Another year, another staff retreat come and gone this week with time for reflection and energizing momentum. We shared good conversation, good ideas, good food and good fun as we planned for the future and took part in some community service – not too shabby for two days! Here are some of the highlights through photos…
An awesome video from the Downtown Cleveland Alliance, with a couple glimpses of the BrownFlynn team in our Terminal Tower digs!
By Mike Wallace, Managing Director, and Sarah Corrigan, Associate Consultant
Early autumn brings the unveiling of the Dow Jones Sustainability Indices as companies all over the world learn whether they have what it takes to be recognized on one of the preeminent sustainability indices.
When any award is announced, the first question is typically “Who won?” The second is “Who decided?” In the case of DJSI, the answer to the first question includes a list of 16 companies that have made the list each of the last 15 years. The answer to the second question is RobecoSAM, an investment firm based in Zurich, Switzerland, that specializes in sustainability investing.
Research firms specializing in environmental, social and governance analysis are experiencing a growth in the demand for their services as investors and other influential users become more attuned to the utility and availability of such information. Such firms provide investors (both asset owners and asset managers) with the tools and data to compare and contrast ESG performance of companies across sectors and regions. Quantitative metrics and consolidated scoring allows these comparisons to be made in real time, a feature favored by investment analysts who don’t have time to read your latest sustainability report cover to cover. Considering the growing number of PRI Signatories and CDP Signatories, the experts analyzing such ESG performance information quickly are multiplying.
To read the full post please visit GreenBiz.com.
The Luck of the Irish rang true this St. Patrick’s Day at BrownFlynn! Principals and Co-Founders Barb O’Brien Brown and Margie Pigott Flynn received the Walks of Life Award from the Irish American Archives Society in honor of their contributions to Northeast Ohio through sustainability consulting and community engagement.
Since 1997, the Irish American Archives Society (IAAS) has honored Irish Americans in Northeast Ohio for their extraordinary community contributions with the Irish Walks of Life Award. Honorees are recognized for distinguishing themselves in their chosen “walk of life,” whether judge, educator, business leader, health care professional, journalist or philanthropist.
Barb and Margie represent business leadership for their significant community contributions as founders and principals of BrownFlynn since 1996. Being green is part of Barb and Margie’s nature, both in terms of their heritage (they are of 100% Irish decent) and their daily lifestyle. As Principals and Co-Founders at BrownFlynn, they advise companies on improving their social and environmental impacts and provide thought leadership on sustainability through conferences and articles. Outside of work, they are actively involved in the community through university boards, advisory councils and committees. As Tom Corrigan, IAAS Acting President, said, “Because of what BrownFlynn does everyday, I dare say it would be difficult to find two women who are doing more to keep the world ‘green.'”
Photo Credit: Marianne Mangan
Barb and Margie joined other nominees at the IAAS Walks of Life Award Dinner in February and were honored to march upfront in the Cleveland St. Patrick’s Day Parade. They said, “We’re honored to celebrate our Irish heritage and congratulate our fellow honorees. Go Raibh Maith Agat!”
By Brittany VanderBeek, Analyst
By Todd Reubold, Director and Founding Editor, Ensia
The connection between banking and the environment may not seem obvious at first, but it runs deep. To learn more, Ensia recently spoke with Diana Glassman, head of Environmental Affairs for TD Bank, a retail bank with approximately 1,300 branches in the eastern United States. Over the course of our conversation we discussed TD Bank’s environmental initiatives, criticism of the banking sector for financing fossil fuels, the intersection of energy and water, and more.
Todd Reubold: Part of your role at TD Bank involves identifying opportunities to expand the company’s environmental commitment. Can you tell me more?
Diana Glassman: TD Bank seeks to be an environmental leader. This is a belief held at the top. It’s the right thing to do, and it also has business benefits. There are revenue benefits, there are brand benefits, there are employee benefits, there are reputation benefits, all of which are important to a growing business.
TR: Can you give me a few examples of TD Bank’s environmental initiatives?
This interview originally appeared in Ensia magazine; read the full interview here.
A team at BrownFlynn sat down with the head of environment for leading US retail bank TD Bank to find out how the organization measures employee engagement on sustainability.
How do you accurately measure effective employee engagement in environmental initiatives? It is a tough nut to crack for most companies, but TD Bank has found a way that works for them.
We interviewed Diana Glassman, Head of TD Environment for TD Bank about the Environmental Employee Engagement (EEE) Program, who hopes it can help others scale up their own successful programs. TD Bank is a top-10 retail bank by deposits in the United States with more than 26,000 employees and 1,300 stores throughout the East Coast. TD Bank is a subsidiary of the Toronto-Dominion Bank Group.
What is the EEE Program, its intended accomplishments and its critical success factors to date?
TD Bank set specific environmental business goals as we strive to be as green as our logo. The EEE Program is a holistic approach to capture the minds and hearts of our employees, and to enable them to be Environmental Leaders while building the better bank.
We wanted to establish a program that aligned with our corporate goals of reducing carbon/employee by 25% and paper by 20% by 2015, and fit our corporate culture. We also wanted to create a comprehensive program that quantified results and reached all our stores, many of which have only a handful of employees. Before establishing this program, we did extensive research and found that a program like this did not really exist in the market, so we had to create it ourselves.
One critical success factor is the framework we developed called the 4H’s of Environmental Leadership at TD Bank®: Head, Heart, Hands and Horn. This framework has helped us structure and organize our program to ensure we are moving employees through the cycle and using our resources efficiently. Importantly, we identified quantitative metrics that matter to the business for each stage of the cycle – and can track our performance over time.
Another critical success factor is an identification of audiences within the bank, and recognizing that we need to take each audience through the 4Hs with different tactics that are suited to them. We have 1,300 retail stores from Maine to Florida and 26,000 employees. That is a lot of employees with diverse interests and needs to motivate and mobilize!
A final critical success factor is that we needed to integrate the EEE program into the core of the business; we needed to make it relevant to all employees from part-time tellers to senior executives otherwise it would never have a chance of surviving and thriving. Our EEE program is linked to our university talent acquisition efforts, orientation, training, rewards and recognition, and leadership development pipeline in our largest business – and financial metrics that matter to senior executives.
To read the full blog post please visit the 2 degrees website!
Competition breeds progress. Innovative products, remarkable technologies and consumer convenience are just a few examples of how competition improves our lives on a daily basis. Now, competition is changing the way that companies approach corporate sustainability.
Sustainability ratings and rankings offer a new landscape for viewing how the world’s premier companies compare. But deciphering the metrics and methodologies of different raters is challenging. Fortunately, the real value of ratings isn’t in the numbers, it’s in the fact that a simple benchmarking exercise can translate into substantial organizational change.
To read the full blog post on GreenBiz.com please click here!
BrownFlynn recently got a firsthand look at the G4 guidelines and summarized the top nine things one needed to know. No. 1 on this list: “Materiality is a must.”
While previous guidelines encouraged companies to determine materiality, they tended to focus on the number of indicators reported on and the application level achieved. The G4 guidelines explicitly require reporting efforts to focus on materiality, with the first step in the process being a robust materiality assessment followed by disclosure of material topics.
To read the entire blog post please click here.
Gone are the days when we used only words to tell a great story. Today, especially when communicating sustainability, we rely more on the old saying “a picture is worth a thousand words.”
Please don’t get us wrong; words, statistics and data measurements are crucial to sharing a company’s focus on the triple-bottom-line, but we need to use more visual and compelling elements to truly portray a commitment to sustainability. That’s the only way to break through. Furthermore, effectively communicating sustainability can be a key driver in positive organizational change.
To read the full blog post please click here!
Taken at face value, more evidence surfaced this month supporting a close relationship between company market performance and the disclosure of environmental, social and governance criteria. Less clear is when more investors will reward ESG disclosure and inspire nondisclosing companies to get on board. Integrating fundamental equity analysis with ESG criteria boosts the quality of investment decisions, according to the Principles for Responsible Investment.
A similar assessment by Deloitte outlines both the short- and long-term implications of ESG investment management. Further, the Carbon Disclosure Project now has 722 institutional investors representing $87 trillion in assets requesting companies to report their carbon emissions and climate change strategies. This same investor group is also asking companies to report on water and forest use, reflecting a heightened awareness of natural capital and environmental costs.
To read our full blog on GreenBiz.com, please click here!
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