Conference chats, blogs, articles and newsletters on environmental and social issues have great intentions. But what do they actually achieve?
This was one of many conversations we had with Simon Burckitt, General Insurance Sustainability Lead at Aviva about real action in the sector. We agreed these things were never going to move anything beyond a point of view, thought process or at the very most an idea. But that could and should change.
So in order to try and create this shift, we started our roundtables for Heads of Sustainability and Social Impact in the Financial sector. The objective was to find ways for collaboration and sharing of actionable ideas amongst peers.
And like most new initiatives we’ve learnt, changed and evolved these sessions ever since.
We kicked off in London in March this year, with a group of purpose leaders in some of the biggest brands in Financial Services. The theme, ‘Return on Purpose’ resonated with the group. But, whilst we all agreed we didn’t want another talking shop, there was a feeling that we hadn’t 100% achieved our goal with more challenges than ideas and solutions being shared.
In June the original group were joined by further large players in Financial Services who came together to stretch thinking around influencing and inspiring people across large organisations and particularly how to motivate leadership teams to invest both time and money to ESG initiatives.
This proved more successful. With a slightly more structured approach we were able to reach consensus on the real barriers to success and focus much more on the ways we can overcome them.
Such was the positivity that FS organisations in Scotland asked if we could convene a group there. The Edinburgh roundtables we now run in parallel to London have attracted a growing number of purpose leaders in FS companies in Scotland ever since.
In November, with the popularity of the London sessions growing, we welcomed a much bigger group and discussed an area that many of our participants had identified as a real challenge.
How do you actually understand customer motivations and expectations on ESG?
With presentations from experts in foresight and by inspiring with examples from other sectors, we led the group in a discussion about how you can truly get to know the customer’s perspective.
The very top level conclusions were that customers don't have all the answers, how looking to the future is just as important as the here and now, and we discussed how to ensure what customers say actually turns into action.
One participant wrote;
“This time I got to meet new people from across the financial services sector and I just love how engaged we all were. Everyone was ready and willing to be open about opportunities, achievements and challenges.
If you're a company that wants to build the right strategy, culture and skills to deliver sustainable, scalable impact I can't recommend these sessions and the Good Innovation team enough”
The next in the series of roundtables takes place on March 7th from 3-5pm.
This session will focus directly on a challenge the group has identified as critical, relevant and potentially really powerful for their organisations.
Connecting employees through a simple, consistent and compelling purpose narrative.
Embedding purpose across an organisation is a challenge. And building the narrative is just the first step, but a really important one. Truly compelling, engaging storytelling is hard.
We'll explore the challenge as a group, bring examples of innovative ways to do it and help understand how this relates to your organisation.
The results will allow you to start to formulate ideas that can engage your employees to attract and retain them and start to build a culture where purpose is fully embedded and creates more impact.