Summary: Beyond the Green Team: Aligning Internal and External Communication to Advance Corporate Sustainability by Julia L. Goldstein

Sustainability is not only a moral duty but also a business opportunity. However, many organizations struggle to communicate their sustainability efforts and goals effectively, both internally and externally. How can they overcome this challenge and leverage communication as a strategic asset for advancing corporate sustainability? In this article, we will review the book Beyond the Green Team: Aligning Internal and External Communication to Advance Corporate Sustainability by Julia L. Goldstein, an award-winning writer and consultant who specializes in helping businesses and nonprofits tell their stories and engage their audiences.

If you want to learn how to communicate sustainability more effectively and authentically, and how to create positive change and impact in the world, then you should read the book Beyond the Green Team by Julia L. Goldstein. The book will provide you with a clear and comprehensive framework, practical tips, tools, and examples, and inspiring and motivating stories that will help you develop and implement a successful sustainability communication strategy.

Recommendation

The days of switching to reusable coffee mugs and calling your company sustainable are over, says Julia L. Goldstein. Today’s consumers, governments and investors demand that corporations do more to prioritize sustainability. Learn how to support the culture and mind-set shift required at your organization better to protect people, the planet and your profit margin. Goldstein will inspire leaders to reflect critically on how they can embed sustainability into every aspect of their business through various methods, including getting certifications and combating apathy within an organization.

Take-Aways

• Today’s companies are facing pressure to be sustainable, not just profitable.
• Making sustainability communications a top priority requires awareness and engagement.
• Create a “green team” to share your sustainability strategy throughout your company.
• Drive sustainability efforts with collaboration, openness and transparency.
• Share your sustainability journey externally and be strategic with your messaging.
• Collaborate with other organizations to transform industry norms surrounding sustainability.
• Apathy, knowledge gaps and cost fears block corporate action on sustainability.
• Nurture a culture shift, working toward long-term sustainability.

Summary

Today’s companies are facing pressure to be sustainable, not just profitable.

Sustainability can mean avoiding depleting the planet’s natural resources or seeing sustainable economic growth. Today’s organizations can achieve both if they rethink what growing sustainably means: Sustainable growth doesn’t have to refer to unchecked, continuous growth but can rather refer to figuring out how your organization can thrive in the long term while considering its impact on the natural world. Many people, including investors, customers and governments, are pressuring you to prioritize sustainability at your organization. Doing so may help you win customers: According to a World Wildlife Federation survey, over half the respondents reported changing brands to support companies better aligned with their sustainability values. ​

“The mantra of ‘profit is king’ and the desire to put shareholder value above all other priorities have defined capitalism for decades. But it doesn’t have to be that way. In fact, it can’t.”

Whether you see pressures to be sustainable as an opportunity or a nuisance threatening your profitability depends on your corporate culture. Consider the following questions to reflect on your journey toward valuing sustainability, both personally and within your organization:

• What triggers your concern for the environment?
• What meaning does “sustainability” have for you?
• Is your company facing any pressure to be more sustainable or disregard sustainability?
• How prepared is your organization to create and deliver consistent and believable messaging surrounding sustainability?

Making sustainability communications a top priority requires awareness and engagement.

Companies go through five stages in their sustainability communications journey:

1. Unaware – Your corporate agenda and daily communications fail to touch on topics related to sustainability and environmental, social and governance practices (ESG).
2. Vaguely aware – People within your organization are starting to understand that they need to take action toward embracing more sustainable business practices.
3. Aware – Your company website features an ESG or sustainability page while your employees understand the importance of sustainability and its relevance to their roles.
4. Involved – Leadership encourages workers to prioritize sustainability, while your external communication gives ESG a central focus.
5. Fully engaged – All the company’s stakeholders view the company as an industry leader when it comes to advancing its sustainability agenda at all levels of the supply chain.

Create a “green team” to share your sustainability strategy throughout your company.

Contemplate creating a sustainability green team at your company, encouraging a core group of workers to steer the creation of the sustainability strategy and communicate it to others. Make sure participants have some authority and ability to enact change, as they’ll otherwise become discouraged. Prioritizing sustainability must also occur on a leadership level, and many companies have begun hiring executives to serve as Chief Sustainability Officers (CSO). The leader in this new role (and similar variants of this role) is tasked with ensuring every employee understands the organization’s position on sustainability and overall strategy.

“Unless a company is committed to honest, open internal communication, the external communication is likely to be inconsistent, confusing, or even misleading.”

You may want to create a sustainability board of directors, identifying a group that will work separately from your corporate board of directors. The sustainability board of directors should be composed of employees (and ideally top leaders) who give feedback on your corporate sustainability strategy, perhaps overseeing it as well. Your sustainability board needs some degree of decision-making power to effectively oversee a needed culture shift toward valuing sustainability. Also consider creating a sustainability committee dedicated to helping leaders announce new sustainability programs and goals while helping people throughout the organization understand their change pathway. When appointing employees to work in new sustainability-centric roles, include individuals from the following departments: Marketing/Communications, Engineering/R&D, Operations/Productions, Finance and Human Resources.

Drive sustainability efforts with collaboration, openness and transparency.

The companies that truly stand out in their sustainability efforts are those that nurture corporate cultures that support collaboration, openness to novel ideas and transparency. Nurture healthy competition to drive sustainability outcomes in a collaborative culture, rewarding workers or teams who excel in their efforts to be more sustainable, whether improving efficiency or reducing waste. There doesn’t always have to be a singular winner – collaborative challenges can provide opportunities for ideas to cross-pollinate.

The company Airbus, for example, invited their employees to contribute ideas related to workplace inclusivity and sustainability. Airbus’s Culture Evolution Director Alice de Casanove used the challenge as an opportunity to foster collaboration, creating hybrid solutions that incorporated different aspects of everyone’s ideas.

“A culture that does not allow for any dissent is not healthy. It stifles innovation and can endanger the safety of employees and customers.”

Research from Oxford Economics and SAP found that under 10% of executives (out of 2000) were sustainability leaders. These leaders set and communicated clear sustainability expectations and guidelines and were more likely to achieve revenue growth exceeding 10% than leaders who didn’t prioritize sustainability. Achieving your sustainability goals requires creating a culture of openness in which team members feel safe to share constructive feedback and ideas. Closed cultures, by contrast, in which leaders make decisions in secrecy and don’t give people an outlet to express themselves, are more resistant to shifting toward embracing more sustainable policies (or even discussing them).

Share your sustainability journey externally and be strategic with your messaging.

Better communicate your sustainability progress to investors, customers and stakeholders by doing the following:

1. Assess your tagline – Your tagline functions as part of your company’s “public face” and should include a promise to your customers. For example, Danone uses the tagline, “One Planet. One Health” (although it does sell some unhealthy products).Does your current slogan or tagline inspire you, and is your company consistently fulfilling its promise?
2. Reflect on the possibility of “greenwashing” – Is your organization using misleading messaging that exaggerates its commitment to sustainability? Can you increase transparency and create communications materials that better reflect the reality of your situation?
3. Audit your website – Does your website properly communicate your sustainability values and practices?
4. Refresh, redesign or update your website – You can communicate your commitment to sustainability on your home page, your “About” section, your blog and in the resources you link to (e.g., white papers). Substantiate your sustainability successes by linking to news and media clippings on a dedicated ESG page that discusses your achievements. If redesigning your website, ensure visitors can easily navigate it, quickly determining whether your products or services meet their expectations. Don’t make sustainability promises on your website that you aren’t taking aligned action toward.
5. Publish a sustainability report – Share your sustainability efforts by issuing a report that aligns with the Global Reporting Initiative’s stringent standards.
6. Get certified – Are there any sustainability certifications, perhaps specific to your industry, that you could apply to differentiate yourself from the competition?

Collaborate with other organizations to transform industry norms surrounding sustainability.

Demonstrate your commitment to prioritizing ESG by getting certified as a “B Corp.” Companies with B Corp status are those that are committed to “the triple bottom line,” which refers to “people, planet and profit.” To get a certification that lasts three years, you need to score high on a “B Impact Assessment,” in which the nonprofit certifying body, B Lab, rigorously assesses whether your company is sufficiently showing its commitment to ESG practices. B Corp companies exist across various industries, including the Unilever subsidiary Seventh Generation (which manufactures household cleaning and personal care products) and some of Danone’s divisions. There’s no guarantee that B Lab will certify you, as they only certify a small percentage of applicants.

“B Corp certification forces companies to examine everything they are currently doing. This is the starting point. Companies can and should celebrate that they’ve earned enough points to qualify.”

Companies are stronger when they collaborate and join forces with others, moving toward sustainability targets together. Consider joining industry associations to connect with other companies who share your commitment to ESG. That said, be mindful that industry associations may also justify environmentally harmful business practices if they represent status quo interests. You can also find support on your sustainability journey by using the Conference Board, a nonprofit organization offering companies resources in areas that include economic development, human capital and ESG.

Apathy, knowledge gaps and cost fears block corporate action on sustainability.

There are three primary challenges, or “bottlenecks,” preventing companies from taking sustainability seriously:

1. Cost – Leaders may believe they don’t have the option to focus on more sustainability, as doing so might erode profit margins. But they often fail to identify possible ways to change their business model and practices while remaining profitable. For example, what if you slowly integrated sustainability into your supply chain, offering customers the option of gradually switching to more sustainable alternatives? Leaders could also join forces with the competition to incrementally phase out an unsustainable product.
2. Apathy – When people fail to convince those in power to change their mind-set and adopt more sustainable practices, they sometimes become apathetic, assuming nothing will ever change. Combat apathy by tackling small sustainability issues first to avoid overwhelming people and demonstrate progress.
3. Knowledge gaps – Many employees lack sustainability training. Help your business evolve, getting buy-in from employees by providing sustainability training and empowering workers to act as a green team, committed to achieving sustainability goals. If your customer base doesn’t value sustainability, don’t be afraid to lose some in the short term – think past the current quarter or year, and you’ll likely see long-term rewards.

Nurture a culture shift, working toward long-term sustainability.

According to Marc Epstein and Adriana Rejc Buhovac, in their book Making Sustainability Work, there are three stages organizations go through when transitioning to more sustainable practices. First, leaders adopt new policies to better comply with environmental regulations and avoid penalties or losing customers. Second, they start gaining a competitive advantage in their sustainability practices, deepening their commitment to protecting natural resources, reducing wasteful energy usage and improving safety. Finally, companies begin planning for sustainability in the long-term, proactively working toward one, five and ten-year goals.

“When your company embraces sustainability as a key priority, the culture will shift in a positive direction.”

Improve your company’s sustainability communications by embracing the following three pillars:

1. Connection – Create the right team structures (e.g., build your sustainability advisory board) and position your company to collaboratively work with others (e.g., joining industry groups).
2. Communication – Communicate your sustainability message with honesty, clarity and openness, soliciting fresh ideas and feedback from stakeholders (workers, teams, customers and investors).
3. Content – Create aligned internal and external communications, sharing your vision, mission and purpose. Build trust through being consistent, and committing to your sustainability goals, as you embed sustainability more deeply into your company’s culture.

About the Author

Julia L. Goldstein helps manufacturers align business and sustainability goals with communication strategies. She’s the author of sustainability-focused nonfiction books, such as Material Value: More Sustainable, Less Wasteful Manufacturing of Everything from Cell Phones to Cleaning Products.

Genres

Business, Communication, Sustainability, Environment, Marketing, Leadership, Management, Nonfiction, Education, Social Science

Review

The book Beyond the Green Team is a guide for organizations that want to communicate their sustainability efforts and goals more effectively, both internally and externally. The author, Julia L. Goldstein, is an award-winning writer and consultant who specializes in helping businesses and nonprofits tell their stories and engage their audiences. She draws on her own experience as well as research, interviews, and examples from various industries and sectors to show how communication is the key to advancing corporate sustainability.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part covers the basics of sustainability communication, such as defining the mission, vision, and values of the organization, building a green team, and avoiding greenwashing. The second part focuses on internal communication and collaboration, such as fostering a culture of sustainability, engaging employees, and aligning sustainability with other business functions. The third part deals with external communication and marketing, such as identifying and reaching the target audiences, crafting the sustainability message, and measuring the impact.

The book Beyond the Green Team is a valuable resource for anyone who wants to learn how to communicate sustainability more effectively and authentically. The author provides a clear and comprehensive framework for developing and implementing a sustainability communication strategy that aligns with the organization’s goals and values. The book is full of practical tips, tools, and examples that illustrate the best practices and common pitfalls of sustainability communication. The book is also engaging and easy to read, with a conversational tone and a personal touch.

The book is suitable for a wide range of readers, from sustainability professionals and leaders to employees and volunteers who want to make a difference in their organizations. The book is also relevant for different types of organizations, from small businesses and nonprofits to large corporations and government agencies. The book offers insights and advice that can be applied to any industry or sector that is interested in improving its sustainability performance and reputation.

The book is not only informative but also inspiring and motivating. The author shows how communication can be a powerful tool for creating positive change and impact in the world. The book encourages the readers to take action and to join the global movement of sustainability. The book also celebrates the achievements and innovations of various organizations that are leading the way in sustainability communication.