Purpose-Driven Agendas: Aligning Profit with Sustainability
Attending the Female Quotient Lounge at Climate Week NYC, held at Deloitte’s NYC offices, provided a valuable opportunity to step away from the daily responsibilities and reflect on how we can contribute to a greater purpose. The event featured senior leaders in Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) from Salesforce, Delta Airlines, and World Central Kitchen. Their insights led to an engaging discussion, offering the audience a wealth of meaningful takeaways.
A growing trend in business is integrating purpose-driven agendas into the core of operations. Companies like Salesforce and Delta Airlines exemplify this shift, where sustainability and purpose are no longer seen as side projects but as essential elements of their business strategy.
According to Sunya Norman, Senior Vice President of ESG Strategy & Engagement at Salesforce, operationalizing values is crucial. She emphasized that today, companies are not only driven by profit but also by their values. At Salesforce, the focus is on embedding sustainability into every department, ensuring that each function contributes to the company’s overall ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) goals.
Similarly, Delta Airlines has embedded sustainability within its operational framework. Amelia DeLuca, Delta’s Chief Sustainability Officer, emphasized that the airline’s sustainability mission is deeply integrated into its daily operations. Delta is committed to reducing its carbon footprint with initiatives like carbon councils and new fuel-saving procedures. DeLuca mentioned how consumer trust is critical to their sustainability strategy, and engaging employees at all levels is essential to driving purpose-driven leadership.
Why Companies Care: The Drivers of Success
- Corporate Responsibility: Companies today are increasingly expected to address global issues like climate change actively. Beyond just doing good, consumers and stakeholders are holding businesses accountable. For many, the driver to act is a combination of regulatory pressure and the need to maintain public trust.
- For example, World Central Kitchen (WCK), led by CEO Erin Gore, is driven by the explicit mission of addressing food security during disasters. While WCK is a nonprofit, Gore emphasized the need for purpose-driven leadership within any organization, whether for-profit or nonprofit. The organization’s focused mission allows it to respond swiftly to crises, addressing the needs of communities while upholding its core values.
- Consumer Demand: Consumers are increasingly choosing brands that align with their values, including sustainability. Brands that demonstrate environmental responsibility can tap into a growing market of eco-conscious consumers. For instance, Delta Airlines’ storytelling around sustainability, such as highlighting farmers contributing to sustainable aviation fuel, resonates with passengers seeking more transparency in corporate environmental initiatives.
- Long-Term Business Viability: Companies realize that addressing climate change is essential for long-term success. Businesses heavily dependent on natural resources or energy, such as airlines and manufacturing, face increasing costs associated with environmental degradation. Proactively investing in sustainable practices can reduce operational costs in the long run, as DeLuca explained in her discussion on fuel-saving initiatives.
- Employee Engagement and Retention: For many companies, internal drivers, such as employee engagement, play a crucial role in sustainability efforts. As Synya Norman pointed out, helping employees understand their role in sustainability is critical to embedding purpose into daily operations. Delta, for example, actively involves 100,000 employees in its sustainability mission, showing that purpose-driven leadership enhances not just corporate culture but employee retention.
Measuring Success: Beyond Financial Metrics
The success of corporate sustainability initiatives cannot be measured solely by traditional financial metrics. Instead, companies are turning to a broader set of measurements to assess the impact of their efforts.
- Community Engagement: World Central Kitchen's success is measured by the number of meals provided and the impact on local communities. By involving local chefs and sourcing food from local farmers, WCK ensures its programs are sustainable and empower the communities it serves. The focus is on avoiding the unintended consequences of external aid, such as wiping out local industries, as Gore mentioned in the case of Haiti’s rice farmers. After a disaster in Haiti, large quantities of rice, beans, and bottled water were donated from outside the country. While this aid aimed to help those in need, it unintentionally devastated the local agricultural industry. By flooding the market with free food, the donated rice and beans effectively destroyed the demand for locally grown produce, as farmers could no longer compete with free products. This led to the collapse of Haiti’s rice farming industry, which has struggled to recover since. The lesson WCK draws from is the importance of listening to and supporting local communities in disaster relief efforts. Instead of importing aid, WCK emphasizes purchasing food from local farmers and hiring local chefs to support sustainable recovery and prevent long-term harm to local economies.
- Employee Engagement and Organizational Change: At Delta Airlines, sustainability initiatives are deeply rooted in employee engagement. DeLuca explained how Delta tracks progress in embedding sustainability in every employee’s daily tasks, from operations to customer service. By 2027, Delta aims to have all 100,000 employees actively contributing to its sustainability goals. Delta Airlines’ transition to paper cups exemplifies how small, symbolic sustainability actions can resonate strongly with consumers, even if they don’t drastically reduce carbon emissions. Although switching to paper cups doesn’t significantly decarbonize Delta’s operations, it is a visible sign of its broader commitment to sustainability. Delta found that this change and installing solar panels on their campus garnered significant employee and consumer engagement and positive responses, more so than some of the company’s more important but less visible sustainability initiatives, like sustainable aviation fuel. The paper cup transition demonstrates how small, tangible actions can build consumer trust and show that the company is doing everything within its control to be environmentally responsible while waiting for more considerable technological breakthroughs.
- Data and Accountability: Measurement is crucial to sustainability success. Delta’s carbon council, for example, uses data to assess the impact of various fuel-saving measures across its fleet. Tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) related to fuel usage, carbon emissions, and employee behavior allows the company to adapt its strategies continuously.
- Long-Term Systemic Change: Companies also measure success by contributing to broader systemic changes. For instance, Delta’s investment in sustainable aviation fuel and Salesforce’s focus on aligning technology with sustainability highlights how these companies contribute to long-term climate change solutions. Salesforce emphasizes operationalizing values throughout its organization, encouraging different departments to leverage their superpowers to drive impact.
Salesforce emphasizes the importance of embedding sustainability into the core of its operations through a concept they refer to as “operationalizing values.” Sunya Norman of Salesforce shared that the company focuses on leveraging the strengths of each department to advance its Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) goals.
Salesforce integrates sustainability across various business units by empowering subject matter experts in each department, such as procurement and technology, to apply sustainable practices in their specific areas. This decentralized approach helps the company drive impactful change. Norman highlighted that Salesforce’s mission is to align its business, such as its focus on technology, with addressing global challenges, illustrating how purpose can intersect with corporate strategy. The company believes that “values create value,” meaning that by integrating sustainability into their business operations, they contribute to a better world and drive long-term economic benefits.
Overcoming Challenges: Balancing Profit & Purpose
While progress is being made, balancing sustainability with profitability remains challenging for many companies. Amelia DeLuca mentioned the difficulties of addressing climate change in sectors like aviation, where technological innovations are still decades away. Sustainable aviation fuel, for instance, has yet to be available at the scale needed to replace traditional jet fuel fully. Yet, Delta continues to invest in smaller-scale solutions, like reducing waste and educating consumers about sustainability, while waiting for breakthroughs in fuel technology.
Incorporating purpose into everyday business operations can also face resistance. As Norman from Salesforce mentioned, integrating sustainability into a large corporation requires navigating complex systems and ensuring that each department is aligned with the company’s overall values. However, when done right, purpose-driven leadership can turn challenges into opportunities for innovation.
A Shared Responsibility
The fight against climate change is a shared responsibility between businesses, governments, and individuals. Companies like Delta, Salesforce, and WCK demonstrate that the impact can be profound and lasting when purpose-driven leadership is embedded into an organization's core. While financial returns are still necessary, measuring success through broader metrics like community engagement, employee involvement, and long-term systemic change provides a more holistic view of how businesses make a difference.
As more companies embrace sustainability and purpose-driven agendas, the question is not whether businesses can make a difference in the climate crisis but how quickly and effectively they will lead the way. The future of our planet depends on it.
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The participants mentioned several key performance indicators (KPIs) used by their organizations to measure their impact on sustainability and purpose-driven initiatives.
Employee Engagement in Sustainability (Delta Airlines)
Goal: To engage all 100,000 employees in sustainability efforts by 2027.
Metrics: Tracking year-by-year progress of how employees across various departments contribute to sustainability (e.g., fuel-saving initiatives and operational changes).
Fuel-Saving and Carbon Emissions (Delta Airlines)
Goal: Reduce jet fuel consumption and carbon emissions.
Metrics: Data tracking fuel usage and carbon savings per flight and operation.
Community Engagement and Local Impact (World Central Kitchen)
Goal: Maximize community involvement in relief efforts.
Metrics: Hiring local chefs, sourcing food from local farmers, and integrating community resources into disaster relief.
Sustainable Procurement (Salesforce)
Goal: Integrate sustainability into procurement practices.
Metrics: Tracking the extent to which procurement decisions reflect environmental and social responsibility.
Data-Driven Decision Making (Delta Airlines)
Goal: Use data to track operational changes and measure sustainability performance.
Metrics: Collect detailed data on operational shifts, such as fuel-saving measures, and analyze their impact on cost and carbon reductions.
