The research

• Scope: A national survey of more than 10,000 leaders and employees of Australian businesses
• Aim: To identify the stimulus for and obstacles against businesses engaging in sustainability reporting

Initial findings

The research profiles the attitudes of more than 10,000 leaders and employees of Australian businesses towards sustainability reporting and their experiences with this emerging initiative. While the formal report is still being finalised, the initial findings make for compelling reading. We’ve identified that there are, and will be, significant supply chain pressures on all businesses to demonstrate their sustainability credentials, and that organisations that currently think sustainability reporting is irrelevant to them will be getting a wake-up call in the not too distant future. There are also extremely interesting implications for small-to-medium sized enterprises, professional associations and professional service firms, who are less likely to have yet adopted a formal approach to sustainability reporting.

An in-depth report summarising the research findings will be available on this website from Thursday 22 April 2010. The findings will also be publicised at a public launch to be held at The University of Melbourne on April 21. A panel discussion will feature:

• Dr George Beaton, Executive Chairman, Beaton Research and Consulting
• Dr Rebecca Sheils, Director of Research, Beaton Research and Consulting
• Andrew MacLeod, CEO, Committee for Melbourne
• Alex Malley, CEO, CPA Australia
• Professor Rob Moodie, Chair of Global Health, The Nossal Institute for Global Health and Chair of the National Preventative Health Taskforce
• Professor Craig Pearson, Director, Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute

Alex Malley’s talk will be particularly interesting – CPA Australia is the first professional accounting body in the world to produce a sustainability report that was both independently assured and checked by the GRI. The experiences of CPA Australia in breaking this new ground will be invaluable to organisations thinking of making the move.

The launch is invitation only and places are strictly limited; however, if you are interested, please contact Lynda Dean at Beaton on (03) 9829 0000 to check availability.

In the meantime

For those who want to act now, a useful resource is the Good Business Register. The website is managed by St James Ethics Centre, the hub for the GRI and United Nations Global Compact in Australia. Their resources are essential reading for anyone interested in best-practice sustainability reporting.

And while you wait for the findings, you may also like to comment on how you feel about sustainability reporting. Are you experiencing pressures from clients and other stakeholders to demonstrate your commitment to sustainability? Are sustainability credentials affecting your supply chain? Is sustainability reporting on your organisation’s agenda? If not, why not?

Maia Gould leads the pro bono agenda at Beaton, a world-leading B2B research and consulting firm. In 2010, the pro bono element of the firm’s well known Annual Business and Professions Study will focus on sustainability issues in the business community.

In our 2009 Beaton Benchmarks study, we found that, overall, clients of the architecture and consulting engineering professions were most likely to associate firms (in those professions) with being socially responsible, and clients of law firms were much less likely to do so. This echoed associations of being innovative – again, architecture clients were most likely to associate their firm with innovation, and law clients were least likely.

We have seen that this link between innovation and being socially responsible is a real one, based on clients’ responses when asked to cite specific instances of their firm being particularly innovative. For clients of law firms, the innovative practices cited were wide ranging, but a significant proportion were related to socially responsible business practices, such as work in the climate-change area and pro bono work.

This is what law firm clients had to say about examples of innovative practices:

• ‘Focusing on environmental law and carbon markets, and partnering with an engineering firm to offer a complete service’
• ‘Establishing a climate change group’
• ‘The firm has launched a Clean & Sustainable Technologies Group – good idea!’
• ‘Gave staff a 9.5 day fortnight’
• ‘The firm appears to be innovative in retaining staff’
• ‘Internal staff-mentoring program at all levels’
• ‘Profit sharing with their employees. Goes against the “take, take, take” mentality some firms have’
• ‘The firm is innovative where they have been taking a lead role in understanding the potential impact of both the credit crunch and the introduction of a carbon trading policy’
• ‘Their pro bono work, allotting a minimum of 35 hours per week, which sets a great example for all other firms to emulate’
• ‘The firm has been innovative in its response to the needs of its pro bono clients’

This attitude towards social responsibility is echoed amongst employees of professional service firms. In 2009, Beaton released a research study in collaboration with St James Ethics Centre on what Australian business professionals really think about ethics.

The study shows that Australian workers believe that the ethical obligations of businesses are broad reaching and encompass duty to the environment and to the community. In fact, over 80% of individuals believe that ethical business behaviour includes being environmentally responsible, and 70% believe it includes acting proactively in a way that benefits the communities in which the firm operates. While for law firm employees these figures are lower – 71% and 57%, respectively – they still represent over half of all individuals working in law firms.

So, not only is being socially responsible an ethical obligation of businesses – in the eyes of employees and clients alike – it is also critical to being perceived as innovative.

Is this because people think that businesses aren’t socially responsible but should be – so those that do get social responsibility right are perceived as innovative?

Or is it just because socially responsible initiatives suggest a level of success; that is, if the business has time, energy and money to put into such initiatives, they must be doing their core business profitably, which in turn implies a level of innovation?

Maia Gould leads the pro bono agenda at Beaton, a world-leading B2B services research and consulting firm. In 2010, the pro bono element of the firm’s well known Annual Business and Professions Study will focus on sustainability issues in the business community.

Slowly, this is happening: sections of the business community have made great strides towards a holistic definition of the word ‘sustainability’, in large part due to the work of groups such as the Global Reporting Initiative and the Corporate Responsibility Index, who have sought to put a measuring and reporting framework around sustainability activities.

However, despite the energy and enthusiasm for the issues central to it, mandatory sustainability reporting across all business sectors is a barely visible goal on the horizon of policymaking in this country.

What’s needed is some hard data on the state of play of sustainability reporting in Australia. When you’re working in the area, it can seem like everyone is a sustainability advocate. But what is the real sentiment across Australia’s boardrooms? What proportion of businesses is engaging in sustainability reporting, or even wants to start?

Only with hard data can we see the gaps, the pressures, the touchpoints where those of us who are pushing for business to take a more responsible approach to our world can target our actions more effectively.

And Australia is about to get those hard data.

As part of a collaboration with Rob Moodie and the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne, and with significant input from St James Ethics Centre, Beaton Research and Consulting and WellmarkPerspexa have just completed the fieldwork for a national survey of over 9,000 business leaders and employees on their attitudes towards sustainability reporting in their organisations. It is the most broad-reaching study into sustainability reporting ever conducted in Australia.

So what’s next? The research team is now entering an intense period of analysis, taking us through the New Year. The findings will be launched early in 2010 and a report will be publicly available.

I’m looking forward to keeping you up to date on the progress of the study on this website – and once it’s released, you’ll be able to download the full report here as well.

This landmark study is a big step towards uniting the business community under one sustainability banner – that taking a long-term view about our people, our productivity and our planet is a fundamental responsibility of all businesses. So how will your triple bottom line measure up when the results come in?

Maia Gould leads the pro bono agenda at Beaton, a world leading B2B research and consulting firm. In 2010, the pro bono element of the firm’s well known Annual Business and Professions Study will focus on sustainability issues in the business community.