goodworkpeople

Why Trader Joe’s Wins This Thanksgiving

It’s a time for family. It’s a time for turkey.  It’s a time for profit.

Did you know that only the Super Bowl beats Thanksgiving for grocery shoppers for a one-day food event?   So why on earth would a grocery store be closed on Thanksgiving?

I couldn’t believe it when I walked up to the Trader Joe’s cashier this past weekend.  There it was, a postcard-sized sign pasted on the register: “Trader Joe’s will be closed this Thanksgiving Day to give our employees time to spend with their families.”

I’m not someone who gets overly attached to his grocery stores, but it definitely caught my attention.  It was remarkable to see a company respect its employees in such a simple way, even if it meant sacrificing profits.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Social Change From the Inside Out

When a company is as environmentally responsible as Stonyfield, you’d expect them to shout it from the rooftop.  But they’re not that kind of company.  Truth is, many of Stonyfield’s customers will never know that it was the first dairy processor in the country to pay farmers not to treat cows with synthetic growth hormones or that it was America’s first manufacturer to offset 100% of its CO2 emissions from its facility energy use.

Lisa Drake, Natural Resources Director at Stonyfield, has been leading the company’s environmental impact and stewardship efforts for almost eight years.  I first heard Lisa speak on Timberland’s Stakeholders Conference Call, and was impressed by the approach she takes toward Stonyfield’s social impact.  Her approach is sincere and calculated, and what I like most about Lisa is that she understands environmental change—and any social change for that matter—starts from within.

Check out our interview below.

I think you’re the only non-governmental Natural Resources Director I know.

Certainly there are not a lot of us, at least with that title, in the corporate world.  Many of my compatriots at other companies have titles using the words “environmental affairs” or “sustainability”.  Our Natural Resource Department started nearly 20 years ago when the word sustainability was not so widely used.

Using the words “Natural Resources” reflects my role here—it’s not about environmental compliance.  My role is about recognizing the impacts Stonyfield Farm has on the environment through our use of natural resources (water, energy, waste, etc.) and working to minimize those impacts.

What has been your biggest accomplishment at Stonyfield?

That has to be my work in establishing our Mission Action Program, or MAP.  While Stonyfield has a long history of environmental action, we’ve grown tremendously over the years and it was hard to be sure that we were headed on the right track and that everyone was aligned with our environmental mission.

MAP was set up as a structure to accomplish that—it’s comprised of 10 teams of employees challenged to address our biggest environmental impacts from our own operations to our supply chain to our distribution.  The teams are cross functional and engage the people within the company that make decisions in their every day jobs that ultimately result in our company’s environmental impacts.  Each team was given a charter and asked to create a vision as well as goals—and encouraged to think big.

Getting the decision makers on board and making it core to their job is the best thing we’ve ever done.  People are engaged, inspired and achieving goals that may have at first seemed impossible.   We still have a long was to go, but MAP is our vehicle for achieving great things!

I often think of companies in terms of their ability to influence positive social decision-making among the public at large.  But at Stonyfield, you start with your employees.  Can you tell me about that?

Both are important, but we feel it’s important to walk the talk first.  With our employees, it starts on the first day you come to work at Stonyfield.  New employee orientation includes a general environmental orientation.  Then within the employee’s first quarter here, we also commit a full day to more environmental and organic education.  We spend the morning in a classroom setting learning about climate change, Stonyfield’s environmental and climate impacts and what we’re doing about them, followed by an afternoon on an organic dairy farm.  Quickly people learn that consideration of environmental impacts permeates everything we do here.  It’s our way of thinking and approach to our business.

And then, people start to take it home with them.   They start incorporating what they do at work with what they do at home.  It affects the food they buy, the car they drive, and how they are heating their homes.  And it really works both ways here.  We expect our employees to contribute to our company’s environmental mission, but we also support them in their efforts to have a positive impact in their personal lives as well.  Whether it’s our carpooling initiative, opportunities to attend home energy conferences, buying organic produce through a CSA (community supported agriculture) program, or our fuel efficient vehicle incentive—we try to inspire and help our employees improve their lives and reduce their environmental impact.

I’m not saying that everyone here is a bike-riding environmental zealot.  But I do think that we’ve raised our employees’ consciousness about their personal impacts and, in many cases, spurred positive change.

What are some of the challenges you face translating that accountability to your consumers?

We talk a lot about the power of the consumer.  Every purchase you make is a vote.  When you check out at the grocery store, you are making a choice—to vote for organic or conventional agriculture, family or corporate farms, synthetic growth hormones or not, toxic pesticides or not.  But it doesn’t end there.  We also use our yogurt cup lids and our voice with consumers in general, to educate, inspire and activate.  Whether its farming issues, climate change or nutrition, we hope that our consumers are not just buying a product, but they are also learning and deepening their understanding of these important issues.  And just like we support our employees, we also try to support consumers with things like the recent “Green Living Guide” we developed with Body & Soul magazine.  So in the end, we hope that through their loyalty to Stonyfield and the resulting continuing dialogue, that we’re helping them make a difference.

It would be great to see other companies adopt some of your environmental practices.  How are you documenting the work you’re doing or sharing it with the community?

I’m glad you asked!  We are working feverishly on a whole new website that we hope to be launching in mid-October.  As part of that work, we have documented a lot of our environmental work—our approach, our systems, our efforts and accomplishments, and resources for consumers as well as businesses.  Just as we’ve had the help of many smart and talented people along our environmental history, we are proud to share our learnings and provide resources to others.  It will be up soon at Stonyfield.com.

We also are out in the community regularly speaking about our work and experiences.  Dialogue is so important in creating movement and momentum in sustainable practices.

Oh, and I can’t not mention Climate Counts.  In 2007, Stonyfield founded a nonprofit organization called Climate Counts that is scoring some of America’s largest corporations on their climate leadership.  The idea is to spur the companies to take their climate obligations seriously and get moving if they are “stuck”.  And at the same time, motivate consumers to support companies who are taking the lead and push those who aren’t to do better.  It’s a carrot and stick approach that’s had a lot of resonance both with consumers and in the business community.  You might be surprised to see who some of the leaders and laggards are!

What the Whole Foods Boycott Says About Social Responsibility

I just spent an hour reading comments on message boards, blogs, and online newspapers in response to the Whole Foods health care debacle.  (If you missed the incident, refer to exhibit A, B, C, D, and E).

I usually can’t stand online flame wars, but in this case I was fascinated—not by what the comments said about bipartisan politics or health care, but what they said about corporate social responsibility.

On the one hand, you have a business that has built its brand on social consciousness.  Whole Foods has taken strong public stances around environmental standards, shown respect and compassion for its employees, supported  local development, and contributed generously to philanthropic causes.

Last week, I heard that one of their employees, who suffers from a terminal illness, surprisingly got faced with a prescription costing over $800. Whole Foods picked up the bill.  This was not Whole Foods PR—this came from a friend of mine who knows the employee personally. So by the looks of it, Whole Foods is a company that seriously walks the talk, not only when it’s convenient or public.

And now that its CEO John Mackey has announced his political views on a very sensitive subject, the game has changed.  Suddenly, tens of thousands of former customers are questioning their support of the store.

Here’s what I like about the comments I read:

1.  We are on our way to a more nuanced understanding of responsibility.

As even the most socially-conscious companies face scrutiny on their values, consumers will develop a more mature sense of what social responsibility really means.  It won’t be enough to be good half the time and careless the rest.  The more critically we think about these things, the more sensitive businesses will become to our judgments.

2.  There is a fine line between creating social value and getting political.

This is where things get interesting.  There are many ways for a company to create social value without being political.  Most of this outrage is over Mackey’s use of Whole Foods for political involvement.   As Matt Yglesias of Think Progress wrote, “One could easily imagine a world in which CEOs were reluctant to play the role of freelance political pundit out of fear of alienating their customer base. And it seems to me that that might very well be a nice world to live in.”

3.  Social responsibility is about leadership.

Many of the comments recognized a distinction between Whole Foods the company and its CEO.  Consumers were still willing to support Whole Foods in the long term, but were not willing to support poor management among its leadership.  (And this isn’t his first offense).  It’s the elitist leadership that they couldn’t stand more than anything.  The bittersweet piece is that Mackey has shown admirable leadership in a number of other ways, like paving the way for green businesses and organic grocers.

A Rich Blend of People and Profit

There’s a reason Dean Cycon’s coffee-roasting company, Dean’s Beans, uses 100% fair-trade beans.  It’s not because it sounds good in the company tagline, or because it’s popular among the “ethical consumer”.  It’s because anything less than 100% would mean that some of the farmers he buys from get the chance to improve their lives and some of them don’t—and that just doesn’t seem right.

When you think in those terms, fair-trade has little to do with market price and standards, and everything to do with an ethical approach that guides your work.  But that’s just the kind of guy Dean is.  He operates not to move a product or improve brand perception, but to aid people in creating better lives.  His product is just a way to help him get there.

Check out our interview below. 

You can find coffee literally at every corner.  What makes Dean’s Beans special?

Dean’s Beans was founded on the principle that business can and should be a vehicle for positive social, environmental and economic change.  Every decision we make gets filtered through that ethical lens.

Since we have long term, respectful relationships with all of the farmers we buy from in fourteen countries, we know that they give us their best coffee in return.  That’s not just hype, that is what the farmers tell us and our independent cupping bears that out.

A consumer can be assured that everybody in the supply chain is being treated respectfully, fairly and being assisted to realize their life’s goals as well.  We do this through our People-Centered Development program, where we co-design with the farmers development projects that address their highest community priorities.

There are many companies that are into charity, but not necessarily social change.  How do you distinguish between them?

Charity is an important thing, but it is not about change, it is about maintenance and help.

Many smaller companies don’t have direct relations with the farmers, buying through brokers instead. So charitable giving to organizations like Coffee Kids (which I co-founded in 1988) or Grounds for Health is the only way for those companies to give something back.

But charity does not require the giver to change their own behavior, only to give when they feel moved to do so. In order to participate effectively in social change, we must look at our own part of the equation and realize that we are participating in a system that will keep coffee farmers poor and disempowered forever.  Social change requires us to change our behavior as well, to break the cycle of trade relationships that took advantage of or even created underdevelopment in those lands.

How have you seen socially responsible business evolve over the last 16 years?

Many businesses are trying to incorporate aspects of social responsibility into their operations. I applaud all of those efforts. At the same time I have to make two observations.

First, social responsibility is not just another product on the shelf, it is an ethical construct that should inform all of your behavior.  So it is really not enough to be “socially responsible” in your labor relations with your workers while you are a massive polluter. It can’t be compartmentalized if there is ever going to be real, lasting change.

Second, many companies use social responsibility as a marketing tool, with no serious commitment. Some companies spend massive amounts of money advertising their meager participation on fair trade or other socially responsible movements, but they have no company-wide commitment.

As a social movement, however, social responsibility is here to stay. It has evolved into an integral part of corporate thinking, and I have seen this all over the world through my work with FAO and the UN Global Compact. Now the fun begins as the battle between serious integration of the concept and manipulation for marketing purposes gets into full swing.  But that is always the tension in social movements.

Companies have to change their behavior, but consumers do as well, right?  Is it just a chicken and egg situation?

Change is like a wave on the shore. It starts somewhere out there and swells with momentum. We only see the end product.

Companies only change their behavior in response to momentum from the public. The most clever or responsible ones see the momentum sooner and take action out of sincere commitment or just to capture an emerging market.

So it really begins with society at large, not necessarily the particular company’s consumer.  How it all begins is a mystery, but where it goes from there is not.  I have heard so many companies say they respond to consumer demand, that’s when they will change their behavior. Yet at the same time these companies put out information that lulls the consumer into believing that the problem is being addressed, even though the change at the company level is cosmetic and the commitment meager.

So what are the benefits of this kind of serious integration?

If the companies truly integrate social responsibility into their decision making, the benefits are enormous.

First of all, our environment benefits, as an important aspect of social responsibility is care for the environment.  That benefits all of us, although it is so difficult to quantify the benefits for an individual (they are there!).

Second—and again, this is hard to quantify, but that to me is not the final judge of something’s worth—social responsibility can go a long way towards peace-building in the world.

Believe me, I have seen so many times the result of treating people in the developing world with respect. People who feel respected and hopeful that their lives and their children’s lives will be better are far less likely to blow themselves up or firebomb a church. I don’t take that lightly.