What do the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) mean for your employees?
We might have been hearing a lot about the UN Sustainable Development Goals since their launch late last year, but we’re still finding ourselves discussing how to best apply them to business.
We recently went along to a CSR meet-up in London Business School, where we heard Katherine Rusack of BITC speak about what the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) mean for business. Since we’ve been thinking about the impact of the SDGs on the people in your business, meaning your employees.
How can big business make an impact on the global goals through engaging their employees?
The SDGs were prepared by UN members in order to tackle major development challenges by 2030. There are a total of 17 goals, which cover a range of topics from gender equality to hunger to climate change. The SDGs follow from the Millennium Development Goals, but call for a bigger engagement from business in particular.
The SDGs aim to impact some of the world’s biggest challenges, yet packaging them into workable goals for organisations brings some big challenges in itself.
We're going to focus in on a couple of the challenges: engagement and measuring progress.
Engagement with the SDGs and raising awareness of them is the first step, with the UN already launching fun graphics and social media campaigns to engage the wider public. Inside organisations, we wonder what business might be doing to engage their employees with the SDGs. First it means getting buy-in from the top and choosing which SDGs your business will focus on. Each organisation and industry is different, but a study by PWC called ‘Engaging with the Sustainable Development Goals’ showed how industries varied by their choices of SDGs. Interestingly, one of the most popular was SDG Number 8: promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all. This goal is one which most businesses feel they can make an impact, by ensuring that as an employer they align with SDGs. This goal could be interpreted from different angles, for example many organisations might relate it to ensuring their global supply chain complies with the modern slavery act. The goals are meant to apply equally to all nations, so if we look more locally in our role as an employer should we also be ensuring our staff are engaged with the SDGs?
After engagement, the challenge becomes measuring progress against the SDGs. The magic key to unlocking progress is gathering data.
Efforts to engage can be wasted if that engagement can’t be measured, proven or traced.
As we search for the most effective ways to both engage our staff with the SDGs, and secondly measure our progress towards the SDGs, we wondered how we might help solve these two challenges at the same time. At GivingForce we help clients to measure their progress towards CSR goals, focusing on employee engagement with the community.
The GivingForce portal allows employees to generate their own data towards goals, by signing in to the portal to log their volunteering hours or set up payroll giving, for example, CSR professionals can log in to track the data and extract it for reporting purposes. We have found this makes gathering the data easier, allowing time to be focused on growing engagement instead.
Once the data is gathered, the next step becomes interpreting the data. Interpreting the data has in some cases come to mean not just progress towards a goal, but trying to measure impact. Once an employee has participated in an activity such as volunteering, what is the impact as a result on not just the employee, but the local community or the charity involved? We have found encouraging feedback from employees and charities can produce an indication of the impact. Impact needs to be measured over the long term, which we need to start measuring effectively now so that by 2030 we can try to imagine the impact of business on the SDGs.
Employee volunteering and involvement in local communities seems to be going through a wave of growth, which is just one of the possible implications of the SDGs on your employees.
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