Viewpoints

The Christmas Kettle collection may be the best-known image of the Salvation Army. Nearly everyone has seen such a kettle and many have dropped some coins into it before Christmas.

Salvation Army Captain Joseph McFee, who placed a kettle on a tripod at the San Francisco port back in 1891 and started to collect food for hungry sailors, could not have guessed that his invention would become world famous – one of the best-known brands worldwide. As an innovation, the kettle has retained its strength, and this year again, innumerable Christmas kettles across the world will bring Christmas joy to those who live in poverty. This proves how a small individual action can have far-reaching consequences.

Christmas Kettles came to Finland in 1906 and the Salvation Army’s kettle collection has provided joy to Finnish homes ever since. In 1998, traditional outdoor kettles were complemented with a website raising funds online. This year activities expand again when unmanned kettles are placed in K-citymarkets and VR State Railways’ ticket offices across Finland.

Eija Kornilow

Help from the Finns

The Christmas Kettle collection has been well received by the Finns and so we can help thousands of people with food vouchers, mental support, advice and other activities that provide support in their daily lives. Last Christmas we helped 7,600 households. Collection proceeds also enable us to continue providing support long after Christmas, which means that the total number of beneficiaries will be much larger. Donations also help us organize various camps and events for children and families throughout the year.

Bearing responsibility together

Our cooperation with Kesko started last year. The kettles in K-stores and K-citymarkets collect aid to low-income people also this Christmas. Our partners provide us with important support in this work.

The Salvation Army has a Christian background; we carry other people’s burdens and help those in distress. We all belong to one family of humanity and are responsible for each other. Together we can do more than alone; therefore we are grateful to our every donor and partner.

Our world needs new innovations to spread the good. Anyone of us can be a new Joseph McFee who discovers a new way of doing good and helping one’s neighbours. Let your imagination fly and consider what you could do. The good you do to others is good you do yourself. Helping will give you strength and joy. It will leave an unforgettable imprint.

Merry Christmas!

Eija Kornilow
Head for Communications
Finnish Salvation Army

Corporate responsibility, social responsibility or sustainability - a dear child has many names. Corporate responsibility and the related objective of transparency has become an established part of large and medium-sized companies’ business. A corporate responsibility report is one of the most significant means of describing the impacts of a company on the environment, society, economy and increasing transparency in the company’s administration.

Reporting provides companies and their stakeholders, such as investors and consumers, with information about the positive and negative environmental and social impacts. Reporting, collecting data and figures is, however, not sufficient. It’s important what figures and information the company publishes, what themes its responsibility report covers and how it describes its challenges and even failures. Transparency and concrete actions to mitigate negative impacts are an essential part of high quality reporting.

Corporate responsibility reporting is a process whose value is much higher than the annual publication of a report. The reporting process provides the company with valuable information about where its challenges and opportunities lie and what to pay attention to from the viewpoint of risk management. Significant information includes, for example, the risk of child or forced labour or other human rights issues in the company’s operations or subcontractor chain.

Information collected during the reporting process also provides precious data to the company management and board of directors, and a smart company embeds responsibility in the purchasing chain, strategic planning, remuneration systems, and board discussions.

Global Reporting Initiative publishes the responsibility reporting guidelines which are the most widely used across the world. The new G4 version of the guidelines places an emphasis on defining the major impacts of operations together with stakeholders and reporting on them. The guidelines also include reporting on the impacts of the subcontractor chain, which may be challenging but very material when studying the social and environmental impacts of retail trade, for example. Since 1997, GRI has also provided indicators for climate change and greenhouse emissions.  

The author Tuulia Syvänen is Chief of Staff at Global Reporting Initiative GRI. Further information available at www.globalreporting.org .

Kesko’s Corporate Responsibility Report has been prepared in line with the G4 guidelines.

The Rehabilitation Foundation and Kesko are implementing a joint project for supporting working ability and learning at the beginning of career. One of its aims is to identify learning difficulties and increase awareness of them.

The project ran a questionnaire among young employees. Its results show that learning difficulties are more common than usual in the trading sector and warehouse work. The most common learning difficulty is dyslexia.

For many young people, the trading sector and warehouse work provide jobs that enable learning at work. Compared with school, working life offers better possibilities to exploit one’s own strengths, which, in case of dyslexia, include big-picture thinking, good manual skills, diligence at work and good social skills. It is also argued that there are lots of dyslexics among entrepreneurs.

Learning difficulties and the ways in which people tackle them are often different between different individuals. For Finnish dyslexic adults, foreign language skills are the biggest problem. They read slowly and especially men can have difficulties in writing. Problems of memory and concentration are also common. Some Finnish adults have problems with basic reading. Sometimes the reason for an employee’s reluctance to participate in training or to take on assignments involving reading and writing is a learning difficulty.

More often than not, learning difficulties are not disclosed at the workplace or to the supervisor, because they are not thought to affect work performance, or employees prefer to hide them. Moreover, there are lots of young people and adults whose learning difficulties have not been identified at school.

The project workshops have discussed how learning difficulties are taken into account in working life. Paying attention to youths’ working ability provides a basis for the whole of their careers.

It is important to take learning difficulties into account in communications and apprenticeship arrangements. The Occupational Health Care Service can arrange a private discussion on learning difficulties and their possible effects on work performance. Training and career alternatives and the promotion of working ability and learning can be discussed in performance and development reviews. It would also be useful to think about the core content of our work.

Kesko has paid good attention to the induction of new employees and discussions about matters related to working ability. In this project, these matters are discussed with regard to learning difficulties. Does the employee have the possibility to repeat training? Are instructions clear? How can learning difficulties affect the ability to work?

In a good working community, employees can make use of their own strengths. A tolerant atmosphere, seeing details as part of the big picture and learning one new thing at a time over a longer period of time will make learning easier. Paying attention to problematic areas in communication and learning and the career as a whole will benefit all employees.

The writer Johanna Korkeamäki is a researcher at the Rehabilitation Foundation.

The project for supporting working ability and learning at the beginning of career is run from 2013 through 2015. The main financier is the Finnish Work Environment Fund.

Integrated reporting has been widely discussed recently. It gives companies new opportunities to develop corporate reporting. The aim is to provide a better overall picture of the company’s ability to create value and combine all information that is material in this respect.

Companies have drawn up a great number of different reports in recent years and their complexity and extent have increased continuously. The aim of integrated reporting is to sum up the material elements and reduce the amount of fragmented data. It does not, however, eliminate compulsory reporting but links together the most important data from various types of reporting.

Reporting has traditionally presented a review of the company’s past operations whereas integrated reporting also keeps an eye on the future. The aim is to help investors, in particular, but also other stakeholders to form a better overall picture of the company’s operations and its ability to create value at different time spans as well as of the factors contributing to value creation. 

Compared to the current practice, integrated reporting provides a more exacting description of the company’s business model, strategy, earnings logic, risks, objectives and progress realized in relation to its ability to create value. In addition to financial data, information is also needed about immaterial factors and the impact of corporate responsibility on business. The starting point for all this is integrated thinking in operating practices, management and business.

Globally, integrated reporting is just taking the first steps. The new model has been developed as a multinational project by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC). Last December, the IIRC published the <IR> Framework, which presents the fundamental concepts of integrated reporting and assists with the implementation.

The starting point of the <IR> Framework is to observe the factors that affect value creation in a ‘big picture’. The company creates value through its operations, but factors contributing to value creation also include the financial, social, technical and environmental circumstances in the company’s operating environment, its interaction and cooperation with customers, employees, suppliers, local communities and business partners as well as the availability, price, quality and management of various resources. These factors are summed up in the company’s business model and its description. The <IR> framework enables the company to seize and sum up the complex value creation process with all the factors involved.

Mikael Niskala is a corporate responsibility professional and Senior Adviser at Mitopro Oy.

The Crowded Years Initiative^TM of Attorneys at Law Borenius; the telecommunications company DNA’s open-plan office model; Kesko’s projects Many Kinds of Performers and Let’s Talk about Work; Lassila & Tikanoja’s multicultural working community application; and the Family Federation of Finland’s advocacy of family-friendly workplaces are concrete examples of the Diversity Charter Finland’s encouraging initiatives. The charter launched by FIBS in 2012 currently includes 35 forerunner operators, which employ hundreds of thousands of people and the growth continues.

In Finland, we have traditionally thought that we are a very homogeneous nation with same kind of services selling well from the south to the east of the country. This idea has been challenged by changes resulting from the emergence of different generations of consumers on one hand and the different services demanded by foreign customer groups on the other.

In recent years, to the annoyance of biologists, the mobile business has adopted their traditional concept of ecosystem when referring to a community of different actors in which new, innovative combination of components takes place. The basic notion of a flourishing ecosystem is diversity, in which diversity generates new energy. In fact, this was also called for in the negotiations for a new Finnish government, in other words, boosting economic growth by doing things in new and better ways.

Businesses too should recognise that there are huge numbers of different people and needs among buyers as well as sellers. The diversity of the business world is a fundamental element in corporate responsibility and it is acknowledged by many of the forerunner companies. The Sustainability in Finland 2014 survey by Corporate Responsibility Network FIBS interviewed 200 business leaders, and its results revealed that labour practices and diversity management have become the third most important CR theme.

Diversity management aims for companies to employ sufficiently different people, including the composition of the top management. This has been seen to improve the efficiency, atmosphere and productivity of the company. Equal opportunities for career progress generate an enormous amount of positive energy at every level. In practice, this means recruitment, management path planning, flexible working hours, providing employment for the young and age conscious management. The most immediate benefits are seen in customer work when, for example, employees with language and cultural skills are used in customer service.

Even today in Finland, there are shortages of employees and competent personnel while at the same time, not all qualified people are given the opportunity to advance to appropriate positions on the grounds of gender or some other reason. The EU also promotes non-discrimination with the help of gender quotas and reporting on personnel diversity. The Finnish Non-Discrimination Act obviously has the same objective.

We have seen that many companies and industries themselves have succeeded in improving their internal atmosphere and external reputation by means of good diversity management. It is more sustainable than compliance with directives. Retailing, an industry that encounters consumers on a day-to-day basis, has taken part in various projects and pilots.

The Diversity Charter Finland, launched by FIBS in 2012, currently includes 35 forerunner operators which employ hundreds of thousands of people and the growth continues. The willingness to change things is manifested externally in the Charter signed by the managing director, which shows that the management takes the matter seriously. The Charter signatories take part in the Working Life 2020 project aimed to raise the quality of Finnish working life to be the best in Europe by 2020.

Doesn’t this sound worth joining?

Further information: http://www.fibsry.fi/fi/english/themes/diversity-charter-finland

The writer, Mikko Routti, is the Executive Director of Corporate Responsibility Network FIBS.

I am a 20-year-old young man from Espoo and work at Ruoholahti Intersport in Helsinki. After passing the matriculation examination in 2013, I completed military service of six months. I plan to begin my vocational studies in the next few years, but I’m not yet completely sure of the field.

As I was unemployed for five months only, the period mainly felt relaxing and liberating after the hard work at school and the military service. I visited the Employment and Economic Development Centre a few times during these months, but got no actual support from there.

When I started looking for a job, my main wish was to find something to do with sports. Still, my search covered many sectors of retailing: I applied for nearly 20 different jobs before succeeding. I didn’t lose heart, however, but continued with an optimistic mind.

I was given a Sanssi card, which proved useful at an interview for this job at Intersport Ruoholahti. The outcome was a sudden and pleasant surprise. I had emailed my CV to some employers just the day before and now I was asked to come for a job interview. I agreed to come the following week and felt really excited.

At the interview I was naturally a little nervous and so perhaps not quite myself. The interview was relatively short, but I think the questions were all relevant, about my background and the duties of a shop assistant, for example.

Now I work part time and for a trial period of four months. My duties include sales, customer service and goods handling. I feel that the job is exactly right for me - I’m service-oriented and the atmosphere in the store is great. Every day there is motivating, thanks to customers and my workmates.

Working for Intersport is close to my heart, as I’m keen on various sports. I do this much out of interest, not out of necessity. Finding the right products for customers makes me as happy as them.

Now I want to work, which means that I’m putting off my study plans a bit.

What I want to say to other young people is that it pays to just be yourself and keep trying, even if you may not find a suitable job right away. However, energy and a certain type of modesty are qualities that help when looking for a job, as an ability to adapt to different duties is important at many workplaces.

For myself, scanty work experience was no obstacle to getting an interesting job; I believe that my positive attitude and that I really wanted to have this job were decisive.

Writer Joni Yliviitala works for Intersport Ruoholahti in Helsinki.

The United States have a long tradition of ‘Buy American’ thinking. As part of its huge New Deal revival package in the 1930’s, the Roosevelt government launched a ’Buy American’ programme in 1933 to guide public purchasing. The programme is still in effect today and it has since been complemented with other programmes favouring domestic products.

The updated nutrition recommendations were published in January 2014. The previous recommendations were from 2005, so it was indeed time to update the recommendations based on new research data. The main work was done by a Nordic expert group that organised a careful review of latest scientific evidence by some 150 experts. The assessment of scientific evidence was based on international criteria. The Nordic recommendations, on which the Finnish recommendations are based, were published in late 2013.

There have been claims in the public discussion that the youth guarantee entered in the government platform is not happening in practice. It seems that there are more critics than unemployed job applicants. But as we know, a positive and open-minded attitude and team spirit are keys to change and a good end result. The K-Group has been like the leader in a wedge of cranes, showing sceptics that the youth guarantee and employing young people do work in practice.

Some time ago, I met Adrien Kouadion, a cocoa farmer living in Ivory Coast. He is quite a delightful person, a passionate football player who wanted to become a farmer like his father. It was love at first sight when he met his wife; he constantly delights his community through his positive attitude and enjoys time with his family. Via YouTube, you and thousands of others have a chance to meet Adrien and let his sparkling good humour and contagious smile cheer you up.

In Finland, there is a discussion about what to do with textiles and clothing that are no longer used. EU will also take up the issue when it starts reassessing waste legislation in the course of next year, and the focus will probably be on textile waste again.