The Green Generation

Occasionally someone gets very carried away and introduces me as CEO of Kuoni UK.  I’m not.  At Kuoni, CEO is more likely to mean Chief Experience Officer.  We have 32 of them – that’s one for every store.  Our Store Managers (CEOs) are the most important people in our customer journey.  Put a great store manager into a poor store and very soon you’ll have a great store.  Put a poor manager into a great store and very quickly you’ll have a poor store. It’s simple.

It’s for this reason that I still try to do final interviews for all Kuoni Store Manager appointments.  And that’s how a few months ago I was asked during an interview: ‘What’s Kuoni’s policy on sustainability?’ This was a first – never in twenty years of interviewing had anyone ever asked about the green credentials of the business.

With my curiosity aroused I began to ask people around the organisation how important Corporate Social Responsibility was in their choice of employer. The responses were very insightful. For ‘Generation Y’, those born between 1977 and 1998, it was clearly really important that Kuoni took sustainability seriously.  Some even went so far as to say they wouldn’t work for a business that didn’t.

This is the generation that was brought up to be the ‘Green Generation’; they choose the products they buy and the companies they buy from very carefully.  These potential employees were taught about sustainability at school.  Climate change was a major topic of discussion during their teenage years. When the time comes to choose a company to work for they treat any green claims with a healthy level of skepticism.

I was delighted when Kuoni was recently announced as one of the Sunday Times Top 100 Companies to work for.  One of the key criteria under consideration was our commitment to social responsibility as scored by our own staff – so our success in these awards was a vote of confidence from our own team.  In our efforts to improve, we’ve just introduced a ‘volunteering’ scheme allowing employees to take up to two additional paid holiday days each year to put something back into the community.

Many business leaders take comfort in the illusion that they choose their employees.  They don’t.  At Kuoni we never forget that our employees choose to work for us.  They have made a positive choice and having convinced them to join we need to convince them to stay.  Increasingly that choice is being swayed by the way we influence the environment, the communities we work with - both in the UK and overseas, and by the products we sell.  Add to that our ethics and values, and the employee checklist is growing.

It’s easy to think that Corporate Social Responsibility is a shareholder issue but it’s not; it’s a stakeholder issue.  And your most important stakeholders are your employees - convince them that you’re serious and genuine and they will reward you with loyalty and commitment long into the future.