ESG. Culture. Data. Investors.

Keesa Schreane, author, speaker, ESG analyst, and current Director of Risk, ESG Data, and Sustainable Finance at the London Stock Exchange Group. She specializes in being able to look deep into the data and qualitative aspects of a company's Environmental Social Governance (ESG) report. Ultimately, her focus is in building stronger, more compassionate and more sustainable financial markets and corporations. In addition, Keesa contributes to broadcast television, live streams, and panels on numerous outlets and publications.  https://www.keesaschreane.com
  

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Transcript

Triple Bottom Line | Episode 34 | Keesa Schreane|

[Upbeat theme music plays]
Female Voice Over
[00:03] Welcome to the Triple Bottom Line, where we reveal how today’s business leaders are reaching a new level of success with a people-planet-profit approach. And here is your host, Taylor Martin!

Taylor Martin
[00:17] Hello, everybody. Welcome. I’m so glad to have you today. We have Keesa Schreane on today. She is the author, keynote speaker on corporate culture on ESG, risk, and climate. She’s currently the director of risk, ESG data, and sustainable finance at the London Stock Exchange Group. She just published a book titled Gambling on Green: Uncovering the Balance among Revenues, Reputations, and ESG. Keesa, dive into that and tell us more about this book and what it is that you do.

Keesa Schreane
[00:46] Absolutely, so over the last several years, the conversation around ESG has really come to bear in a way that many of us who have been involved in this field have dreamed about for years. A couple of things have led us to this point where the conversation is now considered mainstream and it’s considered broad. One of those things have to do with what’s going on in corporate society. If we take corporations, ethics concerns that people have, treatment of workers, as we saw during the pandemic, there was a lot of concern around worker safety and worker health and how workers were getting on in some really challenging environments, particularly frontline workers. Then importantly, we see changes as it related to climate. A lot of those changes have to do with regulation that we’re seeing. That’s everything from what’s going on in the UK and the European Union regarding just really honing in on some key areas of what ESG is and what ESG investing should look like to what’s going on here with the conversations around the SCC here in America.

Obviously, if we take a look at the Inflation Reduction Act, a lot of that centers around really putting forth and putting teeth in some of the climate conversations as well as the social conversations if we just look at the cost of healthcare and how the Inflation Reduction Act helped to take care of some of that and to ease some of the burden. The reason it’s so very important now is because A, it’s being looked at by a lot of people. We are hearing a lot of opinions and whereas some of the opinions that we’re hearing really contradict the data and contradict the science, we do see an opportunity for the conversation to really flourish and for people to get access to data and access to science and thus come to the conclusion that ESG at this point is more important than ever, raising awareness around climate concerns is more important than ever, as well as raising awareness around social concerns, whether that’s inside of companies or outside in our society, and obviously, the important role that businesses have to play. Businesses, the lifeblood of a business is the people in the business, that’s the lifeblood. Also, businesses have loads of resources. They’re able to support communities. Businesses play a very critical role as it relates to the climate, as it relates to the social construct and governance and ethics.

Taylor Martin
[03:15] I’m going to talk about the elephant in the room here. Whenever somebody brings up ESG, there’s always one out of four or five people that will talk about something negative that’s happened in the ESG space because some company is not following – they found a way to shoehorn themselves into being ESG-approved and it’s driving people crazy because the investors are realizing can I trust this report about this company being ESG approved or they actually have an ESG report that is valid. Can you speak to that?

Keesa Schreane
[03:46] Yeah, and many people know that is greenwashing and you described that perfectly, Taylor. It’s when a company goes to market and they say, hey, what we’re doing is good for the environment, what we’re doing is healthy for our consumers, when in fact, once we look at the stats and once we look at the data, we find that’s not the case. There are a couple of ways that we are honing in that we see greenwashing being taken down and really having a rigorous examination of what we can consider green and what we can consider sustainable and ESG-friendly, that sort of thing. If we look at it from an investment standpoint, this is what’s going on over in the UK and Europe. We see that investors are really being tasked with identifying what is making their investment green, what makes it sustainable. When there are metrics that are put behind this so called greenification of something, then it makes it very clear. When those metrics are transparent, meaning we all have access to it, that really makes for the democratization of data, of greenwashing data, and it helps us understand what’s behind actual measurable products, whether they be financial product or other products, actual products that have measurable results that we can say, okay, this definitely is good for the environment, this definitely I can see where this can help with carbon emissions reduction versus a company simply using it as a marketing exercise.

That’s one way we can look at it in terms of what the investors can do. In addition to that, regulation, which can work in tandem hand in hand, regulation can help prevent that, too. When companies see that there is not only a social backlash but also a financial backlash from stating what’s not true, then that would incentivize them to not only be truthful about what they are doing with what they’re bringing to market, but also to give us insight into what they are doing to correct past mistakes, what they are doing to make their product more sustainable. Taylor, if we looked at corporate reporting which is really part of the backbone of sustainability, when I say corporate reporting for those who aren’t familiar with it, it’s when corporations through their disclosure, through sustainability reports, through other government reports, they say, hey, these are the things that we have done as it relates to sustainability, this is what our climate or our carbon emissions reduction looks like, this is where it was ten years ago, five years ago, and now you can see the trajectory and see how it’s gone down. This is how our stats on diversity, equity, and inclusion look. You can see our workforce makeup from ten years ago, you see it from five years ago, you see it now. You’ve seen how we’ve managed to increase that number. That’s the quantitative piece, which is very important. We want to know, and I say we, regulators want to know, investors want to know, consumers want to know how companies have managed to deal with issues in the past and where their numbers are now versus where they were years ago.

In addition to that quantitative piece, in addition to the numbers, we also want to know if you haven’t performed so well in other areas, just tell us how you’re going to manage performing well in the future. That’s really where the entire business community comes to bear and can have a role, whether it’s legal and that’s really putting forth the type of language that we need to use in companies to make sure that it’s clear, but to make sure that we’re meeting the legal and compliance requirements, making sure that the folks who are in the C-suite make sure they understand what’s important to the business and that they can communicate that, making sure that employees, I say leaders, leaders at all levels understand what the business is doing well, where there’s room for improvement, and how they can help to ring that improvement to bear. Also, that’s really important for those who sit on the board. They have a critical role in working with, not only the business, but working with investors when investors say, hey, this is something we really need to see you doing better on for us to feel good about this investment. They’re talking to the board. They’re talking to C-suite.

These are the different groups. These are the communities who are working hand in hand to make sure that not only are there numbers in these areas improving but to make sure that they have a plan for the future and that plan for the future is really important. Again, I’ll reiterate. Sometimes a company is not where they want to be. That’s just the reality of things, but in order for them to get to where they need to be and to remain competitive now and into the future, they really need to have a plan. Approaching this corporate reporting from both a quantitative perspective, which is those numbers and where you are now, as well as a quantitative perspective – a qualitative rather perspective is very important. I urge corporations to look at those, examine those, and really be meticulous about the approaches to both.

Taylor Martin
[08:49] I concur with all that, but let me dig a little deeper, okay? When it comes to the qualitative and qualitative measuring, not all companies are the same. It’s actually the opposite. There are such diversity of companies and what they should and should not report. How does ESG find a way to find commonality so company A, who does a totally different business than company B, maybe company A is doing twice the effort but maybe the current ESG status doesn’t really show that. How do we able to make sure that, one, people don’t manipulate the ESG system like they are right now with the greenwashing you mentioned, but two, to make it equitable so that company A, B, and C, and D, and so on, they all have an even playing field in their own perspective markets in how they report?

Keesa Schreane
[09:40] That’s brilliant, Taylor. One of the things that I mentioned in my book is that it’s so very important to look at your peers, and then when we all were younger, we all were in school, many professors say, okay, you look at your own iPad. You don’t look at somebody else’s iPad and look at their answers. We all need to look at our own iPad in many cases. This is a case where it’s okay to look at someone else’s. When I say that, I’m speaking specifically about the region you’re located in, the size of your company. Look at your peers. If you are a small to mid-sized enterprise, SME is what we call them, if you’re an SME, look at what the other small to mid-sized companies in your industry, what are they doing? How are they reporting? Are they using sustainability report? Are they just including information in their other reports? What are they reporting? That’s a good way to get an understanding of what, for example, these carbon emission reductions should look like for your sector or industry and for your company size. When are they reporting it? What’s the frequency? Are they coming at it with an annually? Do they have something where they’re doing it on a more informal basis, on a more frequent basis? Those sorts of things, looking to your peers to understand what they’re reporting, how they’re reporting, can really give you a sense of what you need to be doing.

Now, many at the time small companies, mid-size companies even they may not have the same resources as a large company. What does a large company have that a small or mid-sized company might not have? They might have a chief sustainability officer. They might have sustainability team members inside the company to really help them with reporting, to help them with tracking. They also might use third party tools to do that. Now if you’re a smaller business, you might say, Keesa, that’s easy for you to say, but we just don’t have the resources, we just don’t have the finances. That’s why I say it’s important to look to your peers, look at how they’re doing it, how they’re doing the reporting, what they’re reporting, then from there that’ll get you a sense of where you need to be, but that’s so very critical, Taylor, because if we compare ourselves as companies to other businesses that are outside of our sector, outside of our industry, much larger than us, then that is a way for us to get into a lot of trouble because we aren’t comparing like for like. That’s really a key piece that I’d like to share with companies.

Taylor Martin
[11:57] Let’s keep breaking down ESG. For those out there that haven’t heard of ESG, environmental social governance, just so you know, triple bottom line was first to that phrase, that meaning. It was a triple bottom line, then it was CSR, corporate sustainability reporting, and then it became ESG and because the environmental social part, the social part was really missing in the governance as leadership what is leadership doing and how they’re governing their business. Let’s dive in. Can we break apart and put back together how the environmental, the social, and the governance work together interconnectively?

Keesa Schreane
[12:35] Yeah, and to be honest, Taylor, many people who I talk to, they say, okay, I get environment and why it’s important. I hear a lot about the climate. I get obviously why what we’re doing in society and how businesses are contributing to society, I get why that’s important, and wow, I really get why corporate ethics and why that’s important, why governance, good governance is important, but what I don’t understand, Keesa, is how are you all combining those three together, such disparate parts together and making that a discipline. You know what? That is a very valid argument. Why would we put these three together? Taylor, I think one of the answers to that is that we’ve seen that when companies handle or really do an effective job of one, how it can so easily seep into other areas. If we look at these areas and take them separately, obviously we can measure them. We can come to a conclusion about how we’re doing, how are companies doing in those areas, but if we really think about it, Taylor, they are so interconnected. If you look at the climate justice conversations that we’ve seen, particularly over the last several years, we’ve seen people make the accurate statement that your zip code can sometimes have a tremendous impact on your health.

With the pandemic, we initially heard of people having these underlying conditions and thus were more susceptible, well, what does that mean? That means that they may live in places that may have polluted water. They may live in places where there are loads of factories where there are lots of carbon is being emitted. They may live in these places where they are, quite frankly, breathing in dangerous fumes. Those sorts of things can make people sick. When we saw that, we saw not only were there issues with the environment so where they lived, their access to water, their access to air, and how the access to water and air that was clean just wasn’t there, but we also saw where there needed to be accountability by companies, companies who were responsible for those things. We saw a social piece, people who were living and existing in these neighborhoods and these communities and how they were impacted by the climate, where they were living, the water that they were drinking, the air that they were breathing, and how that had negative impact on their health.

Then we saw that other piece of that, how companies for so many years were not doing the right things by their communities where they were doing business, where they were conducting business, and how the lack of corporate ethics and the way they conducted their businesses, how that impacted society and how the misuse of nature and natural capital had an impact on people who lived there. I like to give that example to help people see full circle why ESG can be a discipline that’s really spoken of as a singular discipline and what ESG, what it means in the practical sense. It means not only are corporations held responsible but it also means that corporations can have a good positive impact on society, on people inside the company, on people in the neighborhoods, and they also can have a good positive impact on natural capital that they use and that they recycle.

Taylor Martin
[15:55] That’s a good explanation of how everything is tied together. You’re pulling the strings together nicely there. Thank you for that. Let’s dive a little bit more into the social part. Let’s talk about culture. I knew you’d have a treasure trove of experience here so that’s why I want to get at this question here. Can you give us some broad strokes about possible misconceptions that management typically has when it comes to building and seeing the actual value that culture plays in the success of their businesses?

Keesa Schreane
[16:22] Yeah, well, I think management tends to believe in most organizations that culture is important. To me, their belief or thought about culture being important really is something that’s already there. My concern and what I’ve seen is that some management teams create culture within themselves. All the C-suite folks come together and the C-suite folks enter into a room and the C-suite folks decide you’re saying from top to bottom the C-suite folks decide this is what our culture is going to be. This is what we’re going to socialize to those who are beneath or those who are in other areas. The whole concept of that, the language that I just used as an example, that’s just not the way to go about culture. First of all, I firmly believe that everyone in a corporation can be a leader, whether you are a contractor providing a service to the company, whether you are the most junior person who started at the company two and a half minutes ago, or whether you are a middle manager or a senior manager, everyone can be a leader. We’ll talk about this a little later but one way to show that leadership, I think, is with employee resource groups, also called business resource groups, where employees and those in the business come together and they discuss cultural agenda items that are important to the different people who make up the business and they also can talk about sustainability, but we’ll jump to that a little later. I want to answer your question.

Culture is important. I think business leaders recognize that culture is important but it’s the way that we go about creating a good positive culture that is the most important thing. We can only create a good positive sustainable culture that can help a company go from strength to strength and to help it build by including all of the members of the organization, all of our employees, engaging them, making sure that they have a say. Also, Taylor, when we talk about culture, one of the things I think is overlooked is our language. A lot of companies have mission statements and they have these fantastic websites where they talk about their ten-point plans. They have great ways of reaching people, of outreach to people, but if we look at these mission statements or these plans, if we look at job descriptions, we see language that sometimes fosters and nurtures certain groups but not all groups. I’ll take job descriptions for an example. Many times, many studies have been done where we see that many pieces of language or words are gendered. A word that I’ve heard most recently as a gendered word would be analytical. Now, some people might say, well, why would analytical be gendered because we all can be considered analytical? If we look from a cultural perspective, there are certain genders that were expected and socialized heavily with the word analytical where other genders were not socialized or expected to be analytical. We all can be analytical. That’s not the point. The point is many times a word is associated and attributed to a specific gender, that’s the type of language piece that many companies need to look at as it relates to job descriptions or anything that relates to human resources.

If we look at policies and the type of environments that we want to have, our policy should also be scrutinized to make sure that the language in there is inclusive, that we talk about people with various things to bring to the table, people’s values, and that we really talk about people as people to be celebrated who have values, contributions that can be celebrated and who have various talents. If we talk about one specific talent or one specific area and really lob that above all others, I might think that, hey, I bring this to the table but it doesn’t seem from this company’s website that that’s appreciate or respected. I might be tolerated but I won’t be celebrated. Today, that’s really what employees are looking for in order for you to attract talent and maintain talent who really can take your business to the next level, you need to make sure that that language is inclusive. Just one other point as it relates to culture. I love talking about culture, Taylor.

Taylor Martin
[20:36] That’s good. Bring it on.

Keesa Schreane
[20:39] One other thing that relates to culture, one of the stories that I have in my book, it talks about the automotive industry. I didn’t realize this beforehand, but many automotive companies back in the day when they were designing seatbelts, they designed seatbelts with the typical sized man in mind. Now, we can all debate what the typical sized man is, but one point that was brought up in the research is that pregnant women did not at all fit into the calculus or the numbers of what the typical sized man looks like. These automobiles actually could be seen as quite dangerous for pregnant women because they did not fit into the measurements of the typical sized man. One thing that we need to look at is when we are designing products, and we talk about inclusivity a lot and we talk about equality a lot and diversity a lot and it should be talked about and it should be representative in terms of who is in our organization, but if we’re going to take inclusivity to a next level that’s really looking at who’s designing products. Whether you’re a developer or an engineer or a product designer, those people are all very important, but if you find that all of your engineers or all of your product designers or all of your developers or software engineers, whatnot, if they all have a very, very similar perspective background and situation going on, maybe you should look at that and seek to change, because in this case, had there been a pregnant person at the table, they probably would’ve scoped this out and said, hey, it looks like we’re missing something, it looks like we’re missing something big.

When we see a lot of the scandals that go on with organizations, it's simply because there is such a homogenous approach still even today to things. I’m reminded of another example, the clothing retail company H&M. A few years ago, they designed a shirt and it was a child, it was a black child wearing a shirt that had the word monkey written on the shirt and it was something about being in the jungle and the monkey. Just that word being on that child set off a firestorm. Again, we have to say who signed off on that, who said that that was okay, and when we see these situations occur over and over again, it just really draws us to the same point that we really need to be mindful that being inclusive is not just about having people in a building. It’s making sure that they are there to look at the data, look at the information, look at what a company is planning to bring to market and to give their insight because their insight can really make or break a product or a company.

Taylor Martin
[23:23] You’ve covered a lot of ground there and I have a lot to say to that. First and foremost, I’ve got to tell our audience, if you are interested in what she was talking about in terms of leadership, everybody can be a leader within different groups, we did a podcast on sociocracy if you go back into some of our many podcasts and it was fantastic. I’d never heard of sociocracy until I interviewed Ted Rau from sociocracyforall.org or maybe it’s .com. It was great. It gave everybody a seat at the table, gave everybody a voice, and no matter where you were, in terms of higher management or just a lower worker, everybody in between, everybody had a voice, everybody had a place to be part of the whole of the company in terms of its social aspect, which is great.

The second thing you talked about that I want to get back to another podcast I did was on gender equality. That’s another show where we dove really deep into how to break apart genderness and gender equality for all and how that works because Yael, the lady who I spoke to, she opened my mind to a totally different way of looking at gender. She broke apart, like what you mentioned, I think you said analytical might be one type of gender and because it’s been engineered into our psyche as that and she broke that down to all these different types of abilities that people have and then assigning those two genders. Then what you end up doing is you end up having – you find out that everybody is a cocktail of gender. We have male and female and something in between. We have all kinds of stuff that are in us. We’re not just one or the other.

Then lastly, you did say a lot, man. This is great. The last thing you talked about was basically what I call accessibility. It’s inclusion, as you said. I see it as accessibility. We are web accessibility experts. We make the web accessible for people with all abilities regardless. I can’t tell you how many people I have either interviewed or talked to. Every single time you get more voices into a project or product or service or whatever and you make it accessible for all people, the engagement of whatever said service, product, or whatever is incredibly increased. It’s not just a little. It’s so much more. I keep telling people, you know what? Make your website accessible so you don’t get sued, yeah, that’s one thing, but you’re going to get better user engagement when you do make your products or services or your website accessible because all the things you have to do to make it accessible and inclusive brings out other characteristics that the rest of the people didn’t even know existed. I always have to say that to people and let them, remind them, whenever you make things accessible everybody wins.

Keesa Schreane
[26:22] I love that point. It’s just really interesting to me considering if you look at society and if you look at society in terms of the different types of people with different abilities that businesses in the past honed in on only one type of person, that still floors me and it hasn’t stopped holistically. There are many companies and many products that still have lessons to learn there but if we just look at the numbers of companies that totally left out huge, huge swaths of society, it is amazing.

Taylor Martin
[26:58] I totally agree. We talked about culture pretty good there. We covered a lot of ground. What about investors? It seems that corporations are having their feet held to the fire when it comes to the triple bottom line, ESG, people, planet, profit. What do corporation leaders need to understand in order to keep shareholders happy?

Keesa Schreane
[27:17] Investors are really, I’ve spoken with several of them, and they shared with me that totally pulling out of a company because they are, in their minds, there’s lots of room for growth, that’s something that they’re not really interested in holistically from my research that I’ve seen, but what investors are interested in is that they’re interested in developing relationships with these corporate leaders. They’re interested in sharing with them the top areas that they feel are very, very important so these corporate leaders can turn the business around, so they can course correct, and so they can make the changes. This is great. It’s a win-win for the corporate leader because they don’t feel threatened that they are going to have huge amounts of money pulled out but rather they have a chance for a partnership. Amazingly enough, Taylor, most of the investors that I spoke with said that A, the amazing part about it was that out of dozens that they all agree that climate is much easier to measure whereas they said they want to see changes there, they’re pretty certain that because of the fact that it’s easier to measure that they will be able to take a stake, hold companies accountable, and be able to rinse and repeat with looking at numbers, holding companies accountable, course correcting and moving forward. They’re pretty confident in making progress there.

What they seem to be concerned about was the S element and what many investors told me they were concerned about was diversity, equity, and inclusion. They also shared with me that workplace engagement, fostering a positive workplace environment, is much more difficult to measure than carbon emission reductions. In terms of where I believe that next frontier, if you will, is we’re seeing it with climate. There’s lots of work to do. We are not done yet. Let me just put that out there. There’s lots of work to do there. If we look at where the challenge is and where we really can see a lot of benefit as we move forward and as we find climate solutions as we look at the next area, that social piece is very critical. Worker engagement, and I’m going to break down why it’s critical and what that means. Many people have spoken a lot about their mental health in the workplace and they’ve spoken about psychological safety. Now, if employees don’t feel safe in an environment, and when I say safe, I don’t mean just physically they feel like they’re in danger, but safe as in if I raise my hand and I share an idea, will my idea get struck down? Will there be microaggressions, in other words, people subtly telling me that I don’t have the expertise and knowledge as someone else in the room? If that’s the case, if they feel that way, they will not share their ideas. They will not feel comfortable and thus they will not be in a top creative state. When they’re not in that top creative state, there’s really a slim chance that they’re able to produce the best at the best capacity possible. They can produce because human beings are just superb. We can produce, but if we’re not in that state where we’re feeling appreciated, where we’re feeling valued, we tend to pull back a bit. We’re not able to produce in the ways we have been able to in the past.

I’ve seen studies that have said that for those who are in sales, that when salespeople feel that their approaches are valued or they feel good about what they’re doing, that sales increase by 20%. Now, that sounds good to any company. Not only is it important to engage with employees to make sure that they’re feeling safe and feeling good about the work that they’re doing, but also it’s important if we look at the bigger picture about bringing in employees, about continuing innovation, and about being a company that’s around 5, 10, 15 years from now. We’ve heard a lot about quiet quitting and we all have our opinions about what that looks like. Some people have said quiet quitting means that you’re just not putting forth 100% of your effort or you’re not going above and beyond. Other people have said quiet quitting means that, you know what? I’m putting my mental health first. I’m saying that this is where this part of my day stops, and for me to be mentally healthy, I need to transition at this particular time and do these things for myself. Whatever we have to say about quiet quitting or the great resignation that’s happened, it is very clear that we are feeling as workers, workers are feeling more empowered than ever to go out on their own to create their own businesses and to really look at the options for those who stay in corporation to look at the options before them and be really selective about the companies that they choose to become a part of. Because make no mistake about it, the people make up your company, so the companies they choose to be a part of.

The best way for companies to ensure that their people are at a high creative state is to ensure that their culture, the language that they use, and their level of engagement and really interacting with employees of all levels, to make sure that it’s at the highest level, to make sure that these employees and all the leaders in your company that they feel engaged, that they feel safe to speak up and share their ideas, that’s the only way to ensure that people will continue to innovate and that companies will continue to be sustainable in the future. That I speak about from experience in my first book, published by O’Reilly in 2021 Corporations Compassion Culture, I share my own story about being in a company where I certainly didn’t feel celebrated, and at times, I didn’t even feel tolerated. It’s something that started very subtly. It starts with not being invited to lunches when everyone goes out to lunch. That’s okay. I bring my lunch so I’m fine. That doesn’t – and then that goes on to other things. When you speak out in a meeting, people either outright ignoring you and moving on to the next person. Are people feeling that they have to translate what you’re saying, which is subtly saying that we don’t speak your language, we don’t understand you, you’re not clear, which has also other subtleties behind it. That is the most important thing for an employee to feel safe, for an employee to feel like they bring value, and from there, your company really can thrive when they begin to put people first.

Taylor Martin
[33:53] Yeah, I talked about this in a previous podcast where if you don’t have everybody being able to give their full 100% to your company, because people want to be passionate about where they work. They want to work in a place that they can get behind and feel like they’re a part of and the culture and everything and they want it to succeed. That’s just innate in us. I think not allowing people to feel comfortable, like you mentioned, I think the example of not being able to raise your hand to give a question about something or to participate in idea generating, that bodes really bad for the company in terms of its longevity because you have no idea what simple little idea your workers may have that’ll have huge impacts for the growth of your company. I think you need to find ways to always mine that information out of your employees, find ways to – questionnaires, groups, circles, meetings every beginning of the month or something, I think there’s a lot of wealth of thoughts in there that they need to mine out of them.

Keesa Schreane
[34:51] I absolutely love that, I mean, mining it. I thought about, Taylor, as you were talking about mining that information through questionnaires, etc., I thought about the energy and what goes into doing that and where I see some companies putting their energy. I’ve talked to folks and heard a lot about this productivity software that corporations are downloading on the laptops and people who I’ve interviewed for my book said, “I’m so anxious because if I take my fingers off the keyboard for literally 20 seconds, it shows me as being inactive and then my manager will call me and so it’s now, even though I might be remote or hybrid, I feel like there’s micromanagement going on to the Nth degree because of this software because they’re keeping tabs more so than ever,” but if we deploy our resources towards mining that information, those questionnaires, etc., and use that as our way to gauge and improve productivity as opposed to gauging and improving it by number of minutes or fingers on a keyboard, just think about how much further we could be, think about how much further corporations and society as a result of effective efficient corporations how much further we could be.

Taylor Martin
[35:59] Absolutely, I think about that all the time, especially when I’m engaging with a new company and I ask a lot of questions during meetings and there’s a lot of questionnaires for people to fill out before the meeting to kick off meeting so that we can really get deep on that kind of stuff. Sometimes I find things and I’m like I’m no corporate anthropologist but I do see these things and I’ll send an email to the CEO or something. We’re getting here near to the end. We’re getting to talking about the future here. We got caught up here, the next frontier, as you mentioned. Looking into your crystal ball, how do you see businesses actually changing in the coming years?

Keesa Schreane
[36:33] I liked the phrase that I think leaders really can’t predict tomorrow but we can create tomorrow. Taking away the crystal ball in terms of predicting, but really using my voice, my platform to create, what I’d like to create for tomorrow, Taylor, is a business culture where there is such a strong focus on the people inside the business supporting their growth, supporting the growth of their ideas, supporting simply the culture that these people, that the people who make up companies bring to bear, also supporting the neighborhoods and the communities where we’re doing business. When we move into communities, if we look at indigenous communities, moving into those communities, working with the communities as partners, not moving in, not just making sure that our will is imposed, but looking at community members as partners, understanding what’s important to them, understanding how businesses can support them, that’s what I’d like to create for our future where businesses prioritize the people inside the company and the people who were outside their company in their community and their consumers.

Taylor Martin
[37:47] That brings up a very good point that I always like to talk about with people. We could have a whole other podcast about this. It’s about taking care of your own backyard. If you’re in a city, a metropolitan city of whatever size, focus on your area. Make sure you’ve got good, clean water. Make sure that the homeless are taken care of. Make sure your society within your society bubble is doing as good as it possibly can, and then with that extra energy you have, reach out and help other cities that may be struggling or smaller towns or whatever you can, but I think we need to really sit back and focus on what is right behind us within our own cities, which is exactly what you mentioned.

Keesa Schreane
[38:25] Absolutely, very well said, looking at the people who make up our business and those who are in our communities, agreed.

Taylor Martin
[38:34] We did a podcast on regenerative design so I’m going to shout out to that with Colin on that one. He talked about exactly this. When they build buildings, corporate buildings, they come in and they engage community, 100% that’s what they do. All right. Let’s wrap up this wonderful podcast we had today. How do our listeners reach out to you and find more information about you and what you’re doing?

Keesa Schreane
[38:56] Sure, well, I love for people to reach out on LinkedIn as well as my website and that’s keesaschreane.com That’s K-E-E-S-A S-C-H-R-E-A-N-E, keesaschreane.com. I think I’m the only person in the world with that name so if you put that you’ll find me. I’m on Twitter. LinkedIn, my website, Twitter, and on Instagram, those are the ways that you can reach me. I love to have conversation so let’s take it from this podcast on to any of those platforms.

Taylor Martin
[39:29] Don’t forget, everybody. She’s got two books out there. You can get them on Amazon. What are the titles again?

Keesa Schreane
[39:34] Sure, my first book Corporations Compassion Culture, I’m really excited about my book that launches September, which is now, which is Gambling on Green: Uncovering the Balance among Reputations, Revenues, and ESG. I think that whether you are an ESG practitioner now who knows a lot about it or whether you are someone in the investing space or in the not for profit or government space that really are desiring to learn more, you’re a small business or a large business, you can definitely pull kernels from this piece. It was a joy to research and there was a lot of great information about where we are now and where we need to be in the future.

Taylor Martin
[40:13] Excellent, there you have it, everybody. There’s Keesa’s words. Go out and get her books, connect with her on LinkedIn, and get her on your social media stream through LinkedIn which I have now which is great. That’s all for today. Thank you again, Keesa, for being on today’s show. I appreciate it very much.

Keesa Schreane
[40:28] Thank you. Have a good one.

Taylor Martin
[40:29] Over and out, everybody.

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[40:31] Thanks for tuning into the Triple Bottom Line. Your host, Taylor Martin, is founder and Chief Creative of Design Positive, a strategic branding and accessibility agency. Interested in being interviewed on our podcast? Then visit designpositive.co and fill out our contact form. If you enjoyed today’s podcast, we would appreciate a review on Apple podcasts or whatever provider you are logging in from. This podcast is prepared by Design Positive and is not associated with any other entity. We look forward to having you back for another installment of the Triple Bottom Line.
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