DC Velocity - October 2012

ment. They see their employment brand go up. From a sus- tainability and environmental sustainability point of view, if we can use less energy, that is better for us. If we use less water, that is better for us. A lot of these are two-fers, so you’re right that they’re not mutually exclusive. But it does take people a while to get their heads around it because in many instances, this is a leap of faith.

QWe’ve seen an uptick in interest in corporate social responsibility initiatives in the past few years. What’s driving that?

AThere are several things. Number one, the so-called news cycle. Everything is instant. Unfortunately, people learned the hard way that if you don’t manage your reputation correctly, it can really have a big downside. So people started looking for ways to burnish the corporate reputation and out of that came a realization that if you manage the social responsibility end of things, there are a lot of other benefits that people didn’t anticipate.

Another is energy costs. They have gone through the roof at the same time the environmental movement has been gaining a lot of momentum and a lot of support from governments in the developed world.

I think the last thing is the changing nature of the employee.

QMeaning?

ATwenty years ago, it wasn’t unusual for someone to go to work for a company and end up staying there forever. It was lifetime employment, and your social activities, your community activities, they all took place outside of that business. Well, now, people change jobs a lot more frequently, and often they change jobs because they’re seeking a good fit between their priorities and those of their employer.

People, more so than ever, want to feel good about the company they work for. They want to feel good about going to work. They want their family to be proud that they work there. Think of a company like, say, Starbucks, which gets all its coffee from organic farms and prides itself on ethical labor practices. Twenty or 30 years ago, that didn’t factor into people’s thinking to the extent it does today. We see this especially with the younger generations in the workforce.

Obviously, that poses a bit of a challenge for the trucking business, where we are big users of fossil fuel and maybe hold people up in traffic on the highways. We don’t tend to get that “Cool, I love those guys!” reaction [when our company names are mentioned], so we’ve got some work to do in this industry.

QDo you think corporate social respon- sibility is a bigger issue for logistics than for other sectors of the economy? APerhaps, to an extent. We’re not neces- sarily seeing a lot of people asking about our broader social initiatives, but there is an awful lot of interest in carbon footprint, carbon neutrality as far as your shipping goes, and just general energy use reduction.

Most of that came out of efforts by large international shippers to comply with laws in other parts of the world or the push to get “good guy” points when the environmental movement began to take hold in the United States.

In the past from a logistics point of view, there were only a couple of things you had to worry about—price and service. Now, people are throwing environmental considerations into the mix, so now it is price, service, and narrowly defined sustainability around the carbon footprint. Back at the height of the cap-and-trade debate in the United States, people tried to get out in front of that, and they discovered that, gee, some of this isn’t mutually exclusive and we can make some good advancement decisions around this.