Pathway
Assign
Description
Clearly establish accountability for delivering on your organization’s sustainability vision by establishing sustainability roles, allocating responsibility to senior leaders, and translating organizational goals and targets into employee responsibilities. Support accountability by incorporating sustainability criteria into compensation and promotion.
Practice
Sustainability Roles
Description
Assign sustainability roles: establish roles or responsibilities within the organization that allocate sustainability responsibilities
Question
To what extent have you established roles and responsibilities within the organization to allocate sustainability responsibilities?
Resources
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Chapter 8 in Leading Sustainable Change: An Organizational Perspective
This will be a valuable resource if your organization is early on in its efforts to embed sustainability. It will help give you a sense of how your responsibilities may change over time as sustainability becomes more embedded at your organization. The chapter is based on a 2013 study by authors Kathleen Miller from the Boston Consulting Group and George Serafeim from Harvard University.
Practice
Allocate to Senior Leaders
Description
Allocate to senior leaders: allocate the responsibility of delivering on the sustainability agenda to the most senior leadership roles within the organization
Question
To what extent do you allocate the responsibility for delivering on the sustainability agenda to senior leaders?
Resources
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Making Sustainability Stick
Chapter 5 of this book (Goals/Vision and your Sustainability North Star) provides activities and frameworks for companies to help identify senior leaders of organizations and further assign those senior leaders the responsibility and accountability of achieving and driving forward progress to achieving sustainability goals. The entire book is a useful resource for any organization beginning to think about embedding sustainability into their organization and provides frameworks and tools for businesses to identify and define sustainability in their organization, understand material issues, baseline their sustainability initiatives and create goals and targets, and creating sustainable systems and processes.
Practice
Personal Goals
Description
Personal goals: translate organizational sustainability goals and targets into employee responsibilities and expectations
Question
To what extent do you translate organizational sustainability goals and targets into employee responsibilities and expectations?
Resources
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The Role of Human Resource Management in Corporate Social Responsibility
This is a useful resource if you are looking to partner with HR in your company. This guide provides helpful background research on the connection between sustainability and a variety of HR functions, including recruitment, onboarding, and employee development. It also lays out ten steps that HR managers can take to support embedding sustainability within their organization, along with examples from leading companies.
Practice
Compensate
Description
Link employee compensation (salaries, wages, incentives and commissions) to the achievement of set sustainability objectives
Question
To what extent do you link employee compensation to the achievement of set sustainability objectives?
Resources
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The Puzzle of Motivation
In this TED Talk, Dan Pink outlines some key findings of social science experiences focused on the impact of pay-for-performance on task fulfilment. Using the conclusion that pay-for-performance incentives work well for well-defined but not for those that involve more cognitive thought, he suggests that there is a disconnect between business compensation and motivational science. A greater focus on intrinsic motivation within employee compensation structures could yield more effective results over structures that only focus on extrinsic motivations. -
Integrating ESG issues into executive pay
This comprehensive paper from UN-backed Principles for Responsible Investment initiative and Global Compact LEAD (a leadership platform within the UN Global Compact) facilitates discussions between a diverse group of institutional investors and companies to identify the rationale, feasibility, and effectiveness of corporate practices, which include environmental, social, and governance factors within executive management goals and incentive schemes. The main objective of the resulting guidance is to support and enhance the investor-company dialogue on these practices. The recommendations and guidance presented aspire to reflect a common understanding of major opportunities and challenges, as well as practical examples. This document provides a tangible engagement tool to guide dialogue between shareholders and investee companies on this topic, and will help improve corporate boards’ practices to the benefit of both companies and their investors.
Practice
Promote
Description
Move people with sustainability values and skills into higher positions in the organization through incorporating sustainability criteria into decisions about advancement
Question
To what extent do you move people with sustainability values and skills into higher positions in the organization through incorporating sustainability criteria into decisions about advancement?
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