Complete Article
Eleven Sustainability Reporting Tips for
Reputationally-Challenged Companies
Part One
Your company may be reputationally challenged because of the industry it’s in, or because it has — or is perceived to have — accomplished something notably unsustainable. Either way, you find yourself with an active critical community — a set of stakeholders who will read your Corporate Responsibility (CR) report carefully and with a robust interest in finding something wrong. The stakes for your CR report are higher.

Here are some tips aimed at helping Reputationally-Challenged Companies — “RCCs” — write a CR report that is credible, authentic and reduces the odds of gotchas that can set back transparency, sustainability and (potentially) your career.

ONE: Don’t Even Think About Skipping GRI
Okay. You’re leading the report or are a member of the reporting team. I’ll start by assuming your company intends to use Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) Guidelines in their latest incarnation (currently G3.1, with G4 slouching over the horizon), and the sector supplements that are material to your business. GRI guidelines allow for more flexibility than you might imagine, but if you don’t plan to use GRI at all, my recommendation is that you call your document something along the lines of “sustainability highlights” rather than a sustainability report.

TWO: Spit out the Corporate Kool-Aid
Spit out the corporate Kool Aid and become a critical stakeholder. This isn’t easy. Even employees who consider themselves objective have a natural identification with their employer (AKA paycheck issuer), and are more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt. To write an objective, evenhanded report, you have to get out of this mindset. Experiential learning can help: Divide key execs and reporters in your company into two teams, give them some background info, and let one team play the role of critical stakeholders. You’ll be amazed how quickly they get into it. Need inspiration? Imagine that your company just fired you.

THREE: Anticipate Internal Resistance & Build Relationships Early
Companies under fire develop information-protective cultures. Expect it to be harder to persuade your colleagues that sharing “internal” information about operations and performance with potential critics is a great idea. Add to this that your request is just one more item on their lengthy To Do lists, in the category of: Probably Won’t Factor Into My Performance Review or Bonus. How do you manage this?

First, know the business case for your company specifically inside and out, and articulate it convincingly. Talk about competitors who are already reporting, and frame transparency as a leadership practice to get competitive juices flowing. Second, build relationships before you need them. Swing by the offices of key information holders and approvers and take them to coffee. Ask about what they do and what they care about, so that when you go to them for information you don’t have to start the conversation with: “Hi, you don’t know me, but I need you to collect and aggregate data on …”

FOUR: “Should We Include This?”
In the training manual for its two-day certification course, GRI notes dryly: “Partial communications can lead to misunderstanding.” That’s particularly true for RCCs, whose materiality nets need to be woven a bit finer than most to head off accusations that they’re hiding something. At the same time, you don’t want to create a book-length report. Solution?

Web-based reports allow readers to elevator down into ever more detailed levels of information — and simultaneously into issues deemed to be of lesser materiality — until they’re satisfied. If you do plan to stick with a pdf format, create a summary version for what’s most material and a full version where you can stow everything. Alternatively, embed links in your pdf that make it easy for readers to find greater detail and lesser levels of materiality on your website.

At a recent GRI certification training I participated in, debate broke out over whether a large company should report as material information that it had one or two employee discrimination lawsuits out of 100,000 employees. If you’re an RCC, per above, the answer might be yes. But if it’s one hundred lawsuits out of a hundred thousand, you should not only report it, you need to say what you’re doing about it.

If management hasn’t already taken corrective action, tell them they need to do so now. (Along the lines of: “If I can’t say that we’re doing something about this issue in the report, we’re going to get killed…”) This is one of the ways report leaders and teams, who gain a uniquely comprehensive view of their companies — and (at least in theory) have learned to see the company through the eyes of its stakeholders — have the power to influence management toward effecting important change. Reporting can be an important management tool, even after the reporting period in question.

FIVE: Kick the Tires
Shocking as it may sound, policy doesn’t always equal practice at large organizations. If Human Resources at the corporate level tells you that every employee at your 52 facilities around the world receives 12 hours of quality training every year, it might be worth chatting with a couple of employees or HR managers away from headquarters to see if that’s really what happens. If you’re told that 100 percent of solid waste is sorted, recycled or composted, drop by the loading dock. Your goal is to avoid having contradictions between policy and practice emerge after the report, which can lead to embarrassing revelations externally and breed cynicism internally.

You may have noticed that these tips would be useful for any company writing a CR report, not only for RCC reporters. Absolutely — only more so for RCCs, because they have an unforgiving audience. Report leaders and writers may need to underline this to justify the additional resources and due diligence required to write a more rigorous report.

In the five reporting tips above I’ve focused on internal actions. In the second half of this article I’ll share six more RCC reporting tips for internal and external action.

Part Two
SIX: Get out of the Fortress
Corporate conference rooms may be good for some things, but they aren’t good for conversations with critical stakeholders. People feel constrained, acutely conscious of their formal roles and worried that what they say may be used against them.

When I co-led a stakeholder engagement initiative for Ford Motor Co., we met at a local coffee house with the heads of Global Exchange, Rainforest Action Network, Bluewater Network and a senior Sierra Club representative. The two “suits” from Ford wore khakis and casual shirts, with the result that we all looked like members of the same species. Before long people began to chat informally and connect as human beings rather than avatars of their job descriptions.

The NGOs discovered that Ford wasn’t run by heartless robber barons, and the Ford team found out that the NGOs weren’t anti-capitalists who hated Bill Ford and wanted the company to go out of business — they just wanted Ford to change some of its business practices. “Oh,” said the senior khaki. “We can negotiate that — we do it all the time.”

SEVEN: Pay Attention to the “Anti’s”
Early in my career, when I worked at the nonprofit Business for Social Responsibility (BSR), I was the junior member of a team led by CEO Bob Dunn that did consulting work for Philip Morris (now Altria). Our Philip Morris counterparts were surprisingly (at least to me) smart, open-minded, often libertarian and well informed. But they routinely dismissed a great swathe of their more vociferous critics as “anti’s,” at which point those critics — who in fact represented the views of a big chunk of the American public — ceased to exist in their minds.

That wave of the wand increased the PM team’s comfort level, but it meant that they were making decisions based on insufficient information. You need to be aware of, and in most cases respond to, all your important stakeholders’ concerns, comfortable or otherwise. Blithely ignoring tough critics makes you look clueless; ignoring criticism will lead even more moderate stakeholders to assume you didn’t respond because you don’t have a good answer.

However: While holding a keen awareness of your most critical stakeholders in your mind, remember that you aren’t only writing to them. Your loudest critics may not be your most important stakeholders.

EIGHT: Unlearn PR & Embrace the Specific
Be afraid — be very afraid — if you see phrases like “industry leading,” “best in class,” and “visionary” unrolling on your computer screen, or if you find yourself trying plausibly to articulate the oxymoron that goes something like this: “We’ve been the most responsible (insert industry) company since (insert name of scion) launched this great company in [insert date]. And this year we’ve done some fantastic things to improve our performance. Not that we’re suggesting that in previous years our performance needed improving, because we were already great … ” and so on. That way lies madness.

Writers and editors trained in the vague hyperbole of PR need to hold fast to the Specific. Don’t put yourself — or the C-suite — in the position of having to explain that what you said in the report is mostly but, um, not entirely true. Your critics will be looking for exactly this kind of opportunity to cast doubt on your entire report. If it’s not specific, and you can’t back it up 100 percent, don’t say it. If 86 percent of your facilities reported data, say that rather than “nearly all.” That might result in more modest claims that don’t sound as impressive as soaring hyperbole — but it will sound like the truth. And that way lies credibility.

NINE: Say “Oops”
Humility doesn’t come naturally in the hyper-competitive corporate arena, but it’s essential for RCCs in particular to acknowledge mistakes made and goals unmet. This needs to be said up front, in the CEO letter, not beside an asterisk in the back. One study found that if you tell people 10 good things about your company (or yourself) they dismiss all 10. Why shouldn’t they? They’ve just been subjected to an ad, even if the claims are verifiably true.

But tell people nine good things and admit one meaningful missed goal or screw-up (alternate term acceptable), you not only have people’s attention, they are more likely to believe the nine good things you tell them. Practice starting sentences with “Unfortunately, …” and “We didn’t reach our goal this year because …” Use language along the lines of “Despite these accomplishments, we know we have a long way to go.” ‘Fess your sins — you’ll feel better (and be lots more credible) if you do.

TEN: Is it Real or Aspirational?
When you talk about future performance, be it a specific goal or (dangerously) an implied goal, be very clear about what’s aspirational and what’s a hard goal for which you’re willing to be held accountable. It doesn’t hurt to qualify this by laying out the potential factors that might make the goal difficult to achieve. Sweeping predictions may bite you where it hurts.

ELEVEN: Tone and Visuals Matter
An essential reporting consideration that GRI (understandably, given its mandate) doesn’t address is tone — or call it voice, or attitude. It’s critical to get this right, and it probably means diverging from the tone of your traditional corporate communications. An otherwise good report will be undercut if it comes across as arrogant or condescending. People’s responses to corporations, especially to RCCs, have powerful emotional undercurrents, very like their responses to other people. Think of someone in your office or at a party whose arrogance really got under your skin. Visualizing them? Now don’t write a report that sounds like that person.

A second reporting element that GRI doesn’t address is who turns up in the photos in your report. Stock photos shout greenwashing, advertising and an attempt to appear more perfect than you are. Photos of real employees doing real things — human beings at work rather than generically-expressioned models — evoke authenticity, transparency and pride in your workforce.

Finally: Remember (and tune internal expectations accordingly) that zero criticism isn’t the goal. That you may take a few hits is no reason to write from a defensive crouch. The additional rigor you achieve by following these 11 tips will give you and management greater confidence in how the report will be received, and make it more likely that criticism will be — instead of gotchas — disagreement with your policies, which is fair game.

Go ahead and write a confident, positive piece of communications. Share your genuine achievements and express pride in them. Certainly two of your most important stakeholder groups, employees and management, want you to do so.

More than any other document, your CR report has the potential to earn at least the grudging respect of your critics. At the end of the day, sustainable business practices and transparent communications represent opportunity more than risk. Keep that tip in mind above all.

Steve Voien
Copyrighted material 2011 — all rights reserved.