News Ltd gets the green ink

I went to a cracking lecture last night put on by the Public Relations Institute of Australia, featuring the environment and climate change manager at News Ltd, Dr Tony Wilkins, and sustainability communications expert and Clean Up Australia co-founder, Ms Kim McKay.

The lecture was entitled ‘The Issue of our Times’ and looked at the how and why of developing communication strategies to bring about environmental behavioural change.

Both speakers were excellent but the News Ltd speech was particularly heartening, because, if the knowledge, enthusiasm and genuine do-goodedness of Dr Wilkins was a reflection of the rest of the company, News Ltd certainly has an intention to change the environmental practices of a broad community – inside and outside the company.

As Peter Chernin, News Ltd President and COO said in a video shown by Dr Wilkins: “As a media company we are in a unique position, which is that we not only have the ability to affect our own actions but we also have the ability to set an example and the ability to affect the actions of millions of people everyday.”

The catholic-proportioned News Ltd family of news publications and programmes reach more than a billion people everyday. Phew.

News Ltd's overall objectives include: to clean up its own act, to work with suppliers and partners to encourage them to do the same, and to inspire others to reduce their own carbon footprint. Dr Wilkins’ words were: “Knowledge has to be spread. Engagement needs to happen. That’s our (News Ltd’s) job.”

It’s the job of us marketers too. From the pen of WPP’s chairman, Sir Martin Sorrell in the most recent WPP Corporate Responsibility report: “If the marketing industry has been unwittingly complicit in causing the problem, it’s now confronted with an historic opportunity: to shape and encourage consumer demand for sustainable products and lifestyles; to restore the true value of durability; to reject the superfluous in products and packaging; to make much of what has passed for fashion deeply unfashionable.”

Here here, Sir Martin. Here here, News Ltd.

If you're quick you can catch Dr Wilkins tomorrow at the Climate Change Summit in Sydney, which I can’t go along to, bummer. But I encourage anyone who is interested in sustainability within business to investigate what News Ltd is doing and why. Plus there is some interesting news, tidbits and an apparently award winning carbon calculator available on the 1 Degree portal.

By the way, one News Ltd company has profited from these initiatives is BSkyB. It was recently ranked second in a survey of 1,500 Brits as to to green reputation of the FTSE 100 companies.

Communications executive extraordinaire Matthew Anderson is James Packer's right hand man at BSkyB. He used to be the head of Ogilvy PR in Asia Pacific, my old employer, incidentally.

So the next time I am faced with the question as to whether corporate responsibility is a fad, I'm going to cite News Ltd and Matthew Anderson and Sir Martin Sorrell as examples.

We're not saving the world here

You only have to look around at the number of people in World Youth Day in Sydney this week (apparently 140,000 yesterday) to recognise how many of us are seeking meaning and community in our lives.

I was reading an article on happiness yesterday, which got me wondering as to how most people find meaning in the work they do. But if you're not working for Médecins Sans Frontières or the WWF, but just a corporate Joe/Jane, how do you derive personal meaning from your job? Particularly if you aren't financially supporting a family?

If you studied Mr Maslow like me then you know too that after money comes meaning.

Just as more and more consumers these days are demanding values as well as value (thank you, Kat Thomas), once we’ve paid our bills more and more of us are looking for meaning in our work lives. And if you offer it to employees, it’s a great way that you can retain them – beyond money – and win out in the ‘war for talent’.

I once asked a friend of mine who runs his own consultancy as to what difference his job makes. He said: ‘I support 20 families through the organisation I run.” Rather than being about how his advice and assistance saves or makes money for other companies, his response about how he makes a difference was much more personal, much more human and much more direct.

So how do companies do it? Well, Ogilvy PR, an old employer of mine, has a program called ‘So Inspired’ whereby they offer employees and extra day of leave to go our and help in a charity or community project. An internal committee seeks out projects for employees to work on collectively, or you can nominate your own project and go it alone. The last year I worked with them we helped clean up the grounds at a women’s shelter. Ogilvy also has an ‘employee value proposition’, based around the somewhat nebulous mission of ‘helping employees be the best they can be’ through the values of ‘learn and grow, ‘partnership and ‘one step ahead’.

Of course, most of us are looking for meaning more than one day a year. I know I took meaning by the difference I could make to more junior staff, in helping them learn and in helping them enjoy their job. Again, my experience of what was meaningful was much more direct.

My belief is money can be a brilliant thing in how it can help people learn, expand their horizons and help others. Bill Gates is an example of someone who is doing amazing, altruistic things with his cash. On a smaller level, my trip last year to northern Asia allowed me to see first hand how others much less fortunate than myself live, and I think (I hope!) it made me more empathetic, worldly and generous. I also had the time of my life (read: meaning.)

If you want to keep people in their job, particularly younger, single, non-loyal Gen Y workers in this skills-short economy, you need to offer more than money. You need to offer people the ability to make a difference in some way – and usually to another human being. You also need to provide individual recognition for their efforts. You also need to provide people with the wider big picture as to how what they do is beneficial, be it in a creative or never-been-done-before way.

Has anyone got any other suggestions on how else this can be done? How you do find meaning in your work day?

Now after writing all of the above, I've just googled it. And of course someone from the Beeb has already written on it. If you are interested in this topic, it might prove, well, meaningful.

Is sustainability just another marketing flash in the pan?

As I speed date to find myself a new employer, the above question has been asked of me by several potential bosses. The question usually comes up when I start talking through case studies of organisations who are Standing Out for Sustainability, as evidence of how many more could possibly do so, if they had a marketing agency (enter employer) with the CSR brains to do so.

It is a fair question coming from media industry bosses who are used to a short news cycle and are the ones responsible for identifying trends that their clients could “leverage,” as we like to say. Media and marketing agencies are not only the ones that get their client companies on the bandwagon, they are supposed to oracle as to when the bandwagon is going to arrive.

The issue of climate change not going away. This is what makes sustainability a different business issue to every one that has come before. It’s not a cyclical problem. And it’s not just a business problem – it will directly affect every single one of us. And it will affect our children even more.

Since this sleeping beast awoke two years ago, sustainability marketing has centered on companies profiling their own internal practices, as a way of differentiating themselves from competitors either to consumers or employees. So discussion may have centered on how organisations use renewable materials in manufacture, how they ensure their supply chain has ethical practices in place, or their own programs designed to reduce their carbon footprint.

But the game has evolved. In the Sydney Morning Herald today is an article about how big brand name companies are working together in an initiative called Together which is designed to provide advice to consumers as to how they can reduce their carbon footprint. The scheme has been running for a year in the UK, with consumer brand behemoths Tesco, Marks & Spencer, B&Q, BSkyB, Barclaycard, Royal & Sun Alliance, British Gas together selling 20 million products such as low-energy light bulbs or housing insulation on the cheap to consumers concerned about the environment. The campaign has saved more than 500,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to 4.6 per cent of Britain’s overall reduction. Now the colonials are exporting the scheme over to us and Westpac, NRMA Insurance and Origin Energy have already signed up. http://www.together.com/

This is a new product line. So rather than companies just being on the defensive about sustainability, this represents that they are now on the offensive.

Yay! I’m looking forward to the day when internal company practices around sustainability aren’t something that companies can “leverage” to better their reputations. It should be something that they (we) all do.

And although I’m a greenie, I am a business woman. So I know that companies have to make a buck out of something to get behind it. But I don’t care. I am cynical of greenwashing and I am informed. But if something is a genuine initiative that can bring some benefit to me and to the environment, I don’t care if the reasons behind it aren't completely altruistic.

Hats to it, in fact, for demonstrating how being green equals being (in the) black.

Promo video avec celebs is now here -

Is the workplace the new family?

I dunno about you but I don't need an OECD report to know that I don't work an eight hour day. I left the 'clock on, clock off' mentality at 17 when I gave up working the dessert bar at Riley's Table Buffet & Grill.

At 31 however, I haven't given up all the habits I developed in my budding working life when I walked the floors of that family restaurant for some extra cash. Namely, my best friends happen to be my colleagues, or recent ex-colleagues.

Some people I know have a healthy ability to draw a firm and solid line between their work life and their home life. But they in the minority, at least amongst my network of contacts.

Have you, like me, got drunk with your boss? Got drunk with a subordinate? Would you consider a workmate - either current or former - to be in your most intimate circle? Has a colleague ever contacted you when you were sick to see how you were going? Have you ever slept with a workmate? Have you ever married a workmate?

My point is: I think the workplace is the new family. Or, to clarify (before you lose your breakfast in revulsion to my motherhood statements) it at least has many of the tenements of a traditional family.

There are many reasons for this: the travelling workforce, for one. Many of us moved to the big cities for work, away from family, school friends, university friends. I am a classic example. Sydney is my adopted home. I have lived and worked in the UK twice now. Working in public relations in Sydney, I often joke that the boys in our industry are either gay or English (the latter,at least, being not from here).

A girl at my current work got engaged the other day. Her and her new fiance broke the happy news to their respective families on the day following the engagement, a Sunday. But next in line were us, her colleagues. We celebrated with champagne over Monday lunch. And contrary to popular misconceptions about PR, we don't often swig back the Moet on a Monday, Patsy 'n' Edina style.

Colleagues share in this kinda Big Life News by virtue of the fact that we spend so much time together. And culture is such that we do tend to stick with our own. We need to work with people who we understand, and who understand us in order to function together properly. We need to get on to survive, just like any other functional family. And when you are spending so much time with others who are like you, this tends to spill over from the workplace into the personal-place.

What implications does this have? Is it bad? Is it good? Like everything, there are two sides to the same coin.

But it's 11pm so the answers to these important questions will have to wait until another workfamilyday.