Innovation + Responsibility

It's mid-July and I just sent off the first draft of Sun's 2008 CSR report to our external writing consultants (Context, a firm of brilliant minds out of the UK but with offices in the US as of recently) - which will be published some time in mid- to late-October. So I thought I would take a break from reporting, which has consumed my days, nights and weekends for the past month and a half, and reflect on the process.  I'm doing this in part because I think it might be interesting for people to hear how one company does it - the good, the bad and the downright silly - and also I think it will be therapeutic for me!  I do want to say at the outset, however, that Sun's reporting process is probably quite different from that at other companies. We are still relatively new to reporting - this is only our third report, and really our second with meaningful data that interested parties can track.  Because reporting is relatively new, we are still feeling our way around.  We have tried not to be constrained by "tradition" - how its' always been done.  At the same time, we have found ourselves hamstrung by some of our own traditions.

All this is to say we are still learning. And we are taking our growing body of experience, our stakeholder feedback (including yours if you'll give it to us!), and our penchant for doing things a bit differently, and constantly evolving our process. For now, though...this is how we do it.

STEP ONE: HEADS UP, THE OUTLINE, THE SCHEDULE
The first step in pulling together Sun's CSR report is really three steps - (1) letting my internal partners know it's that time of year again, (2) developing an outline to guide us through the early phases of the report writing process, and (3) crafting the schedule of deadlines and milestones that will drive our process from start to finish. So, first I send around an email to all my internal partners who contribute to the report. If you've seen one of these things (here's ours from 2007), you know how chock full of information they can be.  Well, that information comes to me from about 30 different Sun employees around the world. Each of them gets an email from me in (usually) March letting them know, "It's that time again!" (I believe that was the actual subject line of the email)  That email lets them all know the general timing of things, working backwards from our October publication date.

Once I let my partners know things are starting to move, I get down to writing the draft report outline.  Using the GRI guidelines, I look at what we were able to report on last year and what we might be able to add to our GRI reporting this year (It's an awesome color-coded spreadsheet, if I do say so myself!). In addition to the GRI, I use the previous year's report as well as all the information I had been gathering over the course of the fiscal year (I have an email folder named, "Future Reports," where I stash anything interesting that might be relevant to our CSR reporting effort). Then I set up one-on-one meetings with my partners.  The outline usually changes dramatically at this point - it gets much more detailed and in some cases completely transforms. For example, this year you'll see a significant change in the "Our People" section of our report.  This reflects a commitment on the part of Sun's human resources team to help us move toward "best practices" reporting in the area of our responsibility to our employees. The outline goes back and forth a few times, gets executive and legal sign off and we move on to the next step - sharing the outline with our internal and external stakeholders.

While all this is happening, there is a project manager (her name is Terri Bedel and she's brilliant and I know how lucky I am that I get to work with her!) who is doing the painful job of pulling together our report production schedule. She coordinates with me, the external writers, the internal editors, the design firm, the Sun.com team and anyone else who has their fingers in this project, and ends up developing a calendar that becomes our Bible for the next several months as we all work together toward the goal of finalizing and publishing Sun's annual CSR Report.

STEP TWO: STAKEHOLDERS
Sun has two "official" stakeholder teams - one made up entirely of employees, one of external experts from various fields, as well as investors and Sun customers.  We share our detailed, draft outline with both of these groups in an effort to get meaningful feedback to help us improve our reporting, both in terms of including the right information as well as pushing us on goals and metrics.  This year we hosted a conference call with our external stakeholder team, facilitated by our partner Ceres, in mid-May. Shortly after that, I held a conference call with our internal stakeholder team: Sun's Employee Sustainability Council (formerly Employee CSR Advisory Board). In September we'll meet with our stakeholders in person at our headquarters in California.  You'll be able to read about all the great feedback we got - positive, constructive and critical - in our 2008 final report.

STEP THREE(a): WRITE! also known as CALENDAR!
Now comes the task of turning a detailed outline into a first draft report.  This is probably the most difficult part of the entire process (along with data collection, but we'll get to that later).  Part of what makes it so challenging is that there are so many people who need to provide my team with the content, and for many of them, the CSR report is not on the top of their to do list. Not to mention the fact that the timing of our first draft tends to hit just at the close of Sun's fiscal year, which is also right around when people take their summer vacations. So the writing process is as much a calendaring process as anything else.

I try to get each of the content area experts to take the part of the outline that is relevant to their work and put some meat on the bones.  In some cases I conduct interviews with the content experts and from those interviews I flesh out the outline.  Regardless of how I get it...eventually I do get it.  To be honest, it can be a bit painful. And stressful, as I spend the entire month of June wondering if we are going to make our deadlines (we did). 

Once I have what I need, I turn it all into the first draft of the report outline. This year I had the good fortune of having a spectacular summer intern from the Haas MBA program (GO BEARS!) who helped me get the first draft together. Then we send the first draft off to our expert writing consultants. Their work is crucial to us having a good report. They don't just take the content we've given them and polish it, although that is part of what they do. They also flag for us where we may fall short and make suggestions for how we might improve our reporting.  They help organize the report so that it flows in a way that makes sense to the reader.

Then we get Sun's team of crack editors on the case. This team reviews the written report for consistency, clarity and brand appropriateness. In other words, they make sure the report sounds great and that it sounds like Sun! They are the final arbiters of what the report says. If you see it on the page, it's because our editors decided it's okay to be there! 

STEP THREE(b): DESIGN
While all the writing is happening, our design consultants, Celery Design Collaborative, are hard at work coming up with some possible designs for the report - designs that are ultimately approved by Sun's internal design team. What's great about Celery as a partner is that they, like Sun, are interested in pushing the envelope with CSR reporting.  We try to find new ways to bring the content to life for our stakeholders, and to take advantage of the fact that the report is Web-based, thereby opening up all kinds of possibilities. Of course we can't do everything we - or they - want us to do; we  have some constraints based on our corporate guidelines as well as where we are in our reporting. But for our next report we are looking forward to incorporating some very cool features (you'll just have to wait to see them) that we believe move us toward greater transparency and make the report itself more interesting to interact with. 

STEP FOUR: DATA
Once the fiscal year has closed we start collecting data for inclusion in the report. This part of the process can go on for a while, depending on how data processing happens in relevant business units. Sometimes the data we need for the report is not available to us until late August or early September.  So we have a lot of placeholders where charts should go. 

Sometimes the data we want for the report is not available to us at all.  We recognize that data is the heart of CSR reporting.  In fact, it's the heart of CSR, because without the data to tell us how we are doing, we can't put programs and practices into place to help us improve.  This quest for data - more, more relevant and more transparent - is constant. I trust that anyone who reads our 2008 report will notice much more data than in our 2007 report, with pledges of more data to come in the future as our systems and processes continue to be refined.

STEP FIVE: GOALS also known as NEGOTIATIONS
Whenever anyone asks me which of my business school classes was the most relevant for my current job I don't hesitate to answer, "Negotiations." Because as I develop the CSR report, I am constantly negotiating with people - whether it'deadlines, meeting dates and times or what content to include in the report. The most - and most interesting - negotiations happen around goal-setting.  Just as data is the heart of CSR, goals are the soul. Goals give us something to stretch for - they inspire us to be a better company. They allow our stakeholders to hold us accountable. 

Setting CSR-related goals can be tricky because we don't want goals just for the sake of having them. We want them to be meaningful. And in some cases we are just not in a position to set - and drive toward - meaningful goals.  So we negotiate. I'm a big fan of the goal to set a goal. Or the goal to provide data. This gives my internal partners time to think about how they can purposefully add CSR considerations to their strategic planning and implementation. Or it gives them time (and license) to put resources in place.

STEP SIX: REVIEW
Once we have gone back and forth and finalized our content (and design), we send the report around for internal review.  Content experts review and approve it, as does Sun's executive team and, of course, our legal staff.  This year the Corporate Governance and Nominating Committee of Sun's Board of Directors will also have an opportunity to review the draft report. Finally, our employee and external stakeholder teams will review the final draft.  Sun doesn't do third party assurance, and at present there are not plans to do so in the near future. We do recognize that more and more companies are securing third party assurance, and we are looking into alternatives to the costly practice of paying third party assurance firms. To be frank, we do not think this is the best use of our limited resources at this time.

STEP SEVEN: PUT IT ONLINE AND MAKE A PDF SUMMARY
The final phase of Sun's CSR reporting effort comes in September when the Web team starts turning our design and content into an actual online report.  You'd be shocked if you knew how much time and effort goes into getting this thing online.  We lock down the content in September and the report itself goes live in October (end of October this year) - most of that final month is spent refining the online version of the report.  During this time we are also busy creating a summary version of the report that can be printed or downloaded as a PDF file. As much as we'd love to eliminate the printed report altogether, there is some demand for having one. So we try to make it as small and short as possible, driving readers to the more robust Web-based report.

STEP EIGHT: GO LIVE!
Finally, what started as a bare-bones outline - an aspiration, really - becomes Sun's fiscal year Corporate Social Responsibility report, which can be downloaded from our Web site at sun.com/csr.

STEP NINE: DE-BRIEF
Once the report goes live - and after we've all taken a few days off! - we schedule some time to de-brief our process and consider ways to improve it for next time.  To be honest, we also spend at least a little bit of time patting ourselves - and each other - on the back.

STEP TEN: REPEAT