Creative Ways to Make the Earth a Stakeholder in Business
Whether most businesses recognise it or not, the Earth is already a stakeholder in their business. In fact, the Earth is actually the biggest business in the world. All other businesses are technically its subsidiaries.
Let that sink in for just a moment. Your business, and any other business can only exist because of what the Earth provides. And that includes its human capital.
According the World Economic Forum, the Earth provides $125 USD trillion worth of services to humanity each year. Amazon’s yearly revenue of $280.5 USD billion pales into insignificance compared to this.
I intuitively knew this when I started my own coaching business. As I made the move to go full time, I launched The NatureProcess online and gave 100% of the proceeds to Tree Sisters, a non-profit organisation based on feminine leadership and reforesting the tropics.
Giving away more money than I had generated in my business was seen by many as an unwise decision. Yet I knew that I had already received so much from the Earth that I had to enter into a reciprocal relationship with it from the start.
My own connection to nature had helped me to realise that I was part of the Earth and that the Earth and everything in it are actually one natural system. This is something that the Terra Carta, announced by Prince Charles just this week and supported by a number of global leaders, acknowledges too.
It is now only a matter of time until the Earth is fully recognised as the key stakeholder in business that it is. To help you start considering the Earth as a stakeholder in business, here are some of the ways that I’ve already used for myself and when working with clients.
Understand the ecosystem services the Earth already provides your business
In 2015, researchers Paul Sandifer, Ariana Sutton-Grief and Bethney Ward published one of the most comprehensive lists of ecosystem services provided by the Earth. The material goods and benefits provided by the Earth such as the supply of food, raw materials, medicines, etc are only one of seven key services.
Yet much of our sustainability efforts are focused on how we use our natural resources. Traditionally, they are seen as part of our sustainability efforts and not as part of how we can improve health and wellbeing in the workplace.
Part of this comes from a financial perspective. There is money to be saved by adopting sustainability practices. The less waste you have, the less money you spend on recycling costs, etc.
Also, it is now only a matter of time before governments introduce a carbon tax. Looking at ways to minimize your carbon emissions now becomes a priority to save money in the future.
As mentioned, there are many more ecosystem services that the Earth already provides businesses that most are not taking advantage of. These services are the ones that our natural resources provide to staff. These services are available whether businesses take advantage of them or not, making it an unnecessary waste when they don’t.
These benefits to staff are:
· Psychological well-being
· Attention restoration/perceived restorativeness
· Decreased depression, dejection, anger, aggression, frustration, hostility, stress
· Increased self-esteem
· Positive/improved mood
· Reduced anxiety and tension
· Increased prosocial behaviour/improved behaviour
· Increased opportunities for reflection
· Increased vitality and vigour/decreased fatigue
· Increased creativity
· Increased happiness
· Increased calmness, comfort and refreshment
· Improved body image for women
· Reduced ADHD in children
· Improved emotion, social health of children; self-worth
· Improved quality of life
· Attention restoration
· Reduced mental fatigue
· Reduced confusion
· Improved academic performance/education/learning opportunities
· Improved cognitive function
· Improved productivity/ability to perform tasks/positive workplace attitude
· Better general health
· Perceived health/well-being
· Reduced illness/cough/mortality/sick leave
· Stress reduction/less stress-related illness/improved physiological functioning
· Reduced cortisol levels (indicative of lower stress)
· Reduce blood pressure
· Reduced mortality from circulatory and respiratory disease
· Reduced headaches/pain
· Reduce mortality due to income deprivation
· Reduced mortality from stroke
· Reduced COPD, upper respiratory tract infections, asthma, other inflammatory disorders and intestinal disease
· Reduced obesity
· Faster healing/recovery from surgery/illness/trauma
· Improved addiction recovery
· Reduced cardiovascular and respiratory disease
· Reduced pulse/heart rate
· Decreased sympathetic (fight or flight response) nerve activity
· Increased parasympathetic (relax and enjoy) nerve activity
· Increased levels of natural killer cells and anti-cancer proteins
· Decreased blood glucose levels in diabetes patients
· Decreased type 2 diabetes
· Increased physical activity
· Reduced exposure to pollution
· Increased longevity
Utilize the Earth’s ecosystem services effectively and reap the rewards
According to the Educational Institution of Scotland, ill health in the workplace costs UK businesses a whopping £15 GBP billion a year. 28.2 million working days are lost due to work-related ill health and injury.
The UK Health and Safety Executive highlights that 17.9 million of those 28.2 million working days lost due to work-related ill health are a result work-related stress, anxiety or depression.
It’s clear that work is making so many people mentally unwell. That’s why it’s absolutely ridiculous that more work places aren’t prioritising nature-based health and well-being interventions. Especially when they are ‘paying’ for these ecosystem services whether they use them or not.
Simply ensuring employees have access to a view of nature from the office can help organisations save an average of $2990 USD per employee in annual productivity savings through the cost of presenteeism.
Starting to have conversations about how the Health and Wellbeing Strategy of your organisation can link with the Sustainability Strategy is the first step in really starting to think of the Earth as a key stakeholder in your business.
Many of the solutions that you can start to adopt when learning how to harness the power of nature for health and wellbeing in your business are initially free and low-cost.
One of the benefits of lockdown is that people have found themselves spending more time in nature. With nothing else to do, families are going for longer walks and work colleagues are starting to have walking/running meetings in nature.
It’s essential that we explore how to make things like these essential parts of our business culture. Nature is not separate; it underpins everything that we do. And it can support our people to reach their full potential in life.
Use creative ways to include the Earth in strategic conversations
Earth Representation
One of the easiest ways to bring the Earth into your strategic conversations is to create an empty chair that represents the Earth. Working online, this simply means logging in on another account and calling it Earth.
What this does is highlight the importance of Earth in the decision-making process by offering a visual reminder of its role within the conversation. If you’ve never done this before, it can be incredibly powerful and help everyone in the room to think in a different way.
If you want to enhance this experience you can also print out an image of Earth from outer space and allow the ‘voice of the Earth’ to speak through a NASA space recording by playing this at the start of your meeting. Whenever I have done this for clients, they have commented on how impactful it is to hear what the Earth sounds like from space — and how this helps shape their thinking.
There are two reasons these additional actions work so well from an evidence-based perspective: the overview effect and multi-sensory experience.
The ‘overview effect’ is well documented within astronauts who see the Earth from outer space. They experience a strong feeling of awe and rapture that changes how they view the Earth and become inspired to want to do more to care for it because they feel part of it.
What also adds to the astronauts’ experience is its multi-sensory nature. This refers to our ability as humans to experience more than one sense at a time. We have way more than the traditional five senses we’ve been taught we have. Depending on who you speak to we actually have between 30–54 senses!
What the research shows is that when we experience a number of sensory experiences in the same place and at the same time, what we experience becomes more profound. It is these profound experiences that help us change and adapt our behaviour to our environment.
When you bring an image of the Earth along with its sound into a strategic meeting, it mimics this multi-sensory overview effect to create a deeper and richer experience for all involved.
Earth Walk
Another creative way to help bring the Earth into strategic conversations is to ask everyone to go on a ‘Deep Time Walk’ before the meeting.
This is a guided walk that allows you to experience the history of our living Earth in a different way by walking 4.6km to experience how the earth has evolved in 4.6billion years.
It is a core part of the experiential learning at Schumacher College and thanks to the creation of their app, your entire team can take part in it from where ever they are in the world!
You will need time at the start of a strategic meeting to share your experiences and how they have shaped your thinking about the strategic needs of your organisation. It’s also necessary to revisit and review this throughout your entire strategic planning.
Earth Reflection
You can also bring the Earth into your business through creating time to reflect in nature about your strategy and imagine what the Earth would think about it.
This involves working on the strategy as normal first before then asking each team member to spend a minimum of 2 hours outside reflecting on the strategy along with the question of “what would the Earth think about our strategy?”
The reason you need at least 2 hours is because it can take at least 90 minutes in a natural setting for the part of our brain that creates stress, worry and anxiety to switch off. Once this does, we are better able to access our capacity for creativity and intuition.
Following this, you need to have time scheduled to review the strategy individually before then coming back together to share what’s emerged and create any additional changes.
Both the Earth Walk and Earth Reflection exercises focus on harness the potential of multi-sensory experiences. The added side effects of using activities like these to bring the Earth into your business as a Stakeholder are all the benefits first mentioned in this article. That’s the real power of bring the Earth into your business as a stakeholder.
If you and your leadership team would like help to bring the Earth into your business as a stakeholder, then Earthself’s Earth Connected coaching can help.
Earthself has also teamed up with Talik & Co to create a 4-month CPD program for experienced coaches on ‘Coaching with Natural Systems: Evolve Your Practice’ starting February 2021. Find out more here.
Further reading
https://sustainabilityadvantage.com/2019/02/28/5-reasons-why-mother-nature-is-a-key-stakeholder/