Name: Many companies failing to live up to promises to prioritize people
Uploaded: 2022-03-07
Duration: 6 min 31 s
Description: Social sustainability matters, and a new study finds corporations are falling short.

Social sustainability matters, and a new study finds corporations are falling short.

Many companies failing to live up to promises to prioritize people

Environment

Many companies fail to meet promises to prioritize people

Social sustainability matters and corporations are falling short.

Assessing corporate social responsibility

The un Sustainable Development Goals is a set of 17 goals that have been agreed by all un member states are not only about environmental issues, not only about social issues, but actually a mix of both. And in that sense, they cover lots of issues that we would call social sustainability, such as poverty inequality, labor issues, Gender equality issues, etc. So we assessed 1000 companies around the world, and what we found is that 99% of the companies that we assessed. it's actually failing and fulfilling their basic expectations of a socially responsible company from protecting human rights to providing and promoting decent work to act ethically. What we have found is actually companies around the world are failing to live up to the promises they have made to be socially responsible and valuing people. So what we have been looking at is basically how are companies prioritizing people? What did they do to make sure that a year to human rights conventions, what are they doing to make sure that there's equality among their workforce is that they pay people a living wage, And how do they apply ethics? So, we basically looked at these foundations and the sad conclusion is that the 99% of the companies do not have these foundations in place to make sure that people are at the center of this transformation. which means people are going to be left behind. Social sustainability is basically about making societies and communities that thrive and are resilient. We often talk about the footprints of the company and and a company can have positive footprint on society, so their existence and their business operations can lead to people, you know, increasing their competence, it can lead to more collaboration with people. You can even see examples of companies increasing the trust and well being of the society. I think it's right to say that companies have been more sort of forward leaning in dealing with environmental sustainability issues. Part of the reason is that many of these social indicators are more um their long run indicators, it's it's harder to see how a single company is impacting something like the level of inequality in the country or the level of trust in the country. So a little bit more or less transparent one might say, to achieve such a change, you need all the stakeholders to take a different role from the different capacities. Right? So governments have the role of policy making companies also have such a massive influence in the world in the way they operate in the way they use natural resources in the way they treat the people that work for them. So we cannot achieve this global agenda by governments alone. Government needs that business and financial institutions, it's extremely critical that corporations focused on social sustainability. Um I think it's it's not just um something that governments should focus on. It should be corporations, governments, you should have a lot of public private partnerships as well that support this work in the community. So we define social sustainability as making sure that everyone has what they need right that we are supporting communities that are marginalized to make sure that they can be successful today and in the future. We measure success across all of the work that we do from how many people are we skilling including how many people were moving into meaningful jobs, you know? How many people are we supporting with our sustainability initiatives? Right. How many are increasing yields, increase in economic prosperity, increase in income etcetera. So we look at all of the beneficiaries of our programs and we're able to measure progress against all of our commitments and our goals and all of our initiatives. What we're hoping to do with the information we have is that we can inform and empower companies to drive this change fast, but also the stakeholders to help them set the regulatory explorers set the incentives and actually drive the change in the speed that we needed with the urgency we needed. There is no longer a question of why companies should do this, but that the real the conversation is shifting to how companies should be addressing this. This is where we try to provide guidance but also the accountability to make sure that companies actually followed through on that there are probably many reasons why it's so hard to meet the goals for social sustainability that are set for instance in the U. N. S. T. G. I think many companies still believe that it is costly to make the necessary changes for instance, and things like labor practices, you know, and fair trade practices and and so on. And it could also be that regulating at least some of these social sustainability outcomes is harder than regulating things like how much C. 02 do you limit how much water uh you do you use, how much chemicals do you spill or more sort of concrete environmental uh impacts like that. So I think that is probably also part of the reason why we're seeing a little bit of a slow development towards meeting these goals for millions and millions of people living in emerging economies and developing countries. This is a life and death situation. And if we now look post covid, we we can see hunger going up, we see poverty levels going up and this is perhaps the level of urgency that we don't feel in our everyday lives. I think there are a lot of things that we do take for granted right, the ability to have electricity, the ability to have fresh water, the ability to go to school and have a great education. And I think a lot of people don't have access too many of those opportunities like we do, and that's completely tied to why corporations like IBM has to focus on marginalized populations and enable them to have access to skills and to make sure that we're supporting vulnerable communities. And it's also not just about risk mitigation, it's really around making sure that we're supporting the people that need it the most, um, but also looking at opportunities for innovation and new solutions. So this actually benefits corporations in a multiple of ways.