Whether you’re loving working from home or have found it challenging (or both!), we can take some solace in the knowledge that we’re all navigating this new territory to the best of our abilities. We invited three speakers to our October Lunch & Learn to provide a compass to help lead us through this unique WFH wilderness. With 90 people registered, this was our largest lunch-time gathering yet – one of the positives of this new virtual world! 

Watch a recording of the Lunch & Learn: https://youtu.be/FBdCqCGSPLw

Choosing (and using) technology

To kick things off, we heard from Elise Keith, co-founder and CEO of Lucid Meetings, who shared the technology and methods that make for the most engaging online meetings — a must in the days of remote work. Lucid Meetings was founded in 2010 as a remote first company, and just last March was recognized as a top influencing brand in remote work. Our top pieces of wisdom that we want to highlight from Elise’s presentation are:

• The best collaborative technologies for your team are the ones that you will actually use.
• Managers should set up clear terms with your team on what is expected in a remote environment with response times, availability, etc. Allow employees to work and live their lives cohesively.
• Zoom fatigue is real. In video meetings we do a lot of surface acting and it exhausts us! Reduce that surface acting and the associated stress by simply turning off self-view on your camera. Give it a try at your next meeting!

Culture and connectedness

We also heard from Shawna Shandy, Director of Organizational Development at Ruby Receptionists. A model of sustainability ethos, Ruby Receptionists has wrestled through the 2020 changes and shared their learnings as they’ve adjusted to a remote environment. Culture is at the core of how Ruby operates, and Shawna shared with us their experience maintaining their culture in a virtual space. Over the last 5 months, Ruby has brought on over 180 new team members virtually, the largest group they’ve onboarded to date, and it also happens to be the most engaged group with so much gratitude for the culture even in a remote space! We’ve outlined below some of our favorite learnings from Shawna’s presentation and Ruby Receptionists’ experience:

• Utilize unique team building opportunities in virtual space to continue to build and reimagine your culture beyond the work environment 
• Ruby uses Yammer as a means of connecting with one another in lieu of having the traditional office watercooler chat. Yammer brings a casual social-media like sense to communications and encourages connection between employees beyond work discourse. Find what works for your team and try to stay engaged!
• Our humanity is bringing us closer together. We’re all in different boats making our way through the same storm. If there’s anything we’ve gained from 2020, it’s a sense of empathy and humanity. People are getting more comfortable in online meetings, we understand dogs bark and babies cry, and those very humanizing moments can actually bring us closer together.

Tracking, trust and transparency

Finally, we were joined by Natalie Ruiz, CEO of Anywhere Works, an organization that has facilitated remote working long before COVID and simultaneously maintains a lively, engaged corporate culture. Natalie shared some great insight into what employees value in company culture (hint: it’s not ping-pong and office snacks), how transparency and trust can make or break remote work productivity, and how important it is to be honest with yourself about what is or is not working. Some of our favorite insights from Natalie’s experience in the remote work world are:

• Have the right tools – tracking is key! Use tools that help monitor productivity, connection, scheduling, and learning.
• Video is important – it allows you to see people’s faces, build rapport, connect and check-in in a real intentional way while avoiding miscommunications.
• Invest in your culture. Think outside the cubicle for this. Think about who you want to be as a company, and be serious about it!

Q&A with our speakers

What are some technologies/softwares your team is using to facilitate remote work?

• Teams
• Slack
• Zoom
• Google Meet
• Ringcentral
• Confluence
• Mentimeter
• Blue Jeans
• Miro
• Smartsheet
• Google Drive

What about your team are you more grateful for today than you were a year ago?

• More willingness to be flexible
• Seeing more pets and family!
• More unguarded/genuine interaction
• We get to know more about coworkers
• Sense of humor
• Ability to adapt

What is your team’s top Covid-era challenge?

• Zoomed out 
• Burnout and fatigue
• Connecting with clients
• Training staff
• Feeling like you always have to be connected
• Navigating what is coming in the pipeline – feeling a little blind to the future
• Missing the whiteboard!!!

How has your team attempted to replace the water-cooler/hallway chat of office work?

• Planned serendipity: randomized coffee dates between employees 
• Coffee buddy bot on slack
• Watercooler on slack
• Costume contests
• Virtual happy hours and game times
• One on one or group Teams messaging
• Noon time stretch and desk yoga led by staff
• Coffee Fridays via Microsoft Teams
• Dance party! Everyone gets the same song prompt then records some dancing and we make a fun music video

We’ll leave you with some of our favorite overall pieces of advice that came from this Lunch and Learn as well as some great insights shared by attendees in the meeting chat:

Show up and share your own humanity – provide feedback, be vulnerable.

Learning from failure is useful, be kind to yourself and your team.

Trust is so important, especially in remote work. Trust your team!

Host each other, show care, and be good stewards of each other’s time.

Thank you to our terrific speakers and everyone who attended! You can revisit the presentations (or share them with colleagues!) here: https://youtu.be/FBdCqCGSPLw

Let’s imagine you’re a new sustainability professional in your first few months at a company. You hear from the executive team that they want you to research and create the company’s first Sustainability Report. Where do you begin? You’re not the first person in our network to face this daunting question.

Corporate Sustainability Collaborative hosted its quarterly lunch in June, where we asked some local professionals to share their process and how they approached their target audiences, goals and intended outcomes for creating a report.

Guru Larson from Columbia Sportswear shared the evolution of their sustainability reporting, back to the first iteration in 2015.  The report began by simply “putting a stake in the ground” and sharing a wealth of detailed information including the history of the company and company values, in addition to sustainability metrics. Columbia leadership loved the finished product, and 2016’s report was a shorter “update” of the original report, but many at Columbia felt it lacked stories about their work and needed to speak more directly to customers. 2017’s reporting elevated storytelling, for the purposes of informing, entertaining, and providing utility to their customers. It used social media, polished advertising concepts, video, and compelling stories to convey their message.  See all three examples and finished reports at https://www.columbia.com/corporate-responsibility/

Athena Petty from New Seasons Market shared that their process and audiences were very different from Columbia. Their Impact Report is a document, aimed mainly at their large and dedicated staff, who they see as important ambassadors in sharing their messages with customers. Their report focuses on the company’s “mission pillars”, and the report is built around them. The report is fun, colorful, and full of both easy-to-digest stats about New Seasons Market, its operational sustainability and also its community involvement with local nonprofits.  Athena also highlighted the involvement of everyone from HR staff to front-line staff in providing the information, stories and photos the report highlights.  See their updated report at https://www.newseasonsmarket.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Impact-Report-2018.pdf and other sustainability updates here.

Caitlin Horsley was our final panelist, and she shared the evolution of Portland General Electric’s reporting over the past few years. Their report has varied over the years from a 40-page epic document, to an online report with web and PDF mini-reports tailored to specific audiences. When the first sustainability report was released in 2013, it was built around a Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) framework and was aimed primarily at investor-level stakeholders. Over time, the report has shifted to speak to different audiences in the ways and at the detail level they expect. Investors expect metrics, reported in a matrix format. Customers get a high-level, web-based overview of PGE’s values and its progress toward its five “Pillars of Sustainability”. See PGE’s progression and diverse reporting formats here.

All three of our panelists had aspirations to aim even higher with future reports, incorporating video storytelling, incorporating B Corp frameworks into reporting, adding comprehensive climate goals, and maintaining regular updates throughout the year (rather than just once a year.)

Others who attended offered to share their reports, so a couple more examples to check out are Vestas’ reports and ratings page and Yakima Chief Hops’ report. Pick a company you admire, and search for their “sustainability report” or “corporate social responsibility” to get a little inspiration. CSC also intends to host a longer (three to four hour) workshop on CSR Reporting in the future, so keep an eye out for that learning opportunity.

B Local PDX, our local BCorp collective assembled a set of great resources for sustainability reporting, too, which gives you a checklist of questions to ask when starting a report process.  Read it here…

 

Sustainability efforts are often thought of in terms of the easy wins.  Green Teams certainly do important things like encouraging employees to use both sides of paper, recycle more items, and make positive changes to the way they work.  But Corporate Sustainability Collaborative member companies clearly envision a more ambitious view of what’s achievable.

At our December 2018 quarterly meeting, everyone in attendance had a chance to share their workplace’s greatest sustainability success from the year, and some of what they shared goes far beyond resource conservation.

We heard organizations like Vestas (which hosted the event) share their plan to have their building LEED Platinum re-certified, even under stricter criteria that exist now. We heard businesses like KINK-FM going carbon-neutral. Energy Trust of Oregon has a goal with its management team to go fully paperless. Other organizations like Heritage Bank, were going even bigger. Heritage Bank is instituting equity policies aimed at achieving equal pay for men and women. Elephants Deli and CLEAResult are actively centering equity in their purchasing, catering and vendor choices.

Some of the more traditional sustainability projects members highlighted even had lofty end goals. The catering arm of Elephants Deli is working to eliminate specific items like Styrofoam or throwaway plastic tongs – aiming for a goal to remove all single-use (especially plastic) items from their operations.

Businesses like Daimler and the Portland Trail Blazers took on the serious challenge of expanding employee engagement in sustainability beyond small groups of engaged employees. The Trail Blazers added a tour of their sustainability efforts into every new employee’s onboarding process. Daimler has recruited more than 300 employees into their Sustainability Club and started an Ambassadors program with the hope of engaging even more employees in environmental issues.

Some of the most impressive projects were about doing things that sound simple at first, but require serious effort to stay the course. For example, the Trail Blazers organization helps people at their events recycle, but they also sort through EVERY bag of waste bound for the landfill to pull out compostable and recyclable materials before it leaves the building.

Businesses always tell employees not to waste office supplies, but companies like The Standard went to the trouble of setting up a “Green House” to collect unused items for other co-workers to use.

Many workplaces offer an electric car charging station and a few bike parking spots, but companies like Vestas are adding more car charging equipment to meet employee demand and offering in-office bike tune-ups twice a year.

Every piece of paper saved, every kilowatt of electricity not needed, every gallon of gasoline not burned, every pound of “garbage” that was instead turned into compost or recycled into new items all make a difference. But real change clearly requires effort and dedication.  The Corporate Sustainability Collaborative is incredibly proud of our member companies and the strides they are taking to address our biggest environmental and social challenges. We can’t wait to hear about these efforts and more at our next gathering in March 2019.

The language of sustainability can seem like an alphabet soup of acronyms, making the very personal work we do feel rather impersonal. SDG. UN. GRI. SRS. Despite the jargon, these are acronyms that connect businesses back to one central goal – make the world a more just and secure place for all.

The Corporate Sustainability Collaborative (CSC, just to add one more acronym to the heap) hosted its Quarterly Meeting in early September, focusing on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and how businesses can make lofty goals like these important parts of a corporate responsibility program.

Jami Haaning from Engie Insight provided the initial overview of the SDGs and outlined ways in which businesses have worked key Goals into every aspect of their work – from raw materials to the end of life of a product or service. Her presentation, with specifics of how businesses can set their own goals, is available here.

The goals this workshop focused on were:

• Good Health and Well Being
• Affordable and Clean Energy
• Reduced Inequalities
• Sustainable Cities and Communities
• Responsible Consumption and Production
• Climate Action

Breakout groups brainstormed tactics for one goal their organizations could set to make the greatest impact. Ideas bubbled up from the groups, including:

SDG 3 (health and well-being):

• Create a corporate Wellness Committee that oversees health-related initiatives like these below, and ask for input from employees not on the committee
• Company purchases healthy snacks (like fruit) for the office
• Use EcoChallenge to encourage employees to be healthy, with FitBit as prize
• Sponsor a company team for Bike More Challenge or other active transportation advocacy events
• Psychiatric/mental health counseling included in benefits
• “Total Rewards Package” includes non-traditional benefits such as meditation packages, quiet space, yoga classes, fitness center, locker rooms in the workplace
• Program for logging activity levels
• Use safety committee to promote health/well-being and its effects on safety (i.e. awareness of lack of sleep and its risks on the job)
• Offer adequate levels of vacation, and structure teams to allow people to use time away from work

SDG 7 (energy):

• Donate employee time to serve on non-profit boards of organizations advancing clean and/or affordable energy (such as Earth Advantage or Community Energy Project)
• Promote Earth Hour at your place of employment; this is a global challenge to shut the lights off for one hour, the next one is: 8:30-9:30 March 30^th, 2019
• Donate employee time to volunteer with groups like Community Energy Project that install weather-stripping and plastic on the windows for older residents, or those with disabilities. For those able to do the work themselves, CEP provides training and supply kits.
• Encourage employees, friends and employers to offset energy usage through carbon offset programs for natural gas and electricity. This puts promotion and assurance of on-going biogas and wind projects into the hands of the people for relatively low cost. Smart Energy, Blue Sky and PGE’s offset options are programs Portland businesses can consider.
• In Portland, companies could promote employees getting a Home Energy Score by off-setting the cost and then interviewing these employees and featuring the learnings/experience in a company-wide communication forum. This makes the concepts of energy efficiency seem more relevant when your house gets an efficiency score.

 SDG 10 (inequality): 

• Hold job fairs in low-income areas and rural areas to attract new and more diverse set of applicants
• Hire workers from disadvantaged communities (example: Portland companies’ “We Hire Refugees” commitments)
• Eliminate common barriers to employment for people of different abilities / backgrounds (example: remove higher-education degree requirements for non-technical jobs)
• Make workspaces accessible and accommodating
• Conduct “blind” hiring processes, where names of applicants are not shown to hiring managers, only qualifications
• Promote workers from within a company

SDG 11 (sustainable cities):

• Offer inexpensive or free access to public transportation for employees
• Offer employees incentives to use active transportation methods (biking, walking, riding a skateboard) to the office
• Businesses with park-like space (courtyards, outdoor spaces) can open them up for use by the public
• Use the power of your business with local / state / federal government to advocate for policies that advance sustainable cities. Sign on to coalitions of businesses working for equitable transportation, urban design, public spaces, or other urban livability improvements.
• Banks and investors can lend to projects with sustainable development goals and using sustainable technologies in their design or business operations.

SDG 12 (consumption):

• Switch to paperless processes to reduce paper waste and storage needs. (ex. NW Natural has worked on a comprehensive paper reduction program.)
• Update purchasing requirements to prefer products with reduced packaging and made from post-consumer recycled materials.
• Switch to reusable dishware in office kitchens / breakrooms and use catering companies that provide reusable dishware.
• For manufacturers, work on closed loop systems.
• Educate coworkers, friends and family members on sustainable consumption choices through programs like EcoChallenge.

SDG 13 (climate change):

• Move company’s power consumption to sustainable sources (wind, solar) with the help of local utilities
• Work with building managers/owners to convert office or facility lighting to energy-efficient options, such as LEDs
• Work to instill resilience (being able to cope with loss of water or power, minimize impacts from potential natural disasters) in the company’s supply chain and operations assets
• Have the company advocate for cheaper, easier access to sustainable energy with utilities, local and state governments

Many businesses are already using the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI)’s business indicators to track actions like these, and the SDGCompass.org website offers a handy list of key GRI Indicators for each Goal.

To participate in a second presentation of this workshop, attend the Portland GoGreen conference on Oct. 10^th – use the Corporate Sustainability Collaborative’s coupon code (CSC30) to get 30% off your registration.

Preventing waste. Touring our city’s garbage transfer station. Giving you the low-down on our recycling system. Movie night. Volunteering (in the city AND at a natural area.) A group bike ride with a tour of a food distribution hub.

It’s pretty amazing when we look back at all the Corporate Sustainability Collaborative and our member companies were able to do in just one month.  We couldn’t have done all these events without the help of the partners who put on events, gave us prizes for our Reduce Reuse Recaffeinate+ program, and got their employees to participate.  Thank you to our partners:

Location and event presenters and sponsors:
City of Portland – Sustainability at Work
ECO (Ecology in Classrooms and Outdoors)
Energy Trust of Oregon
Heritage Bank
Recology
Apex Environmental
NW Natural
Columbia Slough Watershed Council
Ruby Receptionists
SOLVE
Ecotrust — The Redd on Salmon Street
Asher David Brewing and Cellarworks
B-Line Urban Delivery
The Street Trust

Prize donors:
BIKETOWN
Portland Trailblazers
EcoTeas Organic Yerba Mate
GO Box
EarthShare Oregon
Garden Bar

Want your employees to be in on the fun next year?  Sign up as a Corporate Sustainability Collaborative member, or volunteer to help us put on an event in 2019!

Register now

Join your sustainability colleagues for lunch to go beyond the basics of sustainability. Innovative businesses of all sizes are using the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to plan and quantify their effect on the planet and our society. Mike Wallace, a Partner with ERM, a leading sustainability consultancy, will lead a session on SDGs. Jami Haaning from Engie Insight will facilitate group exercises to help you select the SDGs that align with your company.

Note: A $5 paid ticket is required to attend, and all seats are currently sold.  Put your name on the waitlist and we will contact you if space becomes available.

This quarter’s meeting generously hosted by Ruby Receptionists, with lunch provided by Waste Connections.