Innovation + Responsibility

It has been about three weeks since Sun published its first Corporate Social Responsibility report and the reaction, what reaction there has been anyway, has been mostly positive. We first released the report to our employees (all 38,000 of them) in a letter from our CEO Jonathan Schwartz. We then proceeded to release news of the report to other interested stakeholders. A sucker for measurement, I was on the edge of my seat awaiting the results from our web team that would show me just how many thousands of people downloaded the report. I was especially excited to track the downloads of the report PDF for the days that it was only made known to employees. I am told repeatedly (and have even said in this space) that CSR is in the Sun DNA. Surely this would translate into report downloads.

First came the exciting news about unique hits to our CSR Web site. This tracking went back to September, which is when I joined Sun. We updated the site in December (right before Christmas, thanks to the hard work of Sun web guru Gary Gamitian) and the exciting news is that the update, along with the release of the CSR report, led to a significant traffic increase on the site (and the hundreds of times I was checking out the site to make sure it looked and worked properly only count as one hit!).

CSR Page Unique Hits

September -- 306
October -- 375
November -- 339
December -- 490
January -- 1061
February (up to Feb 7) -- 373 (already on track to surpass January!)

Rather than extrapolate report downloads from these figures, I instead received the actual numbers of times the PDF of the 2006 CSR Report was downloaded from the site. You can surely imagine my surprise and disappointment when I received the following figures:

January 2007
Internal downloads - 225
External downloads- report not available

February 2007 (to Feb 6 - I am working on getting updated numbers)
Internal downloads - 22
External downloads - 58

Um...excuse me? Do you mean to tell me that in a company of 38,000 employees, only 247 of them bothered to download the company's first-ever corporate social responsibility report? That's less than one percent (0.65% to be exact)! What does it mean?

Does it mean - gasp - that our employees simply do not care?
I find this explanation incomplete. After the report was published I got more than 30 emails from employees around the world sharing comments ranging from, "This is why I work for Sun!" to, "I wish we took recycling in Australia more seriously." That means that 12% of the employees who downloaded the report actually sent us a comment! That, to me, is a great number and shows me that our employees do care.

Does it mean that we did a bad job steering employees to the report?
Our CEO sent an email to all employees directing them to the PDF file; we alerted our marketing and sales staff to the report's URL so they can share it, as appropriate, with customers; we had a feature story on our internal Web site about the report and its contents. What did we miss? We deliberately did not provide hard copies of the report to every employee. To print and ship 38,000 reports to every desk would have cost too much - both in dollars and in environmental footprint. Electronic distribution seemed the best path for us to take. Now, in hindsight, I wonder. At the same time, I can just about guarantee that had we put a printed copy of the CSR report on every employee's desk, we would have gotten hundreds, if not thousands of emails deriding our environmentally insensitive distrbution strategy!

Is this simply one of the ironies resulting from a company's decision to take on the task of producing a CSR report?
If you do not provide people with a hard copy, they will not take the extra step of downloading the electronic version, and therefore all the work you put into the report is of limited value because nobody is reading it. But if you provide every interested party with a hard copy of the report, you end up using (literally) tons of natural resources and creating unnecessary environmental waste. And, since "the medium is the message," would a hard copy distribution strategy dilute the power of our eco responsibility commitment?

Today I began the planning process for Sun's next CSR report, which is due for release this September at the same time as our annual financial report. As I think about our approach to this next report, I am really grappling with these questions:

• Just how much do Sun employees care about CSR?


• Short of reading it to them, how can we entice employees to download and read the report?


• If employees are not downloading and reading the report, does that necessarily mean they do not care?


• Should we just print hard copies for everyone? If so, how do we track if anyone has actually read it? And how do we deal with the environmental consequences?


• If employees aren't reading it, and they have a serious stake in our company's work in this area, does that mean nobody is?


• And if nobody is reading it, why are we reporting in the first place? Wouldn't our resourced be better used some other way?

Posted by marcyscottlynn @ 04:08 PM PST [ Comments [6] ]