Chaos to calm: How to communicate sustainability and purpose inside organisations S3 E8

This is a topic that our Twitter followers wanted Jenni to delve into further. In this episode, Jenni shares a little bit about sustainability and the chaos surrounding it by exploring the eight things we need to think about when communicating about this subject internally. Jenni will also shake the dust off a blog from 2019 about purpose and discuss viewpoints in further detail.

Things that will help you go from chaos to calm:

Podcast: Calm Edged Rebels: Why purpose matters S3 E11

Blog: The purpose and the how

You can continue the conversation with Jenni on Twitter and LinkedIn

Transcript for this podcast:

Welcome to this episode of Redefining Comms with me, Jenni Field. Today, I’m going to be talking about communicating sustainability and purpose. This is a topic that was suggested by my community on Twitter when I asked people what they wanted me to talk about in season three. And it’s no real surprise, I think, with ESG, so environment, social and governance, with climate change and purpose all being really hot topics for organisations, it really wasn’t a surprise that this came up on the list for leaders and communicators. 

So I’m going to start this episode by talking about the chaos around sustainability and purpose. And then I’m going to delve into the eight things that you need to think about when it comes to communicating it inside your organisation. 

Now, the chaos part is all a bit interwoven for me, and it brings me back to a conversation that I had on my Calm Edged Rebels podcast where we talked about why purpose matters. I’ve popped a link in the show notes to the episode because we cover a lot in the 40-minute conversation, and it’s an important discussion about where purpose fits, sometimes in organisations that have been around for a very long time.

Now, for me, purpose and sustainability should be considered together. There shouldn’t really be a purpose or a strategy that doesn’t consider the environment or the social aspect of business. And this has long been discussed for organisations, organisations that have to do annual reports. It’s always been a topic where we had corporate social responsibility and it’s always been something that’s really been front of mind for customers. And I say always, but probably really for the last 10, 15 years, there’s been lots of reasons for customers to choose brands and that’s often linked to ethics, sustainability, all of those things.

So, it’s really only a matter of time before employees start to pay attention to that about choosing where they work, given how much time we spend in the workplace.

What are the things to look out for?

If you’re currently exploring communicating sustainability and purpose in your organisation? What are the things to look for that might be causing chaos?

Now, as I was getting to this section of the podcast, I wanted to list out all the things that are chaotic about sustainability and purpose. But actually, when I was thinking about it, the only thing that came to mind was performative action. Because really, chaos will come if you’re just doing something because you think you should be doing it and there’s no real substance behind it. And if you’re doing that, then that’s what’s going to create the chaos.

Whether it’s a charity donation, whether it’s ticking a bit of a box, and this can ebb into other areas of business, not just sustainability. But if you’re doing it just to be seen to be doing it, or you’re doing it without actually following through with action, then that’s where there’s going to be some chaos. So, trying to sort of shoehorn something in just won’t work because it just won’t be genuine and people will see through that so quickly. Now, you don’t have to be completely purpose-led. And I think this is often where organisations get a bit stuck.

And this, I suppose, is maybe the other way that chaos can happen. We can try and shoehorn that purpose in when actually it doesn’t really fit. So, I often talk about organisations being purpose-led or being purpose-full. And it’s a bit of a distinction that I talk about whenever I’m covering purpose, if I’m teaching or running workshops on it, because they are two sort of different strands of the same thing. 

There are organisations that are purpose-led. They’ve been specifically set up because of a bigger purpose. And I’m going to come back to the example of Patagonia, which is always used when we come to talking about purpose.

What does it mean to be purpose-led?

Now, Patagonia is a brand that is very purpose-led. And there are other brands out there like Tom’s, who do shoes, and Nomad, which is a brand I found recently that do sunglasses. These are very purpose-led organisations. And they exist to make a difference in the world. They’re almost, if not already in, a kind of activist space. But your organisation might be more purpose-full. There might be a greater cause linked to what they’re doing, but its reason for being is not the same as organisations like Patagonia. And I think that distinction is important because I think we can get stuck in thinking we’ve got to have this big grand purpose and be purpose-led, even if we’ve been around for a very, very long time.

How can you truly use purpose-led initiatives within your organisation?

Now, back in 2019, I wrote a blog post called “The Purpose and The How”. And I say it out loud here because in my head, it sounded like the tortoise and the hare, but that doesn’t really translate in text, which I’ve learned. So, it always makes me laugh, and it’s given me an opportunity to talk about that today. But “The Purpose and The How” was written to really talk about that step of communicating purpose and how you really start to bring it to life inside organisations.

So, I’ve re-read that post in preparation for this episode, and most of it remains the same, but I’ve added a few more bits to it that I want you to think about if you’re looking at how to communicate purpose and sustainability inside your organisation.So there are eight things that I’m going to run through. 

1. Purpose must be both individual and organisational.

Now, we have to take the time to understand what makes people tick inside the organisation. And it will be aligned to your organisation, whether it’s personal or otherwise. So, let me just explain this a bit. When you’re working with a leadership team or you’re working with a management team, we have to understand what the purpose is for the individuals in that group. So, quite often in workshops, I will be asking people, you know, what is your purpose? It doesn’t have to be a big grand statement, but what do you feel is your kind of purpose? What really gets you out of bed in the morning? What do you really love doing?

Because if we can have that conversation and unearth what really makes people tick, then it will help us understand how that might translate into the organisation. And I remember working with a leadership team where we were looking at their strategy and I was facilitating a workshop around it. And we started to delve into this purpose piece. And one of the directors shared about a real passion for sustainability and sort of that side of things, which we hadn’t massively talked about, but it meant that we could then have a much bigger conversation about it.

And that individual could take ownership for that strategic pillar to really drive that forward because it really aligned to their own personal purpose and values. And that’s what’s really helpful when you start to look at it, both from an individual perspective, but also as a broader organisation. 

2. Purpose really is the hardest part.

You know, it takes a lot of thinking, a lot of conversation, sometimes a bit of uncomfortable discussion, but it’s all really worth it. And I think for me, this is something that really does need to be done in person.

You know, we have to use a space that isn’t necessarily where we work and have the freedom to, you know, walk and think and talk about it. It’s a much more creative process than I think we give it credit for. And I think trying to do that in a strict work environment can sometimes be a bit more challenging. So, having the space to do that and giving it the time is really important.

3. Follow purpose with the how. 

You know, there’s little point in creating a purpose without exploring how it will be fulfilled and whether that’s your values or your behaviours.

But you have to look at all of your different stakeholders and how this is going to play out with each of those kind of in the day-to-day. So how does it impact your communication style? How does it impact how you communicate with that stakeholder group? How does it impact how you show up to that stakeholder group?

There’s lots of different ways that it can manifest in real life. And we have to really explore that as we start to look at things. And this links quite heavily to the episode in this season about the employee life cycle and culture where I talk about the fact that you have to kind of really demonstrate how that’s showing up under each stage of the employee life cycle. This is much the same. If you’re talking about sustainability and purpose, how is it showing up with all of your different Stakeholder groups?

4. You don’t need to have all of the answers at the top. 

Now, there’s a lot of organisations that continue to look up at the senior leadership for all the answers. But it’s really fundamental as a leader to get some answers from people across the organisation. Someone once said to me that decisions are made by those with the most to gain. 

Now, that really stayed with me because decisions should be made by those with the best insight. And when it comes to sustainability and purpose, certainly the sustainability angle, there are going to be solutions and answers to lots of different areas of this across the organisation.

So, if everyone’s looking up, it’s OK to not have the answers, but make sure you’re providing space to listen to people and get input from across the organisation. 

5. Having conversations in person. 

Now, this sometimes sounds easier than it is, but on the back of a pandemic, we’ve kind of forgotten that it’s important to get together in person. You can’t do these sorts of things through a survey and as much as you can do them over a video call, it’s much better to get together to have that discussion and run a workshop, get the board together, get different groups together, get people discussing it, have real conversations that aren’t stilted by technology because it’s incredibly helpful to really bring that connection together and get that passion together to really have some of these discussions about what you need to do differently when it comes to sustainability and purpose.

Now, those five are from the blog post that I wrote in 2019, but I’ve added in some others for this episode. There are three more. 

6. Go big on the how.

So, when you’re mapping those stakeholders, map it to the sort of framework of think, feel, do. What do you want people to think? How do you want them to feel? And what do you want them to do as a result of the purpose?

And then this is the activity that then people will then need to go and do those things. So it makes it much clearer in terms of what can happen. And this is where you can really come up with loads of different ideas. No idea is a silly idea, but if you can start to use some of the innovation techniques where you’re encouraging people to come up with new ideas, then there’s some really great ways that you can start to think about how you can do this.

If you’re really going to dial up sustainability and have a really big part of your purpose and messaging and strategy around that, you’ve got to be able to really demonstrate that in a big, bold way. 

7. Look at the little things. 

So, the suppliers to the organisation, the offices, your environmental policies, how you actually operate, all of that has to be considered. You can’t just do the big things. It has to be all of the little things as well. So, making sure that you’re looking at those and little changes to how you do things that make it really clear.

We’ve just started doing this at Redefining Communications, where we’re making significant changes to how we operate with the collective team when it comes to running focus groups or things with clients. So we make sure that the collective team member who lives closest to the client will go and run those focus groups to reduce our impact on the environment by travelling unnecessarily. So we’re trying to do things a little bit differently and changing how we operate to support being more purposeful. 

8. It’s got to be inside and outside.

So, in the world of technology and social media, you can’t sort of have all these grand visions and grand plans inside the organisation and be very different outside, or the other way round. You’ve got to be matched to every stakeholder group that you’ve got so that it runs through the whole organisation. And importantly, how you communicate also needs to be linked to the message.

So, if you’re talking about being more sustainable and maybe using, I don’t know, less print, which for some people is important, then communicating through magazines to some of your stakeholder groups might not be right. It might be completely right for them as a stakeholder group. So how do you then make that a more sustainable product? So it’s all those things that have to be considered when it comes to sustainability and purpose. 

Thank you for listening!

Now, in the next episode I’m going to be talking about compassion and empathy. And this is because in the pandemic there were a lot of calls for leaders to be more empathetic and it led me to reading more about what empathy is as a concept and it really opened up my eyes to the different types of empathy and where we often confuse empathy with compassion. So I want to delve into that for you in case empathy and leadership is something that you’re looking at.

Thank you for listening. I’d love to continue this conversation on Twitter or LinkedIn and you can also join my community by subscribing to my mailing list. So please connect, ask questions and share your thinking with me and details are in the show notes on how to stay in touch.