Hanna Van der Ploeg
A whirlpool company that promotes the baths with the characteristic 'sustainable', how is that possible? It got my attention while I was working on the website for this company. The reason why this should be sustainable isn't even valuable to mention. It represents how companies are focussed on showing their connection with sustainability. Sometimes I ask myself in how far these companies are really concerned about their responsibility regarding to sustainability.
A while ago I got to know the organisation MVO Nederland. MVO Nederland is a Dutch organisation and can be translated as Corporate (Social) Responsibility & Sustainability. This is an organisation that really helps companies in their management to focus on the important, change making aspects concerning sustainability. According to MVO Nederland, corporate responsible and sustainable is about making the right consideration in management decisions between the different social and economical effects, and keeping the stakeholders' concerns into account. Conversations with the different stakeholders are important, to get an overview of the decisions of the others. Furthermore transparency about actions and the social affects, is important for a sustainable corporation. But how can idea be implemented?
MVO Nederland offers help in implementation of a responsible and sustainable policy by using the MVO steps. I analysed how the organisation does this. The help consists of a process of four steps. The first steps is setting up a vision and mission. This is all about the future plans: what does the company stand for regarding to aspects as people, planet en profit? What will be the role of the company during the upcoming years? The mission will be concrete view on the vision and make the vision visible. The second step will be building up targets and a strategy how to get there: a MVO plan. The third step will be 'making it practical'. Creating a responsible and sustainable project group, making it touchable to employees, creating a basis to start working from and integrating plans into the management processes. The final step will be improvements: moment for reflection, evaluations, changes and developments.
Concluding on what I found, it feels like a simple action plan for complex problems. Viewing on MVO their projects they did until now, it is likely that MVO offers helpful strategies to companies. Probably a clear guide. Hopefully the future companies will make more and more use of these helpful organisations, and that corporation with MVO will be a marketing aspect!
Published by Hanna van der Ploeg