The concept of corporate social responsibility has become more prominent in recent years as corporations have begun to dedicate more resources to social initiatives. These initiatives fall into one of four buckets:
- Environmental: Producing sustainable goods, partnering with environmentally friendly vendors, and more
- Ethical: Encouraging ethical behavior from everyone in the organization, including leadership
- Philanthropic: Pursuing ways to make their communities a better place, whether through financial contributions or volunteer hours
- Economic: Making financial decisions that are rooted in a desire to positively impact the world around them
In this blog, Zaq Tull, our Account Executive for Key Accounts, details his relationship with corporate social responsibility and how it has influenced his career decisions.
My last job was at an agency that booked business leaders on podcasts. At this agency, our typical client wanted to get inside as many ears as possible. One of our clients ran a company that made bedsheets from eucalyptus trees. The company was successful, and if the founder/CEO wanted to maximize listener numbers, it would have been very easy to book him on podcasts that focused on starting or scaling an e-commerce business.
When I lined up some of these podcasts for him, he canceled them, then called me with a unique ask. He wanted to focus on subject matter rather than listener count. The subjects he wanted me to focus on were environmental sustainability, sustainable e-commerce, and corporate social responsibility.
At the time, these subjects were completely unknown to me. At the onset of my search for suitable podcasts, I was a little bit annoyed because they weren’t applicable to anyone else on my client roster. Qualifying these podcasts involved listening to them (of course) and having in-depth conversations with the hosts, who were uniformly wonderful people (not always the case in the podcast sector, unfortunately).
This was in 2019, so as I was exploring the world of corporate sustainability and corporate social responsibility, the pandemic turned e-commerce from something that made shopping more convenient into something that made shopping possible. While I was watching the popularity of online commerce explode, I was also well-situated to examine the consequences, that became more and more apparent as everyone started to have everything shipped to them.
Beyond that, my interest in corporate social responsibility led me to seek employment with a company that operated ethically. Enter The Receptionist, run under a model called Employee Supremacy, where in contrast to shareholder supremacy, a company’s leadership decisions consider employees first and ahead of shareholders.
Part of The Receptionist’s dedication to Employee Supremacy is a generous budget for yearly professional development, which I have used to learn more about sustainability and corporate social responsibility. Our business has an e–commerce component, and in 2023, I decided to evaluate the sustainability of our packaging.
This led to my unearthing of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition (SPC). I attended SPC Impact, its annual event, where I gazed into the future of sustainable e-commerce. The future is bright.
In terms of the present, I went into our packaging evaluation thinking the most important thing that we could do was make all components of our packaging optimally recyclable and optimally compostable. This is a unique challenge for us because the product we ship is large, heavy, and fragile.
In meetings with packaging consultants, engineers, and manufacturers, I learned that the end of life of our packaging is secondary to its durability. Returns of electronics damaged in transit have a devastating environmental impact.
For a company of our size (small but MIGHTY) we have an outsized footprint of customers in the logistics industry. Based on the challenges we had revamping our own packaging, membership in the Sustainable Packing Coalition offers a chance for us to support meaningful advancement in sustainable e-commerce without a potentially economically devastating overhaul to our own packaging, which is very durable.
As members of the Sustainable Packaging Coalition, we are looking forward to learning and implementing more tactics to keep The Receptionist, especially its e-commerce component, sustainable.
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