Engage your employees in ESG

Let’s Talk - Andrew Lowe

How do we get our investors, employees and leaders engaged in ESG?

I think the importance there for being able to articulate and communicate through your leadership: What is our purpose? What do we stand for? Who are the shareholders that we're seeking to create value for?

What is our environmental impact?

What is our societal impact? What is our environmental impact? These are all questions that you as a leader now need to be able to answer in a sincere and authentic way in order to, I think, properly engage with employees, communities, and in fact all stakeholders within your ecosystem.

From an investor standpoint, being quite binary, you know, your organization is either part of the solution or part of the problem, and if you're not able to demonstrate where you sit on that, then I think investors will increasingly form a view that, actually — perhaps their capital or their engagement — their capital needs to go elsewhere or their level of engagement needs to increase with you to help you evolve your ESG strategies.

Be bold. Set ambitious targets.

So, I think the message is: whatever you say you are going to do, be bold, set stretch targets, set ambitious targets, be comfortable that you will have to both perform and transform on the way, and it's that authenticity and boldness that will ensure buy-in throughout the organization.