Social and Environmental Awareness is Becoming Confusing

 

By Lynda Bourne

It is important that both professionals, and the organizations that employ them, are socially and environmentally aware—and act responsibly to protect the rights of others. The financial consequences of failing to be socially aware started to be felt in the 1950s. Around this time, investors started excluding stocks, or entire industries, from their portfolios based on business activities such as tobacco production or involvement in the South African apartheid regime.

These considerations developed into the concept of environmental, social, and corporate governance. Today, ESG is an umbrella term that refers to specific data designed to be used by investors for evaluating the material risk that the organization is taking on based on the externalities it is generating.

The term ESG was popularly used first in a 2004 report titled Who Cares Wins[1], which was a joint initiative of financial institutions at the invitation of the United Nations. Then the UN’s 2006 report Principles for Responsible Investment (PRI) required ESG to be incorporated into the financial evaluations of companies.

Under ESG reporting, organizations are required to present data from financial and non-financial sources that shows they are meeting the standards of agencies such as the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board, the Global Reporting Initiative, and the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures. The data must be made available to rating agencies and shareholders.

Corporate social responsibility is the flip side of ESG. CSR is the belief that corporations have a responsibility toward the society they operate within. This is not a new idea; it is possible to trace the concerns of some businesses toward society back to the Industrial Revolution and the work of primarily Quaker business owners to provide accommodation and reasonable living standards for their workers.

However, it was not until the 1970s that concepts such as social responsibility of businesses being commensurate with their power, and business functions by public consent, started to become mainstream. Today, CSR is a core consideration for most ethical businesses.

These concepts were turned into a structured set of guidelines in 1981, when Freer Spreckley suggested in Social Audit - A Management Tool for Co-operative Working[2] that enterprises should measure and report on financial performance, social wealth creation, and environmental responsibility.

These ideas have become the triple bottom line (TBL), which is considered essential to effective organizational governance these days. Most of the major corporate governance frameworks require the TBL to be included in corporate reporting.

In his foreword to Corporate Governance: A Framework – Overview (prepared by the World Bank in 2000), Sir Adrian Cadbury summarized these objectives in his statement: "The aim is to align as nearly as possible the interests of individuals, corporations, and society."

Similar concepts to the TBL also form a core component of most codes of ethics and professional conduct. For example, the current version of PMI’s Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct incudes:

• 2.2 Responsibility: Aspirational Standards: As practitioners in the global project management community:
  2.2.1 We make decisions and take actions based on the best interests of society, public safety, and the environment.
• 4.3 Fairness: Mandatory Standards: As practitioners in the global project management community, we require the following of ourselves and our fellow practitioners:
  4.3.4 We do not discriminate against others based on, but not limited to, gender, race, age, religion, disability, nationality, or sexual orientation.

So far, so good. There has been a simple set of unambiguous requirements in place for 30-plus years that are straightforward and easy to understand. These simple (if difficult to achieve) concepts have been refined to make consideration of environmental (sustainability), social and financial outcomes important in every decision-making process, including those affecting the organization’s projects.

However, having become a hot topic for boards, investors and managers alike in the last couple of years, these ideas seem to be disappearing into a blizzard of acronyms that appear to be more about differentiating a consultant’s services than adding value. Some of the newer acronyms include:

• 3Ps: People, Plant, Profit
• DEI: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (alternatively EDI)
• DIB: Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging
• D&I: Diversity & inclusion
• JEDI: Justice, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion
• RAP: Reconciliation Action Plan
• SDGs: Sustainable Development Goals (published by the UN)

My concern is that while the concepts defined by each of the acronyms above are of themselves valuable (once you work out what they mean), and a few—such as the UN’s sustainable development goals—add substantially to the TBL framework, most are either sub-sets of the overarching objectives defined in PMI’s Code of Ethics and Cadbury’s simple statement, or essentially cover the same concepts.  

Do all of these extra acronyms add to the core objective of improving outcomes for people and the environment or not? What do you think?

[1]     Download the 2004 repot from: https://www.unepfi.org/fileadmin/events/2004/stocks/who_cares_wins_global_compact_2004.pdf

[2] Spreckley, Freer (1981). Social Audit: A Management Tool for Co-operative Working. Beechwood College.