 67% of Sodexo employees feeling highly engaged.
Guesting at the Forum, KPMG told of similar results when focusing on their employees as key stakeholders. Mike Kelly went on to explain that their focus on sustainable stakeholder engagement comes from the top. John Griffith Jones, the Joint Chairman and Senior UK Partner of KPMG Europe LLP, has said Sustainability is fundamental to our business model and strategy. Mike endeavours to make accessible corporate social responsibility key to KPMGs engagement strategy and encourages employees to take their existing work based skill sets and apply it outside. This approach has seen KPMG reinvest £10.9million into local communities, whilst 39% of KPMG employees have donated their spare time to external causes raking up over 42,000 volunteer hours for a number of projects and pursuits and over £535,000 for Barnados .
Harriet Kingaby, from Futerra Sustainability Communications, warned that offering engagement isnt enough, referring to Futerras 10 Golden Rules of Creating Sustainable Development, and gave championing schemes as an ideal example of how engagement can go awry when under managed. Futerra have recently helped E.ON revamp their champion scheme as the current champions had become little more than reviled bin police. With additional support from the management, retaining and recruiting new champions and encouraging innovation, the E.ON scheme was turned round. Harriet said that the most important factors to bear in mind are involving the right people who are knowledgeable, charismatic and connected and then supporting them from above.
Patrick Andrews is the Head of Governance at RiverSimple and as much as they have a cutting edge product, a hydrogen fuel cell powered car capable of an equivalent of 300 miles to the gallon, theyve also got a cutting edge approach to sustainable stakeholder engagement which they believe reduces their risks and makes them more successful. RiverSimple divide their stakeholders into 6 categories of investors, staff, customers, suppliers, neighbours and environment and then try and regulate and inform the factors that influence engagement such as behaviour, regulations and individual consciousness.
Charlie Duff, from BraveNewTalent, highlighted how graduate recruiters are now using social media to engage with potential employees and then nurture that relationship over several years. Many recruiters have found BraveNewTalent is the ideal way to recruit graduates. Companies like Pinsent Masons LLP use their current crop of graduates to help recruit the next generation. This sustained pre-engagement is helping Pinsent Masons to recruit the best candidates in a competitive field and retain them once theyre employed as the graduates already know the company theyre joining, its culture and its expectations. The power of social media to engage cannot be underestimated, particularly as a large proportion of those that need to e engaged are already social media junkies like Charlie.
The Forum closed with an open discussion from the panel made up from many of the afternoons speakers who were also joined by Wendy Bartlett, MD of Bartlett Mitchell, Tony Cooke Director of Government Relations, Sodexo, and Diana Spellman, MD of Partners in Purchasing. Between the panel much of the advice sounded like common sense, but only because the way theyd implemented these ideas had been so successful it seemed like the obvious way to embark upon stakeholder engagement. When, for example, Wendy Bartlett and her partners founded Bartlett Mitchell, they decided theyd take what worked and then stick with it and only change things when they needed changing and those changes, such as supporting a battery hen charity by buying their free range eggs or trying to reduce traffic with Free Wheeling Wednesday, would be bite sized instead of wholesale changes that would only serve to frustrate the stakeholders involved. The overriding message from the panel was the engagement without the right leadership and support it is something that can fizzle out.
Adam Taub, who had effortlessly moderated the forum, drew the proceedings to an end with an apt quote from Ghandi which could well be applied to stakeholder engagement: First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win. Where do you fit in with stakeholder engagement?
