Season 3. Activists and Innovators Part 2.
Part. 2 Employee Activism: Change from Within.
“One of the most interesting trends of the last decade, is that organisational speaking up has completely transformed. Young people want to call the hotline and say, I worry this organisation doesn't care about climate change.” Alison Taylor
With many businesses confused about what ‘doing good’ actually means, employees are stepping up and pressuring their organisations to act on behalf of an interest greater than their company’s profits.
They want to see their leadership take action and are speaking up as a political act of resistance. Employee activism is increasing globally. People are voting on their feet, ready to leave their jobs when their companies don’t perform.
Some are on the barricades, but most of them are not. We’ll hear from those who are doing grassroots organising, raising awareness in their organisations and encouraging colleagues to speak up and take action. People like Christian Vanziette, Manuel Salazar and Desiree Fixler who are putting pressure on the company from within. Voices of dissent who are daringly speaking truth to power, challenging and resisting in the face of questionable leadership.
And we hear more from activists and experts Gail Bradbrook, Megan Reitz and Alison Taylor who have some tips for activists. Who show us we don’t all need to be on the barricades to lead change and how activists can prevent getting entangled and become part of the problem. Full Interviews with all speakers are on the Season 3 page
Snippets and Credits for this episode
Guardian article on the 420 Carbon Bombs
Extinction Rebellion - a do-it-together environmental movement.
Power for All - Julie Battliana and Tizana Casciaro
Transition movement - Rob Hopkins
Taking Action from the Inside: Linkedin Article Manuel Salazar
Taking Action in Six Steps for employees - Youtube video Manuel Salazar
Creatives for Climate podcast with Ryan Gellert
Sustainability isn’t good enough Paul Polman
Transcript
↓ Write transcript below this line ↓
Tessa Wernink
Welcome to the second part of this series on business activism. In part one, we talked about what activism is in the context of business. In this episode, we'll be talking to people who believe they can change something. People who are challenging and resisting innovators and activists. We'll hear from people who are doing grassroots organizing, raising awareness with employees, and supporting them to take action.
00:00
Tessa Wernink
People like Christian Vanizette and Desiree Fixler who we've heard from before. But first, let's listen to Manuel Salazar who is a climate activist at PWC and is putting pressure on his company from within.
00:23
Manuel Salazar
So I do work for price with the housekeepers, and I, I want to mention the company because I think, I think it's, it's a good company, eh, around the world.
But, uh, like any corporation, they have also, you know, a lot of links with other companies that are not really good for, for the environment. So what I've been trying to do and, and Price Waterhouse Coopers is, try to, um, highlight the fact that we are not doing enough for the environment internally, first of all.
So it needs to be a change of mind or elevation of our consciousness about how important is the environment. And from there start, you know, talking to those clients that our polluters or offenders, let's say, uh, to the environment and, and advise, and they have to do more about it. So I haven't, I've been having my battles with them.
And then what I've don't, uh, so far is refer back to their own basis or core, which are their values. So when they talk about act, 'act with integrity' or 'make the differences'. Yeah. Or 'do the right thing'. So then I just gave them examples of where, where we don't leave those values. Right. So if you have a client with then invest in fossil fuels.
So then, uh, you are not doing the right thing, for example, or we are not 'acting on integrity', eh, by, by, no, by saying nothing.
00:36
Tessa Wernink
Manuel created a video for employees with six tips on how to pressure your company to move toward a more sustainable agenda. The link is in the notes, but they include things like:
Asking for training on climate change to taking a pledge to not invest pensions in fossil fuels and organizing walkouts. He has taken his employee activism public.
Another person who was in the news last year as an employee challenging the senior leadership of her company is Desiree Fixler.
02:00
Desiree Fixler
This market needed that green asset bubble to be popped. It needed this correction, and we weren't moving the. So billions were being mobilized into E S G strategies and yet carbon emissions continued to rise.
02:27
Tessa Wernink
Desiree Fixler was the whistleblower responsible for exposing E S G greenwashing at Deutsche Bank's DWS arm. Where 800 billion in assets were managed and 75% mislabeled as E S G.
We will link the tell all interview by the Planetary Business Podcast with this pod. It is a perfect example of how employee activism is able to force leadership to change course from within.
02:42
Desiree Fixler
And I asked the, the global head of research, does the ESG system use ai? And on on email I, I had a response. No.
So there was a tremendous gap external communication and internal reality.
03:07
Tessa Wernink
After investigating the issue, raising it in several ways, with senior management and the supervisory board, she is eventually fired. The firm publishes the dismissal intentionally damaging her reputation and ruining her career perspectives.
That's when Desiree decides to expose the company's greenwashing and becomes a whistleblower. Taking her story to the. Desiree is a whistleblower as somebody who wants to reform a company or organization, and she knows that in our world today, whistleblowers come with a negative connotation.
03:22
Desiree Fixler
Biggest impact I wanna make after this whole saga is to recast the whistleblower as someone who is trying to do something good in protection of the organization, in protection of his or her colleagues.
03:51
Tessa Wernink
So did her action and leadership have that kind of impact? What happened after she raised the alarm?
04:04
Desiree Fixler
That one action that police raid has sent shivers across Wall Street with one message. Do not use ESG to mislead and missell products do not exploit sustainability. Do not use it as a marketing scheme. You have to be evidence-based and you have to be truthful with your clients. Regulation without enforcement is form over substance.
04:10
Kwame Ferreira
We've heard from Manuel who is inside a company creating a playbook for others to challenge their organizations. Desiree shows us what resistance means and speaking up in the face of power. And there's Christian Vanette who's taking on a different tactic, mobilizing different actors in the system and creating several pressure points at the same time.
04:54
Christian Vanizette
So I started digging into, uh, this, what we call carbon bombs. So new, uh, oil and gas infrastructure that the scientist of the IPCC say is the priority is not to do new infrastructure, uh, because it'll lock us in, in, uh, in, uh, oil and fossil fuel, uh, energy for long time. So the priority is no new oil and gas, uh, infrastructure.
Doesn't mean no oil from tomorrow because there's already a lot existing, no new ones. And so I started digging in how do you stop those carbon bombs? And just for the listeners, there's around, there was an article in The Guardian showing that there's 420 carbon bombs in preparation, so new oil and gas, big infrastructure.
And if they happen, we're at 3.5 degree global warming, which means half of the earth, uh, inevitable. And so it's really the front line of the climate fight is to stop those carbon bombs. And then the question becomes, okay, there's 420 of them. It's huge industrial projects with oil and gas company governments, complicated places.
Uh, and then the question become, how do you stop one? If you wanna stop 420.
04:54
Kwame Ferreira
In November, 2022, the Guardian publishes an article under 420 carbon bombs around the world. By this time, Christian has been looking into how he can possibly stop EOCOP one of the longest oil pipelines in the world. It starts in Uganda and ends in the Port of Tanga in Tanzania, and accounts for around 35 million tons of CO2 emissions.
It's only one of the 422 carbon bombs and is what he calls the frontline of the climate fight. He talks about the billions that go into lobbying and denial by these corporations and sees activism as the only way to get them to change.
06:00
Christian Vanizette
So then we, we started listing all the strategies that activists are doing.
And some involved putting pressure on the banks. So for example, on EOCOP 25 banks said we won't finance the pipeline out of the 30 banks of Total. And so we go after the customers of the banks and we ask them to write their banks to say, I don't want my money to be used to fuel global warming and finance EOCOP.
And so this is how we got 25 banks out. We go for the insurance because if they don't have insurance, they don't have um, uh, the pipeline. And we go after the supplier. And so these are corporates that provide the electrical components. And so one of them, for example, is Schneider in that case. Uh, and then we also go for.
The, the, the court. So there's a, a legal case in court and then you also go for the pressure on the investor and the board members. And so for, how did you have different, uh, pressure points you need to do? And for each of them you have strategies to activate and moving people within the corporate sector to take a stand against.
EOCOP is one of the tools and tactic that comes back a lot, especially in the insurance world.
06:36
Kwame Ferreira
But how do Christian and his new community of undercover activists reach employees? He explains what he calls an escalation of strategies.
07:44
Christian Vanizette
Basically, right now how it happens is that there's an escalation kind of, uh, strategies.
So first, right now, if you look in London, uh, there is two students who go every day in front of the insurance company who is thinking of insurance, EOCOP, and they go with flyers and they just stay at the lunch. And they say, Hey, uh, you guys are, we've heard that you're thinking of insurance. This project we think you shouldn't do that other insurance didn't do.
Here's my email. If you're an employee within this insurance and you also think like me, Get in touch and we'll work together on how do we convince your management to not do that. And then they do like that. At first. No one answers, no one comes to see them. And then after seeing them for one week, two weeks, some people go talk to them because it's kids the age of their, uh, their kids basically.
And then they build trust like that. And then you have 1%, 2% that say, okay. Help you guys. And then we design a strategy with them, and then if they're, they, they ask gently their CEO to do that. The CEO doesn't do that. At the same time, we build external pressure. So we ask for example, uh, artist to come in front of the building and we did a, a dance with 150 people.
So this is the nice way, you know, to get all more employees in, to get the CEO to look at this thing. Oh my God, there's some people who are watching us on this thing. They even brought 150 dancers. So where this will end, we don't want it to be on the financial times. And then the CEO doesn't answer still from the labor within the company, from their own employee and from outside pressure.
Then we escalate it a bit and uh, we block the. And so and so. Then it's disrupt the work of the company. And so then they're like, okay, this is too much. It's on the news and things like that. And at some point they drop. So there's different techniques, but you see that there's different tools being used of external pressure, internal, but the work of the place from within is key
07:53
Tessa Wernink
So what are young people getting active about? Alison Taylor, the professor at NYU Stern, who we heard from before, talks about what makes an ethical business. An employee participation is key to this, but rather than these hotlines to speak up about bribery, illegal activities, and fraud. Employees wanna speak up at about different matters.
09:50
Alison Taylor
I think one of the most interesting trends of the last decade, but particularly the last five years, is the organizational speaking up has completely transformed. Very, very often young people they don't wanna call the hotline and say, I'm worried my boss is committing fraud. They want to call the hotline and say, I'm worried my boss is, is not valuing purpose.
I worry my boss is not inclusive. I worry this organization doesn't care about climate change. I worry that I'm working somewhere that doesn't align with my personal values. So we've seen this huge expansion, I think, um, in what employees want in terms of raising their voice, making their opinions, felt having a, um, a role in shaping the values and priorities of the organization.
And I think a lot of organizations are not responding very well. I think a lot of organizations find all this very threatening.
10:10
Tessa Wernink
Manuel, a values-driven employee and employee activist from PWC acknowledges this. Companies, he says, need to start internalizing the external social movements and climate action.
11:00
Manuel Salazar
And now what we are living is a social revolution. Eh, coming from Venezuela revolution is not really good, eh word, but what happens is then people are moving towards. A more conscious, you know, environment all around it. And we want to see that inside of companies. And that is why companies are now talking about mental health as part of their programs.
Or people are talking about L G B T rights, you know, to gender rights, you know, diversity inclusion, and now is the time for climate. There is no way that we can just operate in the way we continue doing it without including the environment. And when you talk about the environment, you, you have to think about as slow down to the operations that you have.
11:11
Tessa Wernink
I know what you're thinking. You might not think that the only responsibility of business is to create profits for shareholders, but if we spend all that time in our organizations talking about that fluffy stuff, you know, how do we make money and survive? What about the bottom line?
And besides in many countries, people have been fighting for their rights and the rights of collectors for generations. They've organized into unions, they have Works Councils can't they do the talking? Why aren't we using their power? Good questions. Unions are struggling to attract younger employees.
They want to take on a more proactive role, expand their reach, because at the moment, their agendas rarely contain matters of climate change or mission drift. And younger employees think that every job is a climate job. When it comes to the bottom line, it has been widely researched that a diverse and inclusive environment in which all voices are heard are kind to the bottom line.
A KPMG report from January, 2023 tells us that employees are voting on their feet when it comes to corporate ESG commitments. With one in three, 18 to 25 year olds rejecting a job based on a company's ESG records, making talent acquisition and retention another reason to listen up. Does that mean we'll end up spending all our time at work talking?
Leaders need to make choices, say Megan Reitz.
11:51
Megan Reitz
So a lot of our work seeks to understand, allow leaders to be more self-aware about their own response and help them in some cases towards dialogue, um, for those topics that they choose to engage in. And that's the other thing to say is that what we are not doing in our research is saying that leaders should be engaging on everything, you know, every activist topic that there is out there. Cause then they wouldn't get any work done. Um, And the, and the organization probably wouldn't go very far. But they do need to make choices. Um, and they do need to choose what to pursue and what to engage in and what not to. And make those choices in a way that makes sense and is congruent to their stakeholders.
13:10
Kwame Ferreira
Being congruent, in other words, practicing what you preach, walking the talk, talking the walk. But how do companies know what this means, what to take a stand on and whatnot, and how? According to Megan Reitz, this is all new territory in organizations.
[00:14:24] Kwame Ferreira: MBA programs did not include strategies on how to engage with movements such as the Black Lives Matter, or Me Too, to deal with climate anxiety or digital ethics.
14:07
Megan Reitz
There are some emerging pieces of advice, I suppose. And I think the reason why I say it's no playbook is it really is quite new territory in organizations.
And so there isn't that body of research or that body of learning that has been shared, uh, that there is in some other, other territories. One thing that persists in that sort of situation is, the requirement for all of those involved activists and leaders to create the spaces where they can reflect, and learn and make choices.
You know when you are in uncharted territory and it's changing all the time and there isn't a clear 'how- to' guide or, or a similar opinions on it, one thing you've got to do is make space to, to reflect and learn and talk. And those are the spaces as I'm, as I mentioned, you know, those are the spaces that seem to be in very short supply at the moment.
Uh, so that's worrying.
14:35
Kwame Ferreira
While there might not be a playbook, Megan has been doing a lot of research, interviewing thousands of employees and organizational leaders, and has started creating a vocabulary for the different ways companies are currently responding to employee activism or voices of difference.
.
15:35
Tessa Wernink
They have identified six ways in which .Companies are responding to activism. It includes companies pretending it doesn't exist to suppressing voices. Then there's facadism and defensive engagement when leaders are saying the right things, but they aren't acting. And the last two are dialogic engagement and actually stimulating activism
15:22
Megan Reitz
Dialogue in my research is much, much messier, um, because it involves people with different opinions. It is in uncharted territory. There isn't a neat solution. There's not necessarily consensus. So people are making mistakes and there's lots of fallout.
16:10
Tessa Wernink
But what about the employee activists themselves? Is it just a matter of disagreeing, raising your voice and showing dissent?
Perhaps they're just seeing part of a bigger picture. Don't activists have some kind of responsibility to come up with solutions? Gail Bradbrook, who we've heard from before, co-founder of Extinction Rebellion says this:
16:29
Gail Bradbrook
Activist movements can get stuck in the agitate mode. And, um, the idea of there being a bigger strategy that tactics are part of is something that I've been trying to communicate across our movement, really.
16:49
Tessa Wernink
She refers to a book called Power for All in which change is seen as a combination of agitating, innovating, and orchestrating.
17:02
Gail Bradbrook
There are different stages in change. Um, in, in the book Power For All, they talk about agitate, innovate, orchestrate. And so like the agitate is like really insisting that we have to talk about something.
And, you know, as an employee in a, in a company, you could simply start a group and invite people to it. And, and that may be sufficient and maybe a lot of interest, or you could, uh, do something more disruptive. And, I mean, disruptive in the widest sense of that word, because sometimes speaking truthfully and passionately tearfully is disruptive.
You know, sometimes sticking up posters in the toilets anonymously is disruptive. You know, they're, they're just, that person needs to work that out within their own organizing. And, and, and, and then the innovate phase is, you know, I, I also think it's really inspire is how could. Be different, you know, in society, in our company.
What's possible here? I like the work of, um, Rob Hopkins, who started the transition movement here, where he talks about moving from what is to what if. The process of imagining. And then the orchestration is working with different, different groups to drive through change, you know, and again, within an organization there'll be different ways of doing that.
So, yes, just be clear that there's a process to go through here and there's so much that's about relationship that can get skipped over in our desire to see things change quickly.
17:10
Kwame Ferreira
We want individuals, teams, and companies to be forces for creation as opposed to destruction, and in order to do so, they need to engage from within their value system. Agitate is great if this valley system is outdated, but the only way activism will have an impact is if it then empowers corporations to build in a different way. Sometimes you do need to tear things down in order to have a complete rebuild.
18:39
Gail Bradbrook
Activists get entangled with the problem that they're talking about and they, we can still be manifesting a version of the problem even through our activism, uh, talking about. Colonial mentality and racism shows up in social movements, for example, and whether people even want to use that term. Cause really what we're talking about is being a human being willing to, to stand up and, and, and, and try to make a difference.
And there are different. Ways of that. I like that idea of the crafifist movement of the more introverted forms of activism, the softer qualities as Mickey Cashton tells them, calls them, you know, the places of vulnerability and, um, Empathy that we may want to bring through.
You know, when we have that image of activism in our minds, as on the barricades and, uh, with our fists in the air. And I'm all for that as well, to be honest. Um, Then, then it's limiting.
Um, so, and there are different roles, even whatever you set up, you know, there are, I, I could never find this again, but there was a brilliant poem which was about doing admin for the revolution.
And you know, God bless the people willing to do the admin work. We've had some great finance team people that I've worked with in XR that's been often my focus. The creative types were all dressed, looking really wacky and cool, and then I was with the people doing the spreadsheet and they're like old men jumpers.
And then we're all beautiful. We all bring what we need to bring.
19:01
Tessa Wernink
Changing the system doesn't happen overnight, and being radical can be dangerous. There's a great book about this called The Tempered Radical. We'll add all the books referenced in the comments on the website. Megan shares a few tips on what it takes to be a good activist.
20:34
Megan Reitz
Two of the academics that we quote considerably am Meyerson and Scully, who decades ago, came up with the term tempered radical. And I think it describes so well the activists' path and choices. So they, they talk about the need to be radical in organizations in order to challenge the status quo and see change.
You know, you have to be radical, but if you are too radical, the system can't cope with you and we'll spit you out. And then you can't do any change from inside anyway. Uh, so you need to temper how radical you are. Uh, but of course, if you temper it too much, Nobody's gonna take any notice of you. You are too similar to the status quo.
So there, there are these choices to go, navigate to navigate this sort of path. You know, how radical can I be here? When do I need to tow the line? When do I need to fit in, in order to be heard? So that's sort of the overarching statement.
20:52
Tessa Wernink
Are there any role models for business and senior leaders to emulate when it comes to how to engage with activism?
There are companies who are leading the pack in this regard. Companies that were started by rebels and change makers and have grown into big influential voices. These companies keep sticking their necks out to take a stand. Think Ben and Jerry's, whose social mission seeks to eliminate injustices by integrating these concerns into their day-to-day business activities, or Lush who are active and vocal about issues, and use their shop windows and website to highlight them or Dr. Bronner's soaps. Who have supported causes related to drug policy reform, animal rights, organic labeling, and more. And the most prominent is probably Patagonia, who transferred individual ownership to a steward owned model saying that the Earth is now their only shareholder.
I interviewed Ryan in 2019 for the Creatives for Climate Podcast before he became CEO of Patagonia.
21:51
Ryan Gellert
I think probably the most profound change in the last decade for Patagonia is late last year we changed the mission statement and the new one is: We're in business to save our home planet. It's really, it's eight words. It tells us all exactly what we exist to do. And by the way, the word 'home' in front of planet was pretty deliberate, because there's a school of thought out there and a group of people who think technology is gonna solve all of our problems. And maybe when we're done blowing this planet up, we'll move on to the next one and, and we don't accept that point of view.
22:45
Tessa Wernink
Their activist brand takes a stand as a global business on political matters, and more importantly, they use their product innovation and operations to keep challenging and take responsibility, repeatedly challenging capitalism in its current form. They have always supported the activist voice with 40 years of donations of 1% for the planet, and they train their own employees on activist tactics.
23:14
Tessa Wernink
According to Paul Polman, who is former CEO of Unilever and author of Net Positive, younger employees especially fear for the world that they will inherit. It will not come as a surprise that many want to give up their time and talents to companies who are striving to be part of the solution.
23:37
Paul Polman
That 75% of the graduates of US university don't wanna work for big corporates anymore. They wanna work for companies that have a purpose, that make a difference. Where they can say are left his wealth in a little bit better place than I found it. We're isolating ourselves by creating our own problem, by not acting. By not acting for the common good.
23:54
Tessa Wernink
And he recognizes three ways in which companies can go against this. The first being to show greater ambition on values and impact. The second do a better job at communicating this. And the last, which Paul Polman calls, his biggest insight is that companies need to empower the employee to help them address big societal challenges.
24:17
Christian Vanizette
So this is what the big companies, the social entrepreneurs do to build solutions, business models that can do better. When you have, uh, government leadership, and at the same time when you have mass movements and when those three things happen at the same time on a particular topic, then you have a change that happens.
And so for me, the activists are really helping on the mass movements and putting pressure on the, the government and the politicians so they take the right decisions.
And the social entrepreneur is really like building the solutions as civil society, showing that we can still innovate and take into account those constraints.
24:36
Tessa Wernink
It is now time for solutions, not activism says Accenture. Activism is seen as part of a news cycle. Greta had her moment. The pandemic had its moment. The war is having its moment. And in this sequence of moments, activism became unfashionable, at least to trend observers.
25:09
Kwame Ferreira
But activism is not bound by news cycles. Our question is how to weave activism as part of the fabric that makes good and healthy business.
25:29
Tessa Wernink
How are companies responding to activists? Before we get a Chief Artificial intelligence officer, we need a Chief Activist Officer in place.
25:37
Kwame Ferreira
Innovation is something that corporations took in house when design thinking was supposed to change the world. Now it is a combination of innovation and activism that sets corporations apart.
25:46
Tessa Wernink
There needs to be a response that matches the size of the crisis. I think that's why we need both innovators and activists.
25:58