This is all good news: It signals that resource efficiency, social responsibility, good governance, respect for community, stewardship of our environment and the need for resiliency in the face of climate change are moving into the mainstream of business, education and economic planning.

Sustainability, whether broadly or narrowly defined, is making its way into the corner office, either by invitation or slowly (sometimes abruptly) pushing open the door. It’s a business issue, increasingly tracked, measured and acted on beyond the silos of corporate social responsibility departments.

Momentum is building. We can all feel it.

For most of the last decade, Corporate Knights complemented its print magazine with its own online voice at corporateknights.com. It has served as a dependable archive for the thousands of articles, reports, and charts we have produced over the years, and has given our readers a strong sense of who we are and what we do.

But we – as a media operation founded and designed around a respected quarterly print publication – have since outgrown that online skin. The pace of industry has picked up. It became clear that so must we, by using our online voice more effectively and frequently, and adding unique perspective and value to a vibrant global discussion.

To that end, we are proud to announce the official launch of our new website redesign, which is now a daily source of news and analysis that supports our collective mission: using information to empower markets that, in turn, can make the world a better place.

This initiate was made possible only with the financial support of the Ontario Media Development Corporation. Another partner on this mission has been Toronto-based Top Drawer Creative, selected after an extensive search for a web developer that could turn our online vision into a reality. It has proved a winning relationship.

Top Drawer and its 40 full-time staff share our values as an organization. This past April, it became a certified B Corp – a designation earned by Corporate Knights in October 2012.

This makes us part of a community of more than 1,100 businesses that are committed to rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability and transparency. We both see B Corp certification as a natural extension of how we have always operated, and what we stand for.

Top Drawer has been around for 22 years, and is one of the few agencies in Canada that delivers it all under one roof – media, creative, interactive, photography and TV production. One of its strengths is that it has established a 2,000-member consumer panel which it can regularly poll for insights into product and service development.

Just as important for us is that they “got it” – they understood our market and readership, and quickly identified our strengths. Working closely with our art and editorial staff, they captured what we wanted to achieve and executed as expected. No surprises, and pleasant to work with.

The feeling was apparently mutual. “As a triple bottom line company, we place the highest priority on the quality of our relationships. That means we put ‘fit’ before everything else,” said Howard Chang, founder and president of Top Drawer. “This project was a perfect collaboration between the technical and creative expertise of our team and the strategic leadership of Corporate Knights.”

The result is a full-featured, eye-grabbing site, updated daily and packed with articles arranged under more than a dozen sustainability themes or “Channels” – from Built Environment to Utilities & Energy – each of which allows readers to subscribe to regular e-mail updates.

Our Perspectives section delivers Q&As, book reviews, guest commentaries and regular columns, while our Reports section makes it effortless to find our research and popular rankings. Go to the Multimedia tab when we activate it later this fall and you’ll find insightful infographics, stunning images, thoughtful podcasts and videos.

We’ve also made it easier to purchase Corporate Knights, whether your preference is print, digital, annual subscription or single issue. And if you have a favourite writer you’d like to follow, regular contributors will now have their own landing page.

On a final note, through Channel sponsorships we have created an opportunity for advertisers to associate themselves with specific themes and make use of a spot reserved for sponsored content. Here, they can highlight their own sustainability initiatives or the issues that matter to them.

It’s obvious to us, but be assured this sponsored content will be clearly marked to distinguish it from the independent content our writing staff and freelancers produce.

We would like to welcome the following Channel sponsors at the time of launch: Teck Resources (mining), Ecolab (water), Canada Newswire (responsible investing) and ABB (utilities & energy). The Canadian Society of Safety Engineering and the Center for Safety and Health Sustainability are co-sponsoring our workplace channel.

We’re excited about this new phase in our development and, as always, encourage your feedback.

The post Welcome to our new online home appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The other much anticipated event that is the advent of integrated reporting (IR). Spearheaded in late 2011 by the International Integrated Reporting Council (IIRC), a coalition of the accountancy profession, investors, businesses and regulators, IR is a process that results in communication about how an organization’s strategy, governance, performance and prospects lead to the creation of value over the short, medium and long term. Dubbed the “next step in the evolution of corporate reporting”, it is a holistic view of a reporting entity’s performance, risks and opportunities pertaining to six categories of “capitals”: financial, manufactured, human, intellectual, natural and social. The IIRC is set to release its first version of the Integrated Reporting Framework in December 2013, which is already stirring significant interest.

Since 2009, an increasing number of companies have published what can be loosely labelled as an “integrated report”. Perhaps the most notable step towards IR to date has been the adoption of mandatory integrated reporting requirements by the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 2010 as a listing requirement. In Australia and the Netherlands, various studies and surveys have been published on the rate of adoption of IR by publicly-listed companies since early 2010. In our 2013 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations ranking, 18 companies published an integrated report.

In a prototype version of the IR framework released in November 2012, one of the four objectives of IR is to “inform resource allocation by providers of financial capital that supports long term, as well as short and medium term, value creation”. This commitment to inform investment decision-making has deep implications for Corporate Knights, and in particular its flagship Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations Ranking (Global 100). Since its inception in 2005, the Global 100 has sought to identify the 100 leaders in terms of social, environmental, governance and financial performance. Indeed, as at 31 December 2012, the Global 100 companies have outperformed the MSCI All-Country World Index by 9.5% on a cumulative basis since 2005 (see figure 1).

A widespread adoption of IR will present significant opportunities for Corporate Knights’ Global 100 methodology. Over the years, Corporate Knights has brought a number of improvements to its Global 100 ranking methodology to better reflect changes in disclosure practices creating indicators that distinguish companies that are susceptible to long-term environmental, social and financial performance. It is interesting to note that the methodology employed for the Global 100 as it stands today shares a number of interesting similarities with some of the reporting requirements under the prototype IR framework introduced earlier.

As stipulated above, the IR framework is primarily geared towards responding to investor information requirement. THe similarity in some of the Global 100’s key performance indicators and the IR framework’s standards may imply that the Global 100 is well-equipped to assess companies for capital allocation decisions. IR is still an evolving concept and its implementation in South Africa is a source of learning opportunities; Corporate Knights will follow these developments closely.

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CK: Why did Bell take on this issue?

DEACON: Because of the stigma around mental health and illness, it’s an area that hasn’t been championed in a significant way. The objective for us is to really raise the awareness, get people talking and hopefully, in doing so, make a difference in the lives of people because of the investments we are making in an area that is grossly underfunded. Given the business we’re in and the strength of the Bell brand, we can use that heft to get the conversation going, change attitudes, reduce stigma and, of course, lead by example in terms of our own workplace. It’s imperative to do that. It was the right thing to do.

CK: How significant is the impact of mental illness on workplace productivity?

DEACON: The stats are that mental health issues account for 30 per cent of short-term disability claims and 70 per cent of the costs.

CK: Why the disproportionately high costs?

DEACON: Typically the absence rates are longer, and there is a greater proportion of people who go off on short-term leave for mental health problems and end up on long-term disability. There’s a lot of evidence that shows that the isolation that comes when you’re on disability, and the things that lead to good mental health – like connections with other people, meaning in life, etc. – can be lost when you’re on disability. There’s a greater sense of isolation, and that can exacerbate the condition and lead to even longer absence. The research shows that the longer you’re off, the less likely you are to come back.

CK: And what of those people who don’t leave and try to struggle through it?

DEACON: There’s this other thing called presenteeism. It’s this notion of people being at work, but not being well. Canadians with depression report that they function at work at 62 per cent of capacity. So people with depression who are at work are claiming they are definitely not working up to snuff. But generally I describe people from four points of view: they’re well at work, they’re not well at work, they’re sick and off work, and they’re returning to work. You want to have programs around all four, because certainly it’s better for the company and the individual that if they’re well they stay well, or if they’re not well they get better before they need to go off.

CK: What kind of stresses at work can lead to mental health problems?

DEACON: There’s workload, deadlines, feeling undervalued, and lack of job satisfaction. The issue of control – the ability to have control over your work day – is an important one. So, too, is the idea of having to take on other people’s work, or shoulder more. Organizational culture is an important factor. People can be stressed when it’s not clear what’s expected of them. And then there’s the whole area of civility and respect, bullying, all that. But being stressed doesn’t mean you’re mentally ill.

CK: Does a company’s reputation – good or bad – have an impact on mental health? If an employer is viewed as an environmental laggard or is always being negatively portrayed in the media for being a bad apple, can this trigger stresses that can contribute to anxiety, depression or other conditions?

DEACON: I haven’t seen any literature that specifically talks about that, but if you work for a company either perceived to be one of the bad guys, or in fact is one of the bad guys – I would view tobacco companies that way – it would have an impact on how you would feel about the company and your sense of pride in your company, work, and what you’re contributing. We take home a paycheque, but what other psychic values do you get from your work? If you work for a company that does good or is perceived to be good, you’re going to take home some “feel good” points for doing something important and worthwhile. So it seems logical to me that the opposite would be true.

CK: An emerging area of study around mental health relates to the general anxiety felt about the state of the world. Issues such as climate change, environmental degradation, economic turmoil and social injustice – all of these at a macro-level can affect the mental health of the general population, and the Occupy movement may be one expression of this. Would you say that can be exacerbated in the workplace if an employer is perceived as being part of the problem?

DEACON: Definitely against the backdrop of the difficult economy, the fact that Mother Nature keeps reminding us who’s really in charge, and the role we have as humans in our environment and the health of our planet – fresh water, air to breathe, and all that stuff – that creates a level of underlying anxiety. It’s kind of like a layer cake. That is a layer, and you have other life problems – financial problems, death, divorce. Then you talk about working for a company you’re not proud of in terms of its contribution. These all layer on to create an even greater climate for stress. Is it worse now than when I was younger? I don’t know. What I love generally about people is that, in spite of everything, they still have children, they get married and they buy houses, and they love life, in the face of all this stuff.

CK: Of course, some people are better at coping with these stresses than others.

DEACON: There’s a homeless man that lives at the end of my street. He seems to sleep in the bank at the corner. He’s lived on my street as long as I have, which is about 10 years. Such resilience he shows. He’s part of the community – everybody gives him clothes and water. He is who he is. He seems content with his life. But, boy, it speaks to the resilience of humanity.

CK: Presumably, employers that help their employees be more resilient on an individual level benefit at the corporate level. Is this an uncharted path for employers?

DEACON: When we started the initiative and agreed right from the get-go that leading by example in the workplace had to be one of (our objectives), I thought I’d just go to the shelf and get ‘that book’ on how to implement mental health practices in the workplace. And it didn’t exist. So for those companies that want to do not only the right thing but a good thing and a beneficial thing for the corporation, the roadmap is not clear. There’s been a lot of work done in the last couple of years to help create a voluntary national standard for psychological health and safety in the workplace, which I’m encouraged about. Will it be perfect? No. But it will have brought together all of the interested stakeholders with all of the diverse perspectives they have – whether it’s labour, big business, small business, public and private, academic – to create a framework that will provide for the first time a bit of a consensus.

CK: Curious, since mental health can affect workplace productivity and company performance so much, and on a broad scale has an impact on the economy, should we be factoring the mental health of nations into GDP?

DEACON: That’s an interesting question. The argument that’s been made for years is that if you have a healthy and psychologically safe workplace, then your disability numbers will come down so it will have an impact on GDP. The relapse rate will come down. The argument that’s been made over the years is that if you get it right it actually will impact your bottom line. From my perspective, I’m okay and happy with that positioning as being part of being good for business, because I believe it’s true, and I believe it will make it more likely that companies will do the things they need to do in order to create that environment. That’s because the payoff will be there in the end.

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