Business and Human Rights event with BSR and Yahoo 09-20

Twitter roundup: Business and Human Rights event

A summary of our Business and Human Rights event with BSR and Yahoo in New York City this week, including articles, photos and tweets

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Marc Gunther, editor-at-large for Guardian Sustainable Business, left, moderates a business and human rights panel including BSR adviser Christine Bader, Citi's Shawn Miller and Yahoo's Sonja Gittens-Ottley Photographer: Courtney Katz/BSR

Business impacts on human rights span an almost inconceivably wide range that varies from industry to industry and company to company. There's child labor, forced labor, housing, living wages, community relocation, gender equality, health and safety, water, internet freedom vs privacy and much, much more.

All of these issues carry emotional weight - and plenty of reputational and other risks for businesses - but also, arguably, more than their share of complications and gray areas.

Can human-rights-aware company accomplish more by staying in a country where human rights aren't well protected or to leave? Is it more important for a corporation to follow local laws or international standards when they conflict? How much of the burden for protecting human rights falls on businesses' shoulders, as opposed to governments'?

Executives and thought leaders discussed these tricky questions and more - sharing challenges, experiences and best practices - in a New York City event hosted by the Guardian, BSR and Yahoo on Tuesday.

Discover more in the articles and tweets below:

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5 Ways Mayer's Trying To Kick-Start The Yahoo! Culture 09-08

5 Ways Mayer's Trying To Kick-Start The Yahoo! Culture

After reviewing Marissa Mayer’s first year as CEO of Yahoo YHOO -0.21%, my colleague Kathy Gersch finds that Mayer has provided some decent examples of ways to turn a company culture around – despite what the media’s had to say.

In her first year as Yahoo CEO, Marissa Mayer made some transformational changes, launched dozens of apps, and purchased 16 startups. Her most infamous change went viral in February, when an internal memo   to employees requesting that everyone work on-site, was leaked to the press. While Mayer was widely panned for this move, she didn’t intend it to be punitive. She simply recognized that nothing can replace face-to-face collaboration to drive innovation. She may have stumbled on her delivery, but the intention to increase the engagement of her team was right on target.

This memo triggered Mayer’s biggest scandal of the year and the ensuing media-frenzy overshadowed the memo’s very important message. The message asked that employees “participate in our culture and contribute to the positive momentum.” While the message was intended to “get all-hands on deck,” Mayer had neglected to first establish a sense of urgency throughout the company around the opportunity to change Yahoo for the future. If she had, the memo may have received more cheers than jeers.

Looking past the headlines and debatable financials, here are five points Mayer has wisely pursued, which led to the most recent surge the Yahoo culture is experiencing today.

Communicate your vision widely, be clear, and “over-communicate.”
Many leaders are shocked at the lack of initiative shown by employees. What Mayer has figured out, which those other leaders haven’t, is that in order for employees to participate, they have to understand the vision. CEO communication is so rampantly poor, recent studies show that 70% of employees don’t understand their company’s strategy. In fact, research finds that leaders typically under-communicate their visions by a factor of 10  . As Mayer was interviewed over the course of the year, her quotes in the media seem startlingly redundant. She speaks constantly about the company’s goal to develop “engaging” products that “delight and inspire,” by focusing on “the things that Yahoo’s always been great at.” While it may strike you as repetitive, she was no doubt focusing on ensuring the company and the world understand her vision for the future of Yahoo. Smart leaders gladly risk sounding like a broken record in order to ensure that they are clearly understood.

Get them to re-commit.
The best way to turn a company around is to establish a clear opportunity to do something great, and to make that vision clear to everyone. While most people are eager to be re-invigorated by change, unfortunately, a cynical few become so attached to the negativity of the past they cannot let go. In the controversial memo, when all remote employees were asked to work on-site by June, Mayer was drawing a line and asking for engagement – either you’re with us or you’re not. Many missed the positive intent – she asked employees to join the movement and take a personal part in changing Yahoo for the future  . Those without the interest or the energy to see the opportunity in this message, opted-out. Any company’s culture is better off without those who aren’t willing to participate.

Give permission and ask for participation.
If employees who have innovative ideas have exhausted their attempts to make change, receiving either no support or discouragement from leadership, they will give up innovating. In Mayer’s first memo to employees   she stressed and repeated, “You are doing important work. Please don’t stop.” She then closed by inviting employees to come by her office to say “hello” and that she, “cannot wait to hear your ideas for Yahoo’s future.” This was the first of Mayer’s direct and clear calls-to-action, requesting that everyone in the company pitch-in. Employees need to know it’s okay to try, to take risks, and to learn from failures.

Provide the support that nurtures innovation.
At the WIRED business conference 2013, Mayer said she had a lot of people with great ideas who haven’t been able to run   with them due to the economy and other internal problems. She said “to get my team to play offense [get people to run with their ideas], my job as an executive is to play defense,” or in other words, clear the barriers out of the way.

She’s been clearing them. As Mayer works to set up the foundation to support new ideas from the inside, that infrastructure is already there to support the innovation being brought in from the outside (new acquisitions). This will fundamentally change the way a company functions – switching from incremental changes, to taking big risks that offer big rewards.

Celebrate the progress.
When Mayer speaks to the media, no matter what subject she’s interviewed about, she refocuses attention to the accomplishments the company has made most recently, celebrating those wins. She’s also said over and over that “at Yahoo people are working on important things,” and the repetition of this statement helps her people reconnect with the pride they have in their work. There have been innumerable press releases celebrating new acquisitions and app releases, partnerships, and expansion plans. When employees feel they are an integral part of the success, they spend their free-time dreaming up new innovations, and they bring their best and brightest ideas to work every day.

Are Mayer’s efforts to improve the company culture paying off? Well, the media continues to highlight the company’s ad revenue challenge, and they attribute the 73% increase in the company’s stock value   over the year to factors outside Mayer’s control. Time will tell if Mayer has her priorities in the right order; the next year will tell a very interesting story. Either way, if you’re a CEO with a stagnant company culture, the examples she’s provided may help turn your company around and get it innovating again.

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Marissa Mayer Is No Fool 03-10

Marissa Mayer Is No Fool

by Michael Schrage  |   

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Who do Yahoo's "work@home" telecommuting champions think they're kidding? Marissa Mayer is no fool. She didn't take over as Yahoo's CEO because the company was doing well; she came on board because the stumbling Internet enterprise was an underperforming underachiever that had lost its way.

So when Mayer decrees seven months into the job that she wants people to, you know, physically show up at work instead of telecommuting — or else — I'm pretty confident this reflects a data-driven decision more than a cavalier command. In all likelihood, Mayer has taken good, hard looks at Yahoo's top 250 performers and top 20 projects and come to her own conclusions about who's creating real value — and how — in her company. She knows who her best people are.

Let's be serious: if significant portions of Yahoo top performers were "stay@home" coders, testers and project management telecommuters, do people really think Mayer would arbitrarily issue edicts guaranteed to alienate them? It's possible. But that would imply Mayer hasn't learned very much about her company's best people, best performers and culture since joining last July. Most successful technical leaders I know avoid getting in the way of their best people's productivity. But what do leaders do when even very good people aren't being as productive as you want or need them to be? Challenging them to be better onsite collaborators hardly seems either unfair or irrational.

The logical inference to draw from Mayer's action is that she strongly believes Yahoo's current "stay@home" telecommuting crowd would be significantly more valuable to the company — organizationally, operationally and culturally — if they came to work. The crueler inference is that both the real and opportunity costs imposed by Yahoo's "work@homes" greatly exceeded their technical and economic contributions. My bet is that Mayer believes that "working@home" isn't working for Yahoo — in both meanings of that phrase.

Again, why should this surprise? Flailing companies shouldn't invest more in what's not working. The (far) more interesting counterfactual would have been a leaked memo declaring that telecommuters and virtual teams were — by far — the most agile, innovative and productive performers at Yahoo. Therefore the company would delayer its headquarters and remake itself as a virtual networked enterprise. If that had been true, Mayer would have been a different kind of teleworkplace revolutionary.

Then again, Mayer's Google background (and impact) suggested that she was predisposed to consider physical (co)presence as essential to digital innovation success as computational/design brilliance. After all, one key reason why Google invested so heavily in providing world-class victuals and dining experiences at the Googleplex for its employees wasn't health food benevolence, it was to keep people on campus working together. Google explicitly encourages and designs for onsite collaboration. Why would Mayer minimize what she had experienced as a critical success factor?

In fairness, critics such as Virgin's Richard Branson are not wrong when they assert the cultural issues here are arguably as much a matter of trust than facilitating collaboration. But trust cuts both ways. If a CEO authentically concludes that too many "work@homes" have not lived up to their side of the productivity relationship, then the call to return to the workplace could be interpreted as an invitation to rebuild trust. (That's nicer than simply firing them.)

Culture matters. Ultimately, turnaround CEOs have to make the very public choice around not just how best to empower people but how best to hold them accountable. I take Mayer at her word that she wants to promote the values of "collaborative opportunism" and "opportunistic collaboration" at the "new" Yahoo. That should be a leader's prerogative. I similarly don't doubt Mayer knows full well that there's no shortage of technology enabling high bandwidth, highly functional, high impact collaboration across time zones and zip codes alike. My bet is that, sooner rather than later, the truly productive/high impact employees with special needs will enjoy a locational flexibility that their lesser will not.

But, for the moment, this CEO has done what I always thought good CEOs were supposed to do: identify unproductive "business as usual" practices, declare them unacceptable and incompatible with her cultural aspirations for the firm — and then act. I completely understand why it makes so many employees unhappy. I'm sympathetic to the changes they're being told to make. But, on this issue for this company, my deeper sympathies belong to the CEO. 

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