Isobel Wild [00:00:07]:
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the State of sustainability, brought to you by altruistic. In this episode, we're going to run through sustainability linked bonuses so when, where and how they can be used effectively and also how to set up a sustainability training program. Hi, Saif. How are you doing?
Isobel Wild [00:00:26]:
I'm good. I'm good, thanks. I am actually. I'm still recovering from this red eye flight that I had where I discovered what the actual worst seat that you can have on the plane is, which turns out to be the middle seat of the back row of the central column, basically. So you have the maximum distance from windows, aisles, and also the minimal reclining room as well. So I find that as actually the undisputed worst seat you can have on a flight. And I had that for a glorious whatever it is, 8 hours from Chicago to London, so I am still recuperating. It's probably going to take me the better part of June to get over that, but I'm glad to be here, Izzy.
Isobel Wild [00:01:11]:
So thank you for asking.
Isobel Wild [00:01:12]:
Saif. Maybe it's calmer. Maybe next time you should do a Greta Thunberg and sail the Atlantic to get back. Your journey might be a bit more pleasant.
Isobel Wild [00:01:20]:
I'm actually not kidding. Before boarding the plane, I was actually thinking this would be so much easier if I could just go by ship and, you know, like, you could just. It would just be such a much nicer experience. If you could get Wi Fi, maybe you can. I don't know. I haven't been on a ship. I haven't been on a long haul ship ever, so maybe you can get Wi Fi on these things now. In which case it would actually be fine.
Isobel Wild [00:01:43]:
Traveling through Europe by train, I find, is actually just super nice compared to flights. I personally hate flights, but no, I would totally be up for that multi day journey if possible.
Isobel Wild [00:01:57]:
I was actually looking at going to Ireland for a Coldplay concert at the end of August, and I was like, okay, how do I get there? Ireland's so close. Like, you know, it's our closest island, maybe compared to France, I don't know. But I was like, yeah, and you had to get a couple of trains, a ferry, then a train on the other side, and it cost, well, okay. And the equivalent flight from London to Dublin cost about 48 pounds. And the train and ferry fare cost 352 pounds. And I was like, this is mad. Like, obviously I want to do the.
Isobel Wild [00:02:33]:
Right thing, but it's actually quite fun because if you look at how carbon taxation works in the UK, sorry not to bring this back to carbon, Izzy. But like, if you do taxation in the UK, I think when I did this analysis at some point a few years ago, the spread was something like -25 pounds to 100, 3140 pounds or something. And the reason for that spread is that certain sectors are actually incentivized to burn carbon, basically, and air travel is one of them. So if you just look at the ridiculous kind of the ridiculously low costs that, that you have on some of these flights, there's a massive carbon element to it as well. And I think that at the same time, there's probably a lot of low hanging fruit in trying to adjust national carbon budgets by using taxation as a lever. So yeah, I hear you. It's insane. Ilya and our team was actually also finding this.
Isobel Wild [00:03:31]:
I think that just the difference in flight versus trade costs is astronomical sometimes.
Isobel Wild [00:03:37]:
Well, before we get really angry and start talking about the government incentives for the aviation industry, let's move on.
Isobel Wild [00:03:44]:
Or elections, or God forbid, elections. This is not the year.
Isobel Wild [00:03:49]:
We've also got a us based audience. So we're not going to go into.
Isobel Wild [00:03:53]:
The UK, we're not going to go there. We're not going to go into no politics here. This is a politics free zone.
Isobel Wild [00:03:59]:
It's a safe zone. Right, okay. So Lego announced last week that from 2024, a percentage of Lego's group bonuses will be tied to sustainability measures. So the overarching KPI for this is a carbon intensity metric achieved by comparing scope one and two emissions, and one category of scope three, emissions, which is business travel. And this is with how many bricks have been manufactured? Lego bricks have been manufactured over the same period. And this is like company wide. It's not just management or execs, which I think is really cool. But I wanted to just also, before we get into it, read out a couple of learnings that the vp and head of sustainability of Lego had from this experience of setting these bonus.
Isobel Wild [00:04:48]:
I think these are really interesting and also they resonate a lot with me. Number one, a carbon KPI or bonus is a relatively straightforward concept, but when salaries are involved, it takes time to get it right in terms of auditing accuracy and overall scope. Two, relative emissions reductions are not necessarily easy or wrong, nor absolute reductions are hard or right. It depends on the target and the ambition behind them. Number three, it's better to start with scope one and two with a little bit of three and add more later on, then endlessly wait for full scope data set to emerge. Number four, be prepared for the level of engagement and energy from your organization as soon as they realise that part of their salary is now related to carbon performance. Make sure you have plans and ideas for all your teams that will inevitably reach out and want to take action. Number five, bring your finance team and auditors along on the journey from day one and embed the project with your CFO as soon as possible.
Isobel Wild [00:05:49]:
Number six, have a shadow year to work out the kinks and be prepared for it to be bumpy. And number seven, take whatever percentage in the bonus structure you can get. It's the start, not the end game. I think those are really great learnings. And Saif, I would love to just call on you to see if you've got any observations off the back of them.
Isobel Wild [00:06:08]:
Yeah, I mean, I agree, Izzy. I think lots of really good learnings. I think a really great way to approach it. I more or less agree with all the principles that you just listed out, Izzy. I think there's some to particularly note. Great to have finance involved early and kind of get buy in. I think great to have a shadow year as well to work out the kinks. These are great innovations.
Isobel Wild [00:06:30]:
I think it's also very clever to focus on scope one and two and then business travel and kind of commuting because of two things. One is that these are areas that is easy for you to get great business data on and also for you to kind of control as well by virtue of the same process. Like these are things that are within your operational control. You can manage these levers quite actively versus something happening far upstream or far downstream in the business. Then also the chemical conversion rate is much less open to dispute because these are things like fuel, fuel to carbon conversion rates or energy use to carbon conversion rates. And so there's a lot less variability here versus something like agriculture or packaging or other components where there's a lot more variability. So I think it's a very cleverly set up program. In general, I am a big fan of linking bonuses and compensation programs to sustainability performance or metrics.
Isobel Wild [00:07:33]:
I do have one question, though, or one like just, I guess, one thing that seems a bit strange to me, and I'm saying this less as a sustainability professional and more thinking as a business operator, which is if you think about company wide bonuses, I mean, let's take our company, for instance. We could easily say, look, the most important thing to us, for example, is let's say it's revenue or let's say it's actually impacted our customers or whatever. Let's link bonuses across the company to this one metric. And I feel like we've decided not to do that kind of thing multiple times because we recognize that actually every individual might have a highly different level of ability to control that outcome. And so in a way, it's kind of, I don't want to say arbitrary, but sort of abstracted. Like an individual in Lego has very limited ability to actively control this. And so does it actually function as an incentive to change behavior? I think that that is a little. I think that is much less true at the level of senior leadership, because at the level of senior leadership, you have the ability to kind of drive cross functional collaboration.
Isobel Wild [00:08:49]:
Certain parts of the leadership team have a really high ability to control sustainability. KPI's certain parts may be a bit less, but like, everyone in the leadership team, I would argue, has some reasonable ability to drive action on this. Whereas the further you get into the company structure and to like, you know, lower tiers in the organization, I think that gets a lot harder. And so I just kind of wonder to what extent you can actually drive outcomes through a company wide incentive scheme. But actually, I'd love your thoughts on that as well, Izzy, because I could lean either way. I'm just. That's the question I have basically something I'm uncertain about.
Isobel Wild [00:09:25]:
I agree. And I think this is actually going to lead on to our next topic quite well. I was actually speaking with Christina O'Keeffe from Kerry group the other day. And up until this point, and actually for context, I've only really seen sustainability linked bonuses happen in the context of the leadership team and executive team. So in. And it's really interesting that Lego are trying to roll it out across the whole company. And I would like to follow this to see how effective, effective it is. Maybe we should even get Tim on the podcast to discuss it in further.
Isobel Wild [00:09:56]:
But Christina and Keith, they don't have any sustainability link bonuses, but they do have an awesome internal education program which has different kind of incentives. So it linked to engagement or learning metrics around the course. So they would have incentives, like even things like stickers. They've got stickers that people, once they've completed the course, they can add to their computer and that becomes almost like a badge of honour. Similarly, in Perfetti Group, which makes a candy company, they have engagement rates linked to being able to partake in the Cambridge sustainability business management course. So I think there are lots of different, like, softer ways of being able to engage the company as a whole, not just bonuses. But yeah, I'd be interested to see how this rollout works.
Isobel Wild [00:10:45]:
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think that there are also different ways you should engage different teams in the company. And so I think that the idea of saying, look, let's get everyone excited about switching the lights off before they leave the office, I think we're past the stage where that is a relevant lever or considered to be a relevant leverage, certainly in Europe, because in any case, switching the actual energy tariff or the energy supply to renewables is much more impactful than getting people to do energy efficiency in the office. And it's not something that you could do as an individual. So I think there is just a journey away from that kind of thing where it's just a company wide Kumbaya, let's all save the energy sort of situation and more towards actually what can each team do differently in its own kind of in its own territory, in a nuanced way to drive significant impact. So again, I'm a big fan of sustainability linked performance in general. I'm just kind of a little intrigued to see how it can play out. And I think there's a lot of room for it to play out differently for different teams.
Isobel Wild [00:11:55]:
Training, I think, is a big area where you can actually start to bring out that differentiation.
Isobel Wild [00:12:01]:
And Saif, before we move on to the training program setup for these linked bonuses, what would you say? Because I guess they change and they evolve over a certain amount of time. So definitely with scope one and two, you've probably got some easy wins. So making those energy transitions, that would mean that you can meet those performance targets quite easily. But if you're doing this, say, over like a longer period, I can imagine that the bonuses are going to change as time progresses. Do you have any advice for how to manage for that?
Isobel Wild [00:12:35]:
Yeah, I mean, and so again, I guess blending a little thinking as a sustainability professional and thinking as a business operator, I would be more inclined to kind of think about inputs that teams can control and manage and let's say outcomes that you're aiming for and I would almost ignore for the time being, outputs. And let me kind of distinguish between those three. Right. I see an output as like, did the emissions number go down? And that might be something that changes year on year and to an extent it's correlated with the inputs that you can kind of put in. But there's other stuff at play there as you start going beyond scope one and two. There's emissions factor choices, there's quality of data, there's a lot of this sort of stuff. When I look at outcomes, I would say that there are some outcomes that you want to solve for as a business that mean that you will continue to deliver good performance in years to come. So, for instance, are you actually working, let's say, to build better visibility on the supply chain? Are you working to have stronger relationships with key suppliers? Are you working to transition specific materials in your value chain to other materials? Are you looking to build significant capacity for your value chain to both use recycled content and generate recycled content and generate recyclable output as well, for instance? These are like system shifts that I would say are great outcomes to be targeting.
Isobel Wild [00:14:10]:
And I think that achieving these outcomes is going to be the result of year after year focus on different inputs. What I mean by those inputs is you might be saying, okay, look, actually one of the inputs here is have I started segmenting out my suppliers and really identifying which suppliers I can build relationship type a with versus type b? Have I really started like looking at each individual material type and starting to do the analysis on which materials I can swap to or shift to? Have I started reorienting supplier contracts to be more conducive to a long term partnership and collaboration? I'm focusing a little on procurement and supply chain levers here, but you get the idea these are sort of inputs, and whether or not these move the emissions numbers, let's say next year by 5% or 2% or 10% I almost think is less important than in the broader scheme of things because you're making big strides on a journey towards better outcomes. Does that make sense?
Isobel Wild [00:15:13]:
Yeah. So in that sense, would you suggest that the functional leads own, if they do want to do link performance bonuses, that they own a certain KPI that is relevant to that function? So as you said, I don't know, procurement can have the number of supply contracts in there that relate to data sharing or something like that.
Isobel Wild [00:15:34]:
Yeah, exactly. So I would kind of say one of the frameworks that most startups use, for example, is okrs. You look at objectives and key results. What is an objective that I want to achieve and then what are some key results through which I can measure my progress towards these objectives? You could use that. You could use key performance indicators. There's a whole dogma around what is the right way to do this. And everyone has their own take on okrs as well. I think it doesn't really matter what framework you're using, but I would say that figuring out what are the actual goals that you want to achieve, then what is work that your team can own and control and meaningfully drive to deliver better outcomes that's the way that I would approach it.
Isobel Wild [00:16:25]:
So let's say in our business, for example, one of our north stars is what is the extent of the emissions in the shopping basket or the grocery basket that we are managing and controlling? If you look at everything that the average consumer buys, our aspiration at altruistic is we should be able to measure, quantify, but ultimately also manage an increasing share of the emissions of what sits within the consumer's basket. And so there's a part of that that sits with marketing, which is like, how do we get in front of the biggest companies, the biggest brands that have the largest share of basket, in the consumer basket? We could now think about what are the inputs or activities that marketing in our business can control to make sure that we have as many at bats as possible, as many opportunities to work with as many companies as possible. At the same time, if I shift and focus on research within our company research, our research teams are responsible for helping build out our environmental factor database, making sure we have as many unique data points, whether it's secondary data or primary data, to quantify emissions and increasingly, water and other metrics as well, and driving accuracy, precision, granularity there allows us to get much better outcomes, much better results in the work that we do with the brands that sit in that consumer basket. And so you can kind of see these two as completely different, ending up in the same place, but actually, like, you know, the activities within their controls are different. And makes sense then to incentivize those teams to focus on delivering their work really well, rather than hold them to a bar that is a few levels abstracted from them. But that's maybe somewhat of a personal view, just having thought quite extensively about this in the context of our business and also in previous years as a consultant.
Isobel Wild [00:18:22]:
Yeah, and another thing that the head of sustainability at Lego Seb was that this wouldn't have been able to happen if he didn't have C suite buy in and support from leadership team. Do you have any advice for getting the team or the leadership team behind a sustainability linked bonus scheme? Are there any kind of tips of the trade that you've seen that have worked versus not worked?
Isobel Wild [00:18:50]:
I think there are. So I think to an extent, I think this is the same for any other sustainability initiative that you want to run past the board or the leadership team, which is ideally, you talk as little as possible about sustainability and as much as possible about business value. Because ultimately, especially if you look at the zeitgeist or the mood, particularly in the US, but also, I think in many other parts, many other markets and many other parts of the economy, I think that interventions and initiatives within the business that do not generate shareholder value in the near term, the medium term, or the early long term are unlikely to last very long. And so I think that the age or the moment in time where you could just say, look, this is a great thing to do for the planet, and this will pay off in 30 years. I think there was maybe a brief period between 20, 1819 and 2020 where that was, that was working, but now I think you need a much more near term link to shareholder value. And so I would really focus on the original basis for sustainability in the business. What is the business value that you are going to create? Is there more revenue coming out of doing this? Well, there's been some great coverage on the collaboration between Waitrose and Tony's chocolate only, for example, or the Tony Openchain. And they've actually found that they've managed to increase prices of the product, they incorporate better practices within the supply chain, they increase the price of the actual consumer product.
Isobel Wild [00:20:30]:
And so actually there's like a top line benefit here. There are not going to be a lot of situations where you can do that, but that's a great example where you can. And that's business value, right? That's a good story for the board, a good story for leadership. And you can say that having better labor practices within the cocoa value chain helps us do better business. Therefore, it makes sense for us to have a company wide target to achieve something correlated to this outcome. And we are going to reward people for their progress towards that target. That's the narrative that I would take. I would start with the business value and then I would position performance incentives as one part of a toolbox that should include training tools, incentives, and let's say processes like, I would think of maybe these as the four big levers of the influence model that you use to drive change.
Isobel Wild [00:21:23]:
And I would just say to the leadership, this is how we would do it if it was a digital transformation. This is how we would do it if it was a cost transformation. And this is how we're going to do it as a sustainability transformation. But in all of those examples, there is clear business value that needs to be identified for the business to just undergo the massive calorie burn it takes to transform.
Isobel Wild [00:21:44]:
Thanks, Steph. That makes total sense, I think. Speaking of the next lever, the training program. Let's have a quick break and then we will jump into the depths of that. Cool. Let's get back to it. So setting up a sustainable sustainability training program, I think we could all agree that it's great to have a sustainability strategy, but if you don't have the whole company behind it or aligned with it, you're never really going to be able to achieve those punchy goals that you've set. So, Saif, I'm going to pick your brains on how best to set up an internal sustainability strategy and get these colleagues behind you.
Isobel Wild [00:22:27]:
So when you're starting to design it, think about how it's going to look and how you're going to roll it out in your business. Are there any considerations that you should take at this really early stage before doing so? Yeah.
Isobel Wild [00:22:38]:
And Izzy, just to get specific, I think let's talk about training programs rather than strategy more generally, because we could well go down a rabbit hole. But it's funny, I was actually just having this conversation with Kim, who leads the sustainability team at Griffith Foods just very recently. And Griffith is a b, two b food business. And so in their context, trading and upskilling commercial teams and sales teams is an important aspect of the sustainability training agenda. There are other situations, in fact, probably every company, actually, where training the procurement team is an important part of the sustainability agenda. And actually, I can see different trainings for different teams. So maybe if you kind of think about to start with, what are the communities that I need to upskill onto sustainability and to what extent and in what way? And I would probably think about, let's say three types or three angles to that. One, I would think is very senior leadership team.
Isobel Wild [00:23:39]:
And you don't need to have them do like a six month course, but maybe it's a two day boot camp, for example, with some half day kind of primers now and then. But I definitely think that there is an opportunity and a need to get CEO boards and c suite in general upscaled onto sustainability to understand what their peers are looking at. And again, when I was at McKinsey, I would do this on sustainability, but I've also seen this done on advanced analytics and AI and digital. Any big new trends, transition or trend. You want to make sure that you also educate the board, senior leadership and team, etcetera, onto a generalist, the landscape. That's one community. I think there's a second which is functionally, you need to have a slightly different training experience focused on slightly different capabilities for different teams within the organization. I would think of procurement as very distinct.
Isobel Wild [00:24:34]:
Like, how do you manage a buying conversation with a supplier, and how do you actually shift that suppliers thinking, and that suppliers trajectory to a very different trajectory where it's enabling your sustainability program. There's a huge opportunity, a huge need for that sales in a b, two B organization. I think, again, huge need for doing that. Better marketing, particularly in b, two C organizations. What to say, what not to say, how to position messages, what to be careful of, huge need and huge upside from doing that. Well, I would think of the second category of just specialist function by function training programs that are more intensive maybe than what you're doing with the leadership, but also very specific and very nuanced. And then the third one is, I would think about rushing through these because I think previously I've kind of, we've done episodes where I've said three things and then I've gotten one way, one of them or two of them down. But anyway, the third one, I would say is company wide education.
Isobel Wild [00:25:34]:
And I think there you can again be very kind of long and thin. You can say, look, we're going to do a half day once a year, or we're going to do like a couple of hours every quarter or something, or something very light touch. Maybe it's part of onboarding, for example. It's just woven into existing trainings across the company. But something very generalist and very widespread, I would say, is the third type of training that I would look at, by the way. I think there's a big shortage in training providers that can do any of what I've described to any degree of quality, which I think is just another problem for, frankly.
Isobel Wild [00:26:11]:
I think what you've mentioned here is probably five, if not six whole full time employees work like being able to set up, align, coordinate the people, do all the logistics behind it, create the content. It is a lot of work. And if you're doing that on top of your scope, three calculations, engaging suppliers, like, how are you supposed to manage this? And do you see this as a, do you see this as something that you should do internally and you should set up internally, or should you look elsewhere for external consultants or help to come in and actually set this up for you?
Isobel Wild [00:26:49]:
Yeah, so I think actually the companies that are doing this well and likely to do this well are those that have already invested historically in training and capability building as a big lever. And so I think, for example, I actually think Kim at Griffiths was telling me this, you know, she's ex Mars. And I think Mars has like a really well established corporate training program itself already. And so they kind of push this through the same training program. Basically, when I was at McKinsey. McKinsey put a lot of effort into training and capability building all through the journey of the person with McKinsey, which meant that you could actually upscale on sustainability at many different inflection points in your career. It was just like dovetailed in with existing training programs and opportunities. So I think that the companies that are best placed to do this well are just those that already have a culture of training and capability building and upskilling.
Isobel Wild [00:27:48]:
That doesn't mean that you can't do this well if you don't have that history and capability and muscle. But it is just harder for you. Right? Like your organization has not built the infrastructure that you can piggyback on, which means I think you do need to then go external and find other partners and vendors. I would look for what already exists and is well regarded and reputed. You've mentioned the Cambridge program, Izzy, which I've heard great things about. I know many alumni from that program. I think Fran at Greencore, Hugh at Gusto, I think also went there, our own Greg as well from our team. And I think that program is well regarded.
Isobel Wild [00:28:31]:
I don't see a bunch of others out there doing the same thing with the same industry recognition, but I think it's an opportunity. I'm sure there will be others coming out.
Isobel Wild [00:28:42]:
I've got quite a lot of questions off the back of this, but the first one is the list you gave me. So the board functional teams and then company wide. Is that the order of prioritization that you'll go down?
Isobel Wild [00:28:53]:
Pretty much. Actually, yeah, I would actually do it that way. I mean, that wasn't what I had intended when I was listing it out, but I would actually do it that way. Would say, I would probably start with making sure that leadership is engaged, bought in and understands context. And I actually don't think most organizations do this well enough or take it seriously enough, or start with that, but I would start with that. And then I think from there everything else flows and I would maybe have an order of priority within the functions. So I would again lean on business value. That should be the North Star here.
Isobel Wild [00:29:26]:
So if you said, look, we're a b, two b organization, business value from sustainability for us is getting longer term, more strategic relationships with key customers where we have a bigger share of wallet versus the competition that is business value, then you need sales teams to be front and center of the training program that you're setting up. And maybe the first function that you upskill should be that function. Or you say, look, actually we have a big operational transformation to go through. And at the other end of that, we will not only be more sustainable, but we'll be much more resilient as well to external shocks, supply chain risk, et cetera. And then maybe it's actually the operations team that you need to go prioritize. So I would lean on business value and prioritize within that. And then the company wide thing, I would say, probably can come a bit later. It also has more exposure, arguably a little less outside, I would say.
Isobel Wild [00:30:21]:
And where does the sustainability team fit into that? Because I think increasingly we're seeing sustainability teams hiring people that don't necessarily have the sustainability knowledge, but they've got the vocational skill set of change management, etcetera. So would the sustainability team be at the top of that sequence?
Isobel Wild [00:30:40]:
It's a good question, Izzy. I think that I kind of implicitly assumed that one might be bringing in a sustainability professional who is bringing expertise into the business. And a lot of companies are doing that. They're like seeing hiring as a way to acquire expertise that they don't already have, where you don't have that, let's say you're making a lateral shift and you've kind of moved someone from one part of the company to another part of the company where they're now leading sustainability. I would actually see maybe even the leadership training as the opportunity for this person to go through that training experience with other members of the leadership team. And so I think there's like two ways you could approach that. One is to say, actually the sustainability team and leaders should get a slight run up versus the leadership team. They should go through the program a little earlier so they can then be the experienced guides taking the rest of the leadership team through the training experience or through the upskilling experience.
Isobel Wild [00:31:39]:
The other could be actually that they're in it alongside the rest of the leadership team, and it is a shared experience. But the new sustainability leader is going to carry on upskilling beyond where the leadership team kind of goes back to work on their regular stuff, and this person will actually carry on upskilling beyond that. I think there are different flavors of this that you can experiment with.
Isobel Wild [00:32:01]:
Yeah. And I want to take us into what actually the content of these training programs look like. As I mentioned earlier, I spoke to Sibyl Byrd and Christina O'Keeffe from Curry Group, who have honestly set up the coolest sustainability educational program internally, and they've rolled this out company wide, so to 12,000 employees and in their wired community. So those who are connected by email. They're now rolling out their unwired community of employees. But the format of their program is that they have six modules which all align with their sustainability strategy. So one of the module will be health and nutrition will be sustainable, sourcing and it goes on. And with those, they've created six videos aligning with them.
Isobel Wild [00:32:48]:
And maybe it's worth noting that all of this content is like evergreens that's supposed to last for at least three years before they evolve and change it. And also it's uniform, so it's all the same across the globe. But where they actually change the content is how it is deployed. So when the content is set at a global level is then taken by regional teams and they create it and they change the deployment into different areas. So Christina, who's the regional lead of North America, she did watch parties. So they had these films and these modules filmed at gatherings where people would have pizzas, then they would have an open q and a with set questions. And these questions can be anything from what is scope three to also if you were the president of the US, what would you prioritize? Nutritional sustainability, which really got this conversation rapport going. But then the EU, the lead, they actually did a completely different take and they got experts, chemical and engineering experts, to lead sessions on specific parts.
Isobel Wild [00:33:55]:
So I think that was really cool to see how you can set content, but also which is scalable and it's not too overwhelming, but you can actually deploy it in different ways. But to get actually into the setup of the content or like the format and the actual meat of the content. Saif, I'd love to ask you what you think are good anchors to lean on.
Isobel Wild [00:34:19]:
Yeah, I think that we could talk about this for quite some time because I think that it looks different for each. And if you look at those three categories mentioned, leadership training, function specific training, and company wide, I think that the content can look wildly different across those three buckets and even within those. And so maybe if I just take one, just to give you an idea of how I would approach this. So, on the leadership training, I've done a few of these over the last couple of years. I have run these programs myself for boards, and I've also run these for management teams. One that I did last year, I think was with one of the Unilever management teams for one of their business units. And we had, I think like 25 or 30 members of the senior most management team attend. And it was on, it was like an ESG wide training program.
Isobel Wild [00:35:16]:
I normally don't like talking about ESG in general, as you know, normally when you just focus on environmental sustainability, because I think it's very distinct from social and governance. But I made a small exception here, and I talked about ESG as a whole. And in that context, what I focused on was, let's start with business value. Why is this important? And obviously, Unilever is very forward leaning. So you maybe start with a lot of that assumed as a given, and you don't go on like, well, climate change is real, etc. Etc. Etcetera. You kind of assume a lot of stuff is just given and you start midway, but then you kind of go into, okay, great.
Isobel Wild [00:35:52]:
How do we actually start quantifying business value from this? Do we look at consumer appetite to pay more? Do we look at brand durability? Do we look at something else? You then kind of say, okay, how does this play out differently for different companies trying to capture that value? I would like take a value. I always take a value chain example. I say you could have companies at different parts of the, the same value chain, and they're prioritizing different things within the ESG basket. For some, it's like carbon and water and single use materials. For some, it's like carbon and labor practice and local communities. For some, it might be something different. And I kind of try and give it an idea of how you want to focus on winning the game in some places and playing the game in other places, or just staying above board and other places and deciding that mix is part of what I'm trying to upskill the team on is like that you don't try to be amazing at everything. You try to be amazing at a few things and good at many things.
Isobel Wild [00:36:51]:
And then I kind of try and go to, how do you make those decisions or trade offs? And then I go to like, what are the areas that you should think about prioritizing within the business now, this is like a relatively short primer. It's like a couple of hours. It's a big investment, actually, because if you think about 2030 members of a senior management team, this is significant prime time for this. I was getting what the board meeting would get and more, actually a larger stakeholder based on the board meeting. And this is just sustainability and it's just me. And so I'm very conscious of that responsibility. And so I'm trying to cover a lot of ground in this, but I'm also trying to give a framework that they can take away and use to actually drive work. And so I try and think about, like, very dense value creation in a few hours for that sort of session.
Isobel Wild [00:37:44]:
Whereas if I was running that, let's say, with a. With a more junior team, I might take two days over the same content, but just to give a bit of a flavor.
Isobel Wild [00:37:55]:
Yeah. And I think also, like, I can imagine that was quite a high pressure session, Saif, so I take my hat off to you, but I also think there is a real need to, like, make it fun. And I think Erin Nestle tells a great story about how she took the board to one of their farms and she planted some pants in the soil. And over time, she planted in different areas of the soil, some which were healthier soil versus not. And then they hung it up on a washing line to demonstrate what good, healthy soils looks like. And it started off with, you know, like, heavily farmed, high fertilizer, all that jazz with, like, a full knicker, a full pan, and then it goes down until it's literally like a skimpy thong because all the healthy, like, nutrients and bugs and stuff in the soil had eaten away. And I think that is, like, a really emotive, memorable piece that can also just help hammer home what you're trying to get on board. So I think alongside that business value, if you can make any, like, memorable stories, that's part of it.
Isobel Wild [00:39:02]:
And we've spoken a lot about, you know, creating folklore and narratives. I think that's also a good area to lean on.
Isobel Wild [00:39:09]:
Yeah, I mean, I think, Izzy, I would think about early days in altruistic, and this will sound completely detached, but I'm going to bring it first full circle. The early days in our company, I used to think about minimum scalable personality, which is for myself, which is. I had the opportunity to engage very densely with the first few people to join the company. But I thought, actually the person number 25, person number 30, person number 35, I'm not going to get the opportunity to build a one to one relationship with them. And so I have to think about things that scale and can transmit across many different people. If you only engage me in a group slack message, or on all hands, you can still take away some element of who I am as a person, and that gives you a better idea of who we are as a company, etcetera. And so I would kind of think about mannerisms, things I say, like appearances, like all these sorts of things as telling a story about me that can very quickly move at scale and at volume. And I think actually the same principle applies with training programs.
Isobel Wild [00:40:16]:
The example that you've outlined from Emma is a great story that can transmit from one person to another to many. Right. Like, she told it to you, you've told it to me. We now have told it to our audience. It's very memorable. It's very catchy, and it gives a very simple message, which is soil is a natural thing, it's a living thing. And, you know, like, it reacts in the way that living things do when presented with food, basically. Right.
Isobel Wild [00:40:42]:
And this, like, you know, this is a simple message that can transmit across a great distance, and that's perfect. I think when you're trying to affect a company wide change, you want many of those simple things because you're going to make this change across the whole company in very, very small increments multiplied by 100,000 people in an organization like Nestle, at other times, you actually want great depth. And so maybe you actually want, like, have eight procurement people in a room, and you need high intensity, you know, training of, like, real deep content frameworks, skill development tests and quizzes and outcomes in order to be, to be examined as well. And I think you need to mix and match both of those. You need some things that scale very well, very effectively, and you need some things that can just, like, have a really deep, very lasting change within a couple of days of practice and experimentation.
Isobel Wild [00:41:36]:
Saif, I love that, and I hope we can scale Emma's knicker story on maths. But the last area that I want to talk about before we tune off is engagement levers and incentives. I know we're at times left so quick. Fire. If you had to choose three or four, and I'm going to keep you to three and four this time, that doesn't mean ten. What would your key engagement levers be?
Isobel Wild [00:42:00]:
Oh, what? Engage the company as a whole?
Isobel Wild [00:42:03]:
That's a good question. I mean, in terms of, like, this sustainability program, maybe if we can have an engagement lever for the board and then engagement levers for the company as.
Isobel Wild [00:42:12]:
A whole, it's a big question. You know, I think that, like, I would always look to work. I would kind of look at where you want to work, sustainability engagement into existing levers or existing cadence versus where you want to drive something new. And so with the management team, the senior management team, I think, again, bonuses and incentives are a great existing lever to drive action and change. And that's why I think they will be effective there. You need to do some things to make sure it's not gamed with the best of intentions, that it's not gamed and we should talk about this at some point, and I think we have at some point previously, but I think that's a great lever there. I think that with individual teams like procurement, marketing, sales, etcetera, I think that these teams are, again, usually very heavily incentivized by their actual business outcomes. What you probably want to take is you want to work in, whether it's an OKR or a KPI, you want to work it in quantifiably in our organization.
Isobel Wild [00:43:14]:
For example, if you look at our sales team, our sales team is clearly focused on revenue attainment. That's the single goal that our sales force is focused on. Maybe it shouldn't be that way, but, you know, like it or leave it, that's kind of what it is. And if we wanted to drive change in our sales team and how they operate, we'd say, okay, well, actually, let's work in another goal, which is it always has to be a certain type of customer, and we will, we will treat the sale differently if it's a company that we actively want to be working with versus one that we're actually not so keen to work with, for whatever reason, you know that if you work it into the existing cadence of operations, it will go much further. And then from the company wide perspective, I actually think that brand is probably the best way to engage the company as a whole, which is if you start actually rethinking your company brand and what it stands for. Ultimately, I think most people choosing a job these days are highly influenced by the brand that they're joining. They want to join a company that says something about them. This is certainly, I think, true for the highest, highest in demand or the most in demand talent.
Isobel Wild [00:44:21]:
They have the liberty to choose from any number of places they could go and spend their time, and they will go to some place that says something meaningful about who they are as a person. And so I would really look at brand and how you think about that in a sustainability context as the best way to start driving engagement across the whole company. Not just talent in the business, but talent that you want to join the business.
Isobel Wild [00:44:43]:
Yeah, I think that's a good breakdown. If I was just to add one more from my conversation with Kerry, is that they actually created a dashboard. So the regional leads, as I mentioned before, they all had a dashboard and they had a KPI in terms of engagement metrics, and they were competing against each other region as to what their rollout engagement metric was. So I think Christina managed to get 92% engagement. And their european counterpart, I think, was in the late eighties. But having that competition and gamifying it slightly at management level I think can be really effective to make it trickle down into the kind of wider company.
Isobel Wild [00:45:26]:
Yeah, for sure we're all competitive creatures, right? So yeah, I think for sure we are at heart.
Isobel Wild [00:45:31]:
We're actually having a podcast in a few weeks with Camilla Riddeford on driving internal engagement, where we'll dig much. Camilla Riddaford, also as head of sustainability at UK, Ireland and Arla. So we'll dive in a bit more into how she is doing it at Arna and draw on some of her case studies just to flavor this podcast even more. But Saif, any last thoughts?
Isobel Wild [00:45:52]:
No, I'm looking forward to the chat with Camille. I think one of the interesting things with Arla is that I believe it's a cooperative as well, which means that there's an interesting quasi competitive dynamic between suppliers, but they're also like, they have a big stake in the business. And so I think that's an interesting dynamic to manage as well. So I'm excited for that one.
Isobel Wild [00:46:14]:
Yeah, lots to come. Thank you, everybody, so much for listening and look out for our next podcast coming out on next Thursday. Thanks.
Isobel Wild [00:46:23]:
Thanks, Izzy.