Establishing a Cultural Foundation for ESG

Operationalizing ESG requires reframing value to include non-financial metrics as part of the business equation. For many industrial companies, that necessitates an important shift in perspective. Workers must learn to change behaviors and make decisions based on different parameters.  

Organizational culture is the invisible hand that guides the daily decisions and behaviors of your employees. Your organizational culture must be aligned with your sustainability strategy. As management theorist Peter Drucker once said, “culture eats strategy for breakfast.”

In other words, the belief system that governs the daily actions of your employees will override a corporate strategy document.

Cultural systems are often invisible and deeply embedded into an organization. Changing culture can be difficult.

But there are important parallels between safety culture in industrial environments and the development of a sustainability culture, observes Lucas Green, Automation & Operations Centers Manager, Maverick Natural Resources.

Twenty years ago, he explains, safety was not taken as seriously by the oil and gas industry as it is now. At the start, many safety initiatives were driven from the top down. It took some time before safety became an integral part of the way that people work.  

Now, he says, “[safety is] more of a culture than it is a rule to follow. I think those are lessons that we can start working into the environmental side of things.”   

Making Sustainability Part of the Day to Day

Bry-Ann Salahi, Capability Architect at ExxonMobil, says that part of the reason that safety culture became so engrained within oil and gas organizations is because it permeated day-to-day work in everything from safety minutes in meetings to job safety assessments.

“I can just see us taking that kind of parallel with [the] environment and our emissions initiatives so that it's ingrained into our thought process in everything that we're doing from projects and planning, to the equipment we're going to use and buy, [and] the companies that we're going to work with,” she says.

The environment must be part of a “new factor when we're considering doing projects,” adds Green citing the example of new facility design. Normally, he explains, there is a certain number of metrics that you examine in facility design. Environmental metrics – such as emissions or gas monitoring - will need to become a part of that equation.

Encourage Innovation and Risk Taking

Industrial companies must also learn to take more risks and not fear failure, observes Salahi.     

A company needs to “fail fast, learn fast in order for us to meet these benchmarks that we've set and to get to net zero; we need to be open and embrace an innovative culture,” she says.

Beyond culture, leadership must invest in the skills and people that will be needed to make sustainability an operational reality. These can include new skills from data scientists who can effectively analyze sustainability data, technical expertise on emissions management technology and data infrastructure, maintenance teams that know how to extend and improve asset performance, and process experts who know how to make changes for more efficient and effective business operations.

This article was based on a session recorded at Operational Excellence in Oil and Gas moderated by Sean Barnes, Vice President, Corporate Operations, Nine Energy Services. You can hear the full discussion at Making Emissions Reduction an Operational Reality.

Interested in learning more about this topic?  

Operational leaders from across Canada’s industrial sector will be coming together to discuss planning for the operational impacts of decarbonization at Operational Excellence in Energy, Chemicals & Resources Summit in Calgary this June. Now in its 10th year, the summit brings together over 200 senior level executives to share use cases and showcase trailblazing technologies that will transform your operations. Download the event agenda for more information.