The Travel Bug

Friends, I apologize for my lack of posts, but I've been all over the place during the past few weeks. Part of what I enjoy most about my job is the opportunity to visit different parts of the world and learn about communities and cultures to which I've previously had no exposure. But when you have those moments when you wake up and your first thought is, "Wait, what country am I in again?" it may be a bit too much.

So, to make writing this post easier, I'll organize my recent travels by location:

Istanbul, Turkey
After a long night of flying, I arrived in Istanbul with several of my Supply Chain colleagues for a vendor summit. We've been working with more and more vendors in the Middle East and Mediterranean region, so we decided to host a formal day where we could get to know each other better.

Representatives from about 30 vendors, suppliers and partners showed up and we gave them a thorough overview of our business, our brand and our supply chain strategy. I spent some time discussing our factory compliance program and shared with them the CSR vision and strategy I've been working on. It's not quite "approved" yet, but it was great to explain to our partners that CSR will be more than just compliance. Our company will be looking for ways to create value from CSR and it's essential our partners understand where we're going.

Casablanca, Morocco
After the vendor summit, four of us traveled to Casablanca and visited a number of factories around Casablanca. We've already been working with one of the factories, but this was an opportunity to tour new factories to see whether or not they have the capability to work on our product. From my perspective, I had the chance to see factory working conditions firsthand and provide my input into potential suppliers.

Furthermore, meeting with Moroccan factory owners gave me the chance to dive into a strange Moroccan labor law with which I was pretty unfamiliar. The law has the potential to negatively impact overtime payments, and in extreme cases could be perceived as a form of forced labor. But because it's the law, we have to work with our suppliers to understand ways to make sure workers fully understand their rights.

Amman, Jordan
Continuing on our tour of potential factories to work with, we headed to Jordan to tour several factories. From a social responsibility perspective, I concentrated mostly on the topic of foreign workers - people who have come from other countries like Bangladesh, India and Sri Lanka to work in Jordan for several years. These foreign workers are especially vulnerable to discrimination, abuse and potential cases of forced labor, so it is important for us to learn more about how we can protect their rights.

Biella, Italy
After visiting factories, we headed further upstream and met with textile and yarn suppliers in Italy. For me, it was an education in seeing how yarn is spun from wool and how fabric is woven from threads. It was pretty fascinating and I learned a lot about the impacts that our upstream suppliers have.

One of the most interesting things I got to see was a fully automated dye house. Dyeing yarn can be one of the most toxic and environmentally unfriendly processes, but this particular facility had a state-of-the-art, computerized contraption that required only one person to operate the entire process. And thanks to technological advances, it not only limited human exposure to toxic dyestuffs, it also used less water to dye yarns and highly curbed the amount of effluent released by the process.

New York, NY
After a few days at home and back in the office, I headed down to New York to visit employees in our New York office. My main purpose was to meet with members of our Marketing team and to meet with a consultant, but I easily filled my time there with additional meetings on a variety of topics.

It's always good to meet with my colleagues face-to-face and a quick trip to New York is always worthwhile to build relationships.

My friends and family get excited when I talk about upcoming trips, but to tell the truth, I didn't have any time to do any sightseeing in all the countries I visited. Over the course of two weeks, there were only three days where I wasn't on a plane, and when I wasn't sleeping or visiting our partners, I was usually in a car or a van, traveling from one point to another.

I guess this means I'll have to go back to visit these countries and save some time to actually see some of the sights!

The Ethical Supply Chain

I recently returned from a trip to Hong Kong and China, where I had the opportunity to visit some of the factories that produce our goods. In today's economy, supply chains are global behemoths, with companies balancing, among other things, cost, quality, speed, trade preferences, technical capability, product assortment and "social and environmental compliance."

Obviously, it's impossible to maximize all the different variables, which is why companies also seek to diversify their sourcing base. You don't want to be beholden to one country and/or factory for all your goods. If anything happens to that country/factory, your company would find itself up the proverbial creek without a paddle.

My job is to help maximize the last dimension I mentioned in the opening paragraph: "social and environmental compliance." In my and other industries, "social compliance" is a common term. Many people are surprised to hear that most any western company with a global supply chain has a "compliance" organization. The tricky part for stakeholders is to understand what authority that "compliance" team has and how they approach this work.

Some companies take a "checklist" approach to compliance where they have a list of important attributes for their contract factories to follow. Typically, this includes a no child labor provision, no corporal punishment and paying workers. These companies are minimizing the risk that's inherent in sourcing from developing countries.

Other companies encourage their contract factories to "own" social responsibility and work with them to provide management and worker training. They focus on building socially responsible practices into factories' management systems and seek collaborative partnerships with local civil society organizations to keep all parties honest.

Not surprisingly, more companies follow the former model than the latter.

I had the chance to only visit three factories during my trip to Asia and I was pleased to see that they were all pretty good from a social and environmental perspective. Two factories had pretty robust programs where they self-monitor for social and environmental issues. They had stated philosophical approaches to social responsibility and one had even developed a set of standards that it hoped would be stricter than local law or any of its customers.

In thinking through my own company's approach, we definitely fall between the two extremes I describe above. By no means are we doing the bare minimum, hoping that social and environmental risks will never rear their ugly heads. But we haven't evolved to the point where we are actively building management systems in place for factories to embrace and own social responsibility. It's a journey that takes time and an evolution that requires resources.

I'm lucky that the executives I work with "get it" and support me in my efforts to elevate the company's ethical sourcing efforts. Would I consider my company a leader in the ethical supply chain? Not yet, but if I have anything to do with it, we'll get there.

Partnership Groundrules

I've spent the past several weeks trying to figure out how exactly we should be working with our third-party supply chain audit partners. Part of my responsibilities will be to make sure all the factories around the world that manufacture our products respect human rights, labor rights, communities and the planet's natural resources.

I used to work at a company where we had a very big, effective team that would visit factories on a daily basis. Not only did they conduct factory audits to ensure that they were upholding the company's standards, but they also ensured that factories followed up on corrective action plans and worked toward continuous improvement. At my current company, we've decided to contract with two providers of "social compliance."

The benefits of using third-party auditors is that it can be less expensive and time-consuming than building up an internal team, third-party auditors can leverage expertise and relationships from working with other customers and many of these auditors are certified by internationally respected NGOs.

The biggest challenge I've discovered with working with third-party auditors is that they don't have skin in the game. They're required to deliver audit reports, but they're don't necessarily have the incentives to follow up with factories or to do extra work to improve factory working conditions.

With that said, I don't think it's a lost cause. I'm realizing that we have to be crystal clear with what we expect as follow-up to a factory visit and we have to create mechanisms that make our auditors accountable for remediation. We need to figure out ways for our auditors to share our goals and to "own" the responsibility of factory improvement.

So, I've taken a stab at some standard operating procedures, which I hope will get us closer to this goal, but I'm not sure how well-received they will be. Hopefully they'll be strong enough to create a new dynamic of ownership and responsibility while giving us the assurance that these factories are indeed "good" factories when we don't have the manpower or the time to visit them firsthand.

Some Advice for Vendors

As with any new field, CSR is a growing area in need of support. To fulfill that need, hundreds and hundreds of vendors pop up every day, trying to create solutions that will make CSR practitioners' lives easier and help companies realize their CSR objectives.

Hardly a day goes by when I'm not contacted by someone offering consulting services, software, research or something else. The service providers range from established to start-up and it becomes difficult staying on top of all the different vendors and products out there.

I've had my fair share of interactions with different vendors and it shocks me that some act so unprofessionally. After all, representatives are ambassadors of their company's brands and they should realize that their actions reflect on the product or service they're trying to sell. Below are a few experiences I've had that clearly fall into the "don't" category.

Don't come on too strong. One vendor approached my company with a new service that purported to catapult our CSR communications into the stratosphere. An account manager contacted me, my boss and three people in our Corporate Communications team. Once we realized he'd contacted all of us, I scheduled a meeting between him and some other relevant employees. On the call, he was aggressive and pushy, completely turning us off. We told him that we were not interested in his services and he continued to call anyone he could find at the company, aggressively marketing his product even if they were not connected to CSR. All calls and messages came back to me and I stopped responding.

Don't stand me up. I recently scheduled a conversation with a vendor simply because my boss asked me to. I had no idea what the product was or how it related to CSR and neither did my boss, but she asked me to find out what they had to offer. So, I scheduled a conversation and web demo with a representative and waited at the appointed time, but no one called me. Four hours later, I received a rambling voice message informing me that his calendar notified him of a meeting but that he had no idea why he was scheduled to talk to me.

Don't insult a potential customer. A colleague and I were on a conference call/web demo of a software solution that we were really interested in learning about. Toward the end of the call, when we started to discuss cost and budget, I mentioned a figure that seemed reasonable to me, but was negotiable. One of the executives said that we shouldn't even bother continuing the conversation because they wouldn't do business with us at such a low price. A few months later, when a sales representative called to pitch me a new product, I didn't return his call.

Don't assume I have a ton of money. Right or wrong, CSR is often viewed as a cost center and we don't have huge budgets to work with. The money we do have is often tightly controlled and every penny counts. Just because our marketing department may spend millions of dollars, don't think our department has millions of dollars to spend. On anything.

Don't bash your competitors. I once was on the phone, learning about a service and I asked the sales representative to compare his service to a competitor's that seemed similar in my mind. He then flat-out insulted the competitor's product but offered no points of distinction. It seemed like a defensive, illogical and ungraceful response - not exactly the type of people I like to do business with.

Don't create an unnecessarily awkward situation. This one's debatable, but once a vendor invited me and a few of my co-workers to their company holiday party. The next morning, when I chatted with our account representative, I learned that the party featured a table where a naked couple slowly ate a meal. This, apparently, was performance art. I also started to hear stories about how employees were getting plastered, behaving out of hand and hooking up with each other. I was sort of sad to miss the show, but overall I was grateful I didn't see any of the people I worked with in embarrassing situations.