Integrating Sustainability Into Strategy, Governance and Employee Engagement

Just because you can’t measure an action doesn’t mean it’s not creating strategic value, says Suzanne Fallender, director of CSR Strategy and Communications for Intel. Her job, though, is to measure wherever she can and make the best case possible for incorporating sustainability efforts into every facet of the company.

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Corporate adoption of sustainable business practices is essential to a strong market environment and an enduring society. What does it mean to become a sustainable business and what steps must leaders take to integrate sustainability into their organization?
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Suzanne Fallender, director of CSR Strategy and Communications for Intel

“We have been doing a lot of things around sustainability for a very long time,” says Suzanne Fallender, director of CSR (corporate social responsibility) Strategy and Communications in the Intel Global Corporate Responsibility Office.

“What we’re doing now is trying to take it to that next level of integration in terms of our strategy, in terms of our governance system, in terms of employee engagement,” she says. “That’s really where we’ve been focusing a lot of our efforts.”

Fallender came to her role four and a half years ago from outside the company. “I actually was working on the investor side of things,” she says, at Institutional Shareholder Services (now part of MSCI), an organization that did corporate governance and ESG research. “I went from analyzing thousands of companies doing CSR to being inside a company, and I always tease that I get a taste of my own medicine now since I now have to answer the questionnaires I used to send to companies.”

In her role, Fallender works on Intel’s global CSR programs, which are detailed online at http://www.intel.com/go/responsibility and http://blogs.intel.com/csr. She’s also front and center on the issue in social media, tweeting at @sfallender and @intelinvolved.

In a conversation with Nina Kruschwitz, an editor and the special projects manager at MIT Sloan Management Review, Fallender talks about the challenges of breaking out costs and payoffs of sustainability efforts, how the company is using targeted websites like ExploreIntel.com to provide year-round real-time reporting of CSR activities and how Intel sees value in helping create long-term demand for renewables, even if it means paying more for green energy today.

Intel has been active in sustainability issues for a long time, something like 20 years?

Intel started voluntarily reporting environmental data back in 1994, so we’ve had many years of experience with this. We moved to transparency and proactive engagement with investors on these topics, and today we learn quite a bit through proactive outreach and road shows that we do with ESG research firms and socially responsible investors.

Given the long history we’ve had, right now we’re working on how we strengthen that in our strategy and vision, how we integrate it into how we talk about value and how we really engage with the functional business units to make it relevant.

Topics

Leading Sustainable Organizations

Corporate adoption of sustainable business practices is essential to a strong market environment and an enduring society. What does it mean to become a sustainable business and what steps must leaders take to integrate sustainability into their organization?
More in this series

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Comments (2)
The Truth Will Out: Integration Triple Pundit: People, Planet, Profit
[...] and insure compliance. (See Bertel’s Framework for more on this idea). Leaders such as Intel and Cisco incorporate sustainability goals – among other core frameworks – into individual [...]
hosnkml
Thank you Nina for this article.

Sustainability is a challenge for businesses. As the interview revealed, that it is an area that needs more understanding, and hence Suzanne mentions how Intel is heading that direction. 

It is good to hear that sustainability is part of the compensation package for Intel employees. I had a similar suggestion to Porter's article on HBR on US Competitiveness. The suggestion - to introduce a sustainability currency called SUSY, for example. Like the credit card point system, consumers will be rewarded with points for buying sustainable products/brands. Those points will then be possible to convert to a currency like dollar. This can be a source for income for many and will encourage people to buy sustainable brands. The buyers earn while they also contribute to sustainability. 

Intel can move towards that direction by offering its customers to buy its sustainable products. In this way, some of the expenses for investing in sustainability will generate return; not to forget that it will develop the current metrics with more data on the sustainability investment ROI. 

I am confident that many will be interested to buy such Intel products. 

May we then say that we will see in near future - Intel SUSY i7 processor? Many may ask the question - Why? I say - Why not?

Regards
Kamal Hossain
Lecturer of Business Studies
London School of Commerce
hosnkml@gmail.com