The Safety- Sustainability 'Connect'

by Murray Hogarth

AFTER years of mixed success in urging corporations to “just do” sustainability rather than agonize over it the terror attacks in the US have crystallized a key theme for my firm, Ecos Corporation. There is a powerful but simple “connect” between safety, along with its fellow travellers security and stability, and the pursuit of sustainability.

As the economic fallout from September 11 has so graphically reminded us, market stability relies on people (i.e. consumers) feeling safe and secure. The craving for safety and security is an elemental human desire that runs even deeper than core values. It has to be bad business to ignore such an emotional force.

Terror has propelled the current collapse in the consumer comfort zone, but it’s not hard to imagine similar community alarm being provoked by killer hurricanes, deadly emerging diseases, water supply crises or other disasters linked to environmental factors.

For corporations the safety-sustainability “connect” manifests itself in a continuum that begins with workplace health and safety, the original entry point for many companies embracing corporate responsibility.

It then runs through important questions a company has to ask itself like: Are our products safe? Do we practice safe science and R&D? And the tough questions that external parties ask about companies: Does the company provide a safe return on investment? Is it safe to have in our community? And is it safe for the environment?

Any company with pretensions to be sustainable financially, socially and environmentally has to be safe on all of these fronts and more. It’s logical that a company that kills or maims its own workers can’t be expected to care much for its wider environment, its neighbours, or even its customers.

While safety is relatively simple in our experience, sustainability is a concept that corporations find variously threatening, baffling, frustrating and very occasionally liberating. Instead of doing or “operationalizing” sustainability they all too often end up in a state of paralysis by analysis.

What they need is an easy entry point, like safety, that makes sustainability real in terms of their strategy, planning, operations, products and profile. We’ve tried using big issues like climate change, processes like stakeholder engagement and sustainability reporting and, perhaps most successfully, a focus on a very traditional business priority of value creation.

Climate change has been problematical because it is too politicized. Stakeholder engagement and reporting are good tools, but aren’t broad enough and usually don’t suggest practical actions that a business can take. Focusing on value creation is very enlightening for a business audience, but lacks a “values” dimension. Add safety to value, however, and you get a powerful combination.

The beauty of starting with workplace safety is that many corporate leaders readily understand it. Good performers develop strong competencies in managing safety, they work effectively with key stakeholders including organized labor, they report against a widely accepted metric in the form of lost workdays and they can identify the value they create in areas such as improved staff morale, lower insurance premiums and better public profile.

The example of one of our key clients, the DuPont Corporation, highlights the way the safety-sustainability connect can work.

In the 1980s when DuPont strongly acknowledged the need to confront its environmental challenges it looked to the lessons of nearly two centuries of maintaining a strong workplace safety culture, asking: What are we doing to safeguard workers that we are not doing for the environment?

Later, after establishing a safety target of “zero incidents” across its global workforce, DuPont also set zero targets for waste and toxic emissions. It is no coincidence that now it has one of global industry’s most challenging greenhouse emission reduction targets – 65 percent off its 1990 baseline by 2010.

As part of its sustainable growth focus DuPont also has created a business division, DuPont Safety Resources, which sells its safety experience to other organizations. It’s a knowledge-intensive rather than materials-intensive business that saves lives and averts human misery while delivering business savings via lower workers’ compensation costs. That’s safety plus value!

Earlier this year Ecos co-organized a National Safety Summit hosted by the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University in Washington DC. It brought together many of America’s workplace health and safety stakeholders. The keynote speaker was US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, who in his pre-political career as chairman and CEO of transnational aluminum giant Alcoa made improving workplace safety a centrepiece of his highly successful 13-year incumbency.

“For me, this is not about safety, per se: it’s about leadership,” he told the summit. “And it’s about a conviction I have that a truly great organization requires that people be aligned around important values and they understand what they are. And no matter where you are in the world, they’re the same.”

O’Neill’s focus on leadership and alignment underscores the power of using safety not only as an entry point but also as a driver for sustainability.

As global recession takes grip business is more focused on survival than growth, giving further resonance to the safety theme. There’s a close match to the language of a risk-averse business community, with safety and security equaling minimal risk, stability meaning low volatility and sustainability equating to viability.

When the time to chase growth returns, however, safety enhancement is a far more positive and expansive approach than old-style risk minimization. Coupled with a focus on value creation it provides business with the relatively simple framework it needs to do sustainability.

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