Workers shape sustainability investment at this employee-owned company

There’s a lot of value creation opportunity in sustainability, Andrew Kenny, SVP and CFO at Scoular, an agricultural supply chain company, told me.

“We believe that there’s a huge demand from the consumer base, and we can play a key role in that supply chain by connecting all the way from the producer or farmer to what the demand is on the consumer side,” Kenny says. And as a private, employee-owned company with $6 billion in revenue, workers’ opinions matter when it comes to sustainability investment, he says.

Courtesy of Scoular

Based in Omaha, Nebraska, Scoular was founded in 1892. The company is in an intermediary position in the supply chain, including buying, selling, storing, and processing grain and ingredients, as well as managing transportation and logistics for its customers. It has approximately 1,200 employees in offices in North America and Asia. “We recently started an expansion into Asia with offices now in Myanmar, Indonesia, China, and Singapore,” Kenny says. 

Scoular appointed Joshua Mellinger its first director of sustainability in June. “[Our] cross-functional team effort has gotten us really far in our journey,” Kenny says. But it was time for “somebody who can be, in a way, the quarterback,” he says. Kenny will work closely with Mellinger at “the intersection of our global enterprise risk management program and our sustainability programs,” he says. “We’re working to integrate sustainability in everything we do, even the evaluation of capital investments,” Kenny says. 

And when it comes to capital investments, the company answers to its employees. “We truly use the work and the desires of our employee base to shape where we go; it’s not some fictitious owner or shareholder or Wall Street driving something,” Kenny says. “Our employee feedback has been a really critical data point.” After one year of employment at Scoular, every employee can participate in a profit-sharing program. “We put 10% of our profitability into the program this year, and that equated to roughly 10% of employees’ eligible wages,” he says. 

“No matter what role it is, whether you’re working at the truck dump pit for the corn coming in, or you are a merchandiser, or you work in our communications team, everybody ends up participating in that program and has shared ownership, which has served the company extremely well over our long history,” Kenny says. 

Employees out in the field, in particular, provide insightful feedback, Kenny says. For example, to reduce or eliminate “deadhead mileage” and conserve energy, Scoular, along with Cargill, Koch Industries, and a number of other companies have implemented Roger LLC’s digital tools for carriers in the dry bulk truck freight industry, Kenny says.

Last December, Scoular announced a five-year sustainability strategy. “Just this past month, we finalized our first-ever supplier code of conduct,” which “incorporates a number of our sustainability pillars as well with expectations for our suppliers,” he says. When thinking about the production of ethanol, “the journey starts with the corn that the farmer grows, and what sort of sustainable practices they are using,” Kenny says.

See you tomorrow.

Sheryl Estrada
sheryl.estrada@fortune.com

Big deal

To avoid layoffs during the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations greatly expanded their redeployment programs to help employees find new roles internally, according to the consulting firm Randstad. The Randstad RiseSmart 2021 Guide to Severance & Workforce Transition, based on a survey of nearly 2,000 HR leaders worldwide, found redeployment became a priority as organizations recognized that retaining talent is essential, and developing an agile and skilled workforce is key, the report found.

Courtesy of Randstad RiseSmart

Going deeper

The 2021 EY Global Climate Risk Disclosure Barometer assesses the efforts of over 1,100 organizations across 42 countries to publish their climate-related risks and opportunities, based the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures recommendations. Half of the companies provide some disclosure, the report found. However, only 3% do so fully and received a score of 100% quality.

Leaderboard

Kathryn Mikells was named SVP and CFO at Exxon Mobil Corporation, effective Aug. 9. Andrew Swiger, current SVP, announced his intention to retire, effective Sept. 1. Mikells joins ExxonMobil from Diageo plc, where she was CFO. She was also previously CFO at Xerox, ADT, Nalcon, and United Airlines. During her time at United Airlines, Mikells was also VP of investor relations and treasurer.

Mark Bendza was named EVP and CFO at Telos Corporation, a provider of cyber, cloud, and enterprise security solutions, effective July 19. Bendza previously served as VP in charge of investor relations at Honeywell International Inc. He has over 20 years of experience with global companies. Bendza succeeds Michele Nakazawa, who is retiring but will stay on with the company as an advisor during the transition process.

Overheard

"I think you watch as the speculators get blown to kingdom come, while the pandemic stocks come roaring back and the big industrials try to bottom."

–“Mad Money” host Jim Cramer on the end of rampant speculation on Wall Street, as reported by CNBC.