Practical ESG Strategies to Help Your Company Steward the Earth

Good morning, afternoon, or evening! I’m your host, Wanda Thibodeaux, and you’ve got your ears turned to Faithful on the Clock, the podcast where the focus is getting your faith and work aligned. Today’s show is a critical one, guys. We’re going over ESG, or environmental, social, and governance. It’s all about sustainability and what you can do to run your business responsibly in that sphere. Get ready, ‘cause here it comes.

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So in today’s show, I am gonna give you a few tips on how to approach ESG. But the main thing I want to do is just connect ESG to our original role or assignment from God, OK? Because I think that’s gonna help you see why ESG is so important from the faith side.

So if you go through the very beginning of Genesis, specifically 1:28-29, when God creates the Earth and everything, once He makes Adam, one of the very first things God does is tell Adam that He’s giving them all the plants and trees for food, you know, He shows Adam that He’s provided for in that way. But along with that, He tells Adam to fill the Earth and subdue it, and He tells Adam to rule over all the fish and animals and living things. Then, Genesis 2:15 says, “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.” So really, Adam’s job was to be a keeper. He was supposed to steward everything. I mean, He had other roles, too, He could praise God, be a friend to the Father, all that, just the same as you and me. But if you want to look at what God wanted Adam to do with where he was and everything that was around him, Adam was meant to tend to it. And God made Eve to help Adam with all of this and to make sure Adam wasn’t lonely.

So both Adam and Eve had a responsibility to the Garden of Eden and to the world. They had a God-given authority to rule here. And all of us, we all come from Adam and Eve. So I believe that we have inherited that job, that responsibility. We are obligated to take care of the planet and operate ethically within it, not just because customers want us to do it now and it’s good for sales, but also because it’s a clear directive from God to take care of what He made. It’s incredibly respectful to God to say, I hear your command and I’m gonna follow it.

Now, if you want to turn strictly to the business side, paying attention to ESG, you know, if you take a look at some of the things going on in California, even federally now, in the U.S., ESG isn’t just a passing phase. It really is here to stay–there was a great article from McKinsey, I’ll put in the notes for you on the reasons for that. But I know there are a lot of Chrisitan people or people on the political right, and I don’t want to make this into a political thing, but there are a lot of people who flat-out don’t believe the planet is in trouble. They believe that it’s all a hoax or conspiracy, even as species die at up to 10,000 times the natural extinction rate. They can ignore that global temperatures are reaching the hottest on record and that companies have had almost $62 billion in environmental fines just since 2000. I’ll have links in the show notes again for those figures.

But I bring that up because if you want to move forward with ESG, you have to somehow get the people who don’t see the problem…to see the problem. And individuals don’t necessarily change their mind just because you present more data. They change their mind the fastest when they can have the experience behind it all, you know, when they feel the physical heat or their city starts rationing water or they have to get a different material to build with because the original one is gone or tainted, or the price of food goes up because farmers can’t grow the way they used to. But with climate and the environment, the difficulty is that, if you wait until everybody feels it, you’re too late. If you reach that point, then you’re already past the line when you could reverse the damage.

So in my view, the smartest thing you can do is positive reinforcement. You show them right here, right now, what the benefits are. You let them feel lower prices, you show them how a specific effort means clean water in their glass, you know, you just have to make them feel like they’re getting something good for the effort. But you cannot wait to do it. You have to show people now, take steps now that let you show real results that people can see and experience.

To get to the point where you are making that impact, start by taking a hard look at your original core values and connecting them really specifically in measurable ways to all three ESG points. For example, if you say you value transparency, then maybe make specific documentation about your sourcing or materials available to the public. You just take your beliefs and then ask yourself, well, OK, how are we actually living those out and applying them to our sustainability practices? Because if you’ve done a good job selling your employees and customers on those core values already, then you can go to your buyers and workers and say, you know, all these sustainability things, they’re linked to those ideals we all agreed on, they manifest those things, they’re linked to your sense of purpose and why you’re working or buying in the first place.

This process naturally kind of leads you to do some formal audits and take a second look at your policies and procedures. You figure out where the gaps are between where you are and where you want to be, and you sit down with your leadership and you get feedback from your employees and buyers about realistic steps to take to move forward. You involve everybody so that everybody is heard and understands that any changes really are across the whole company, not just from on high. And once you’ve got those steps, and this is really key, OK, you build in some extra accountability to make sure those steps happen. Maybe that means doing reviews each quarter instead of annually or having committees to approve new things. It might mean putting some new infrastructure or automation in place to make sure you’ve got the right data to the right people. You know, smart products, AI, they can make meeting ESG standards and being compliant way easier. But just like with any other shifts you make, make sure those steps have as little friction as possible to get done. And at the end of the day, you should be able to take all of your ESG-related KPIs and show everybody what you’re doing.

And then lastly, I know a lot of people think, whether it’s ESG or other things, that it’s all reactive, that the agencies set the standards and then the companies meet those standards. But agencies, lawmakers, change happens because enough people demand the change, OK? It happens because innovators show that something new, something different, it’s actually feasible. So pay attention to what the regulations are, but look at the trends. Look at the culture. Listen to what people are worried about and really learn where the biggest issues and impacts are. Then go out, you get with your research and development team, you say to your customers, let’s work together to build something that actually makes sense for your life that nobody else is offering. You communicate really clearly back and forth like crazy. And you take the risk, just like you want to be doing with your products and services, to be real leaders in the ESG space. You get out in front and be the company that the regulators and customers look to, to say this is what everybody should be doing.

Through all of this, I can guarantee, the biggest problem you’re gonna have is not the logistics. Like I said, there are a ton of tools, agencies usually are pretty clear on what the standards are gonna mean, but the biggest problem you’re gonna have is a static mindset. You’re gonna have people who, even if they acknowledge climate change as a problem, they’re gonna be resistant to the change, they’re gonna think you can’t teach an old dog tricks or that it’s too expensive or whatever. But here’s what I always tell people on that. Yes, getting yourself set up for sustainability can be expensive out of the gate. But the investment is not optional. Because if we reach a point where we don’t have resources and the planet’s trashed, well guess what. There is no environment to do business in anymore. If you don’t protect what people need to live, it’s not just that business is going to move to different needs, it’s that we’re not going to be able to meet any needs. None. Zero. This really is the long game, you can’t just look 5 or 10 years down the road, it’s generations. But that really should not be an issue, because if you’re doing business right in the first place, then you want to be a legacy brand, you want to be a company that’s gonna be around not for decades but for centuries. Those companies that last centuries are few and far between, but you absolutely can be one of them if you take a broad enough perspective on this and communicate your original value message consistently over time.

So now that I’ve given you all that to think about, I’m gonna just take a breath and close out with a prayer.

God, we’re made to be a friend to you, and that’s the best job ever. But you put us here to be stewards of what you created, too. So remind us that to respect you, to respect and love our neighbor, we’ve got to take care of the world. Give us the courage to set the trends when it comes to sustainability so that we don’t disappoint you and so that we can protect what you meant many generations to have. Show us your beauty and power in the world every day so that we’re more motivated to protect it. In Jesus’ name, Amen.

That’s the show for the week, everybody. I would love to hear how your business is approaching ESG, especially now, I think we’re really sensitive to it on both the business and customer sides. Next week, I’m going to be talking about whether businesses are doing workers a disservice by placing most of the responsibility for self-care and mental health on the individual. In the meantime, I’m gonna ask you, please, go ahead and follow us on your favorite social media platform. Because right now, we really want to keep building credibility for the show, and so the more followers we have, that really helps new people to believe that we are worth listening to. It makes it easy to share our clips and videos and other goodies, too. So go to faithfulontheclock.captivate.fm to find links to our social media accounts, and until then, be blessed.