SERVICES
Social Sustainability is more that just community engagement. The multitude of international, regional and industry regulations and standards creates a complex matrix of mandates and expectations. Without thoughtful strategy, projects and businesses are at risk of significant impacts to their business. Greenwood Social Sustainability utilises twenty years of experience in complex, multi-stakeholder environments to ensure you are effectively controlling threats and making the most of opportunities. We offer a wide range of social sustainability services tailored to your context, from high-level strategic planning to culturally sensitive relationship management.
RISK ASSESSMENT, AUDITING AND ASSURANCE
The multitude of international, regional and industry regulations and standards creates a complex matrix of mandates and expectations. Businesses and projects often find themselves overwhelmed by their obligations or slowed down by inefficient processes designed to cover all bases.
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The current risk landscape is becoming more complex and fast moving. Risk governance frameworks are often challenged by the social risk space because of the multitude of impacted business functions and the subjectivity of measurement processes. Third party review offers an unbiased interrogation of your social performance, improving systems, streamlining processes, meeting requirements embedded in various indices and standards and mitigating the risk of misreporting or accusations of social washing.
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Greenwood Social Sustainabilit offers objective appraisal of the work being undertaken and recommendations for future improvement in the following areas:
Targeted evaluation of specific activities
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Stakeholder Engagement
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Cultural heritage management
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Human rights due diligence
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Modern slavery initiatives
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Social investment strategies
Systemic review
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Social Performance risk governance
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Alignment of company values with current practices
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Benchmarking against industry standards
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Effectiveness of process systems and internal compliance therewith
STAKEHOLDER ENGAGEMENT
Engagement with a variety of stakeholders throughout the value chain, such as community groups, multiple levels of government, investors, suppliers, customers and the workforce, is critical to ensuring business continuity, improving operational efficiency and promoting strong growth.
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Government and regulator expectations of businesses’ engagement grow steadily more demanding. Investors and their proxies increasingly perceive stakeholder engagement as a potential threat to profitability and require improved transparency about the way stakeholders have been engaged. By developing open and respectful relationships with community stakeholders, companies can more effectively problem solve, raise consumer confidence, improve outcomes in negotiations such as land access, and maintain a strong social licence to operate.
Integrating stakeholder engagement into project planning and regular business operations through sharing of decision-making power with interested and affected parties can generate greater financial returns, control risks and enhance public reputation.
Greenwood Social Sustainability will support your stakeholder engagement through:
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Stakeholder mapping - To identify and map all relevant stakeholders (throughout the project lifecycle); provide outlines on level on stakeholder interest, areas of influence on the business and a directory of contacts; assess the salience of the relationship and level of risk associated with it.
Stakeholder engagement plans – Plans for exemplary engagement that is strategic, purpose-driven and adapted to the specific needs of various stakeholder groups - including FPIC processes. Where assessed as being of value, we help you to develop co-design or collaborative models of engagement that enable you to mature stakeholder relationships into genuine partnerships. We can also support you to construct systems for tracking engagements and their outcomes.
Relationship evaluation and management – We can work with you to evaluate the health of critical relationships, monitor stakeholder sentiment, undertake materiality assessments and provide communications, facilitate meetings or directly respond to stakeholder questions or concerns on your behalf.
Mediation – We specialise in facilitating complex stakeholder relationships where projects are controversial, negotiations are extremely sensitive, communication has stalled or legacy relationships need remediation.
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First Nations Engagement | FPIC | Land Access | Heritage Management | Partnering for Better Outcomes
POLICY DEVELOPMENT AND IMPLEMENTATION
Effective social performance governance requires a framework of policies and processes that identify and manage impacts on the communities in which businesses operate. These policies serve to clearly identify company values and priorities and demonstrate commitment to responsible business practices. To ensure these policies are being implemented well and risks are being managed appropriately, associated processes need to be fit-for-purpose, easy to follow, monitored and assessed, and integrated into the broader workflow system.
Social sustainability policies are increasingly the subject of external scrutiny and tracking and reporting against them is now expected by communities, investors and regulators. These policies and processes are at risk of failing when they are a) poorly socialised throughout the business; b) overly burdensome; c) quarantined into ‘community engagement teams’; or d) inadequately identify responsibilities and accountabilities. Done well, they can mitigate long-term risk, improve operational efficacy, increase ROI, improve brand reputation, open new markets and attract more investors, and attract and retain talent.
Greenwood social sustainability works with you to identify and articulate social sustainability values, company risk appetite, areas of priority, targets and aspirations, material risks and reporting expectations.
We offer frameworks, process standards, and guidance notes that are informed by regulatory mandates, industry standards and best practice models and are designed to suit the specific context and priorities of your business. Areas of expertise include:
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Incident management
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Stakeholder mapping and engagement
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Free, prior and informed consent
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Reconciliation Action Plans
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Complaints and grievances processes
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Heritage management
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Indigenous data sovereignty
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Human rights due diligence
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Modern slavery action plans
CAPABILITY BUILDING
Driven by the demands of investor groups and supported by governments and regulators, social sustainability has emerged as a complex matrix of international, regional and industry standards enhanced by a broad spectrum of societal expectations. As a relatively emergent field, it is often difficult for leaders and decision-makers to access expertise on the particular set of business risks associated with these activities. Existing teams find themselves needing to navigate a dynamic and poorly defined landscape and rapidly adapt their work processes to suit it. As a result of a broadening remit, teams employed for their skills and experience on one area are now expected to undertake activities in an expanding scope of work, risking accidental missteps, overwhelm and burnout. Capability-building projects are essential for ensuring that internal competencies are kept astride of arising expectations and commensurate with the degree of risk they are managing.
Utilising external subject matter expertise to build out and mature the workforce empowers businesses to secure greater control of potential risks embedded in their operations, boosts policy/process compliance, curtails organisational siloing and augments job satisfaction and talent retention.
Greenwood Social Sustainability uses variety of teaching tools and pedagogical approaches to enhance capability within the business
Specialist Social Performance Teams - To continuously improve outcomes in social sustainability activities and create professional development opportunities and facilitate clean succession within teams, team workshops, online learning modules, coaching and mentoring is provided in the following areas
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Emerging trends and contemporary best practice in social sustainability
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Transitioning from ‘community engagement’ to ‘strategic social performance’
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Human rights due diligence
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Diversity and inclusion
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Improving heritage management
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Stakeholder engagement and partnering
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First Nations engagement, FPIC, Indigenous data sovereignty
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Complaints and grievance management
Decision-makers, Executives and Board Members – Leaders are acutely aware of the growing impact of social sustainability requirements but with rapid change, it is difficult to know how to translate these trends into material impacts on their business. Workshops and briefing papers provide subject matter expertise on
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the social sustainability risk landscape
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emerging trends – including guidance on inclusive language
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potential impacts of legislative change and/or geopolitics
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economic benefits and ROI opportunities coming from social sustainability activities
Whole-of-workforce – While specialist social sustainability teams share knowledge and follow risk management processes, recognising threats and opportunities in this space is more challenging when cross-over work occurs within other functions. Incidental engagements with community members may cause damage to sensitive relationships or WHS teams may not understand how to assess human rights risks using a rights lens or poor understanding of inclusive language can create unsafe workplaces or poor culture. Online learning modules and ‘lunch and learn’ sessions are offered in
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building awareness of social sustainability
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cultural awareness
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modern slavery
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diversity and inclusion
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Partnering with stakeholders
METRICS AND REPORTING
By examining trends, patterns, and correlations within datasets, social sustainability teams can uncover valuable information that helps identify opportunities for improvement or potential risks. Measurement of their work enables tracking against company goals, early risk detection, enhances return on investment by gauging the success of activities or assessing level of resource allocation. Through carefully recording of events, teams are able to analyse and learn from incidents.
Additonally, Investors and other stakeholders along the value chain (such as communities, customers, suppliers, workforce, industry and professional bodies, activist groups, academia and government) seek high-quality, non-financial information. In order for stakeholders to trust this information, businesses must provide transparent, consistent, comparable disclosures on material risks and company priorities.
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While businesses are inherently data-driven, they are often challenged by the subjectivity of social sustainability and diversity of subject matter.
What to measure? There has been a rapid change in Extended External Reporting (EER) requirements and disclosure principles in recent years but there remains no single reporting basis for this data. With an enormous breadth of options (for example there are over 200 KPIs as published by the OECD in 2021), understanding how to prioritise and synthesise data collection into something useable remains a challenge.
How to measure? Interpreting the success of social sustainability efforts cannot be reduced to the simple numbers of quantitative data. Cross-cultural stakeholders may have different methods for expressing sentiment and long-term initiatives may require complex multi-factor descriptions to convey progress over time. Often social sustainability teams, who have ownership of relationships, are responsible for measuring them, and management selection of reporting criteria both give rise to bias. Stakeholders with grievances are more likely to engage than those who are content with the relationship.
How to report? Qualitative data is less well-understood or perceived to be less rigorous in business circles. Providing evidence for ROI is not clear-cut and changing social sustainability standards and priorities make it more difficult to make comparisons year-on-year. With heightened interrogation of material misstatements, the emphasis on transparency can often compete with the need to maintain stakeholder confidentiality.
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Greenwood Social Sustainability supports you to navigate this fraught landscape in order to maximise the value of data collected, minimise the resources required to undertake the work and provide legitimate reporting outputs.
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Identify dataset priorities to align with company values, brand identity and strategic goals
Develop systems for setting targets, tracking and measuring the success of policies and processes and produce data-driven insights and learnings to improve internal processes and reduce risks
Deliver transparent reporting
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sustainability reports
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modern slavery statements
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industry reporting
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UN Global Compact
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reporting back to communities.
SOCIAL INVESTMENT STRATEGIES
Enterprises often undertake a variety of social investment to build their reputation as a responsible corporate citizens and proactively prevent social problems that may have long-term risks to their business.
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By investing in programs and initiatives that tackle issues like equality and inclusion, education, health and the environment. These activities encourage healthier, more resilient communities that are necessary for strong economic growth. Social impact investing enables industries to deal with issues such as struggles with talent retention and future workforce concerns and addresses risks associated with being unable to meet identified targets, for example First Nations procurement or women in the workforce).
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To take full advantage of social investments, a strategy needs to be developed that takes into account the dynamic and multidimensional nature of social issues and social investments and provides a coherent framework of expectations, priorities and governance processes.
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Over time, businesses often develop an array of disparate activities that sit in a variety of functions - such as such as major donations to community development programs, sponsorship of community events, workforce volunteering activities, workplace giving programs and internships and graduate opportunities. Without a clear strategy and with poor visibility across the business, it is difficult to measure, evaluate and report on the degree of value being created. Legacy commitments can be difficult to withdraw from, poorly assessed activities can create dependency in communities, posing major risks at project closure/post-closure. Furthermore, businesses can find themselves financially supporting organisations and programs that are not perceived to be of value to their stakeholders or not addressing the most material issues. Where ad hoc activities are initiated by separate business functions, spending and resource overlaps occur and poor governance processes produce risks around corruption. Poor definition and socialisation of investments undermine opportunities for workforce engagement and brand reputation.
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Greenwood Social Sustainability creates overarching social investment strategies that amalgamate disparate initiatives, leverage relationships and maximise impacts on more stakeholders. We develop frameworks for social investment that proactively prevent social problems by addressing root causes in a way that that empower impacted communities and build capability. Utilising methods of consultation and co-design to build genuine partnerships enables businesses to target material issues and share risk.
Services include:
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Development of a social investment framework that aligns with company values and strategic goals, targets key stakeholders and takes into account the full lifecycle of the project.
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Engagement with key stakeholders to consult with and co-design a social investment strategy that provides maximum value to all stakeholders
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Establishment of a governance framework that defines formal processes for social investments and minimises risks of corruption or the perception of bias
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Development of a structure that integrates and builds on current undertakings to maximise impact on communities and engagement within the workforce
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Robust, outcomes-based measurement and evaluation of the impacts of social investments to ensure they are within risk appetite, aligned with the defined strategy, provide value for money and are effectively driving purposeful community value creation
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Enhance workforce engagement with social value creation activities to improve job satisfaction and people retention