The ESG Compliance Podcast Tom Fox

Page Motes joins us today with her expertise in sales and compliance. She shares how tech giant Dell is working on ESG compliance, the transferable skills compliance professionals must have to advance, the significance of multi-disciplinary learning, and how customers can contribute to this by making a more significant social impact.
▶️ The Role of Digital Solutions in ESG with Page Motes:
Key points discussed in the episode:
(00:00:36) Page Motes lays out her professional background. She describes the fast-paced culture and vendors’ often-overlooked concerns in large companies. Since then, she has sworn to only be in a position to “use my talents to help advance goodness in the world.”
(00:11:13) Page Motes defines ESG in Dell as “all things environmental and then an aspect of the human rights piece.” She underlines the three most important skills for compliance professionals: knowing how to deal with ambiguity, being an ultimate connector, and exerting authority.
(00:14:37) Her message to compliance professionals hesitant to move into ESG: have the desire to learn different disciplines.
(00:17:30) Dell aims to deepen and broaden gathered data across its supply chain to disclose information based on government requirements properly. Some Scope Three categories remain difficult to report.
(00:19:49) ESG results brought Dell to create Eureka, a crowdsourcing tool for employees to share their ideas with higher-ups and have them kickstarted.
(00:23:58) The different corporate functions in Dell’s sustainability efforts.
(00:25:58) Page Motes predictions for Dell’s ESG endeavors – more customer involvement and collaboration.
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Mandi McReynolds, the Global Head of ESG in Workiva, joins the show to discuss how tech solutions have made ESG reporting easier, what organizations should consider before investing in tech, the significance of putting stakeholders at top priority, and the future of tech in ESG.

 ▶️ Simplifying ESG with Thomas Fox & Mandi McReynolds:

Key points discussed in the episode:

✔️ Mandi McReynolds emphasizes the importance of communicating with your stakeholders to identify your company’s societal and business values. Stakeholders consist of internal, external, and customers.

✔️ Mandi McReynolds describes how Workiva simplifies the ESG reporting process.

✔️ Internal controls are the backbone of an effective ESG program. In order to create processes that stakeholders can trust, have different subject matter experts to add value to the discussion.

✔️ Look at the business value drivers and societal impact value drivers of your ESG plan. Before investing in tech and talent, identify your strategic value in terms of materiality assessment and assessment engagement.

✔️ Bring a holistic picture of what your stakeholders care about as it relates to ESG.

✔️ How financial value has always been intrinsically linked to ESG reporting.

✔️ Find the balance between achieving your ESG commitments and not burning dollars in the process.

✔️ Mandi McReynolds gives her predictions on the future of the technological component of ESG.

Mandi McReynolds is an award-winning author, educator, and practitioner-scholar. She has spent her career building corporate responsibility and environmental, social, and governance divisions across four different industries. Mandi serves as the Senior Director, Environment, Social, and Governance at Workiva. McReynolds is the co-editor and co-author of the book Diving Deep in Community Engagement: A Model for Professional Development. She received her B.A. in Organizational Communications from Cedarville University and M.S. in Interdisciplinary Studies: Speech Communication, Women Studies, and Higher Education from Iowa State University. She enjoys swimming and playing volleyball with her daughter, Ava, and traveling with her husband, Adam.

Resources
Learn more about Workiva - ESG reporting made simple - https://www.workiva.com/.
Mandi McReynolds on LinkedIn
ESG Talk Podcast
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Vault Platform CCO Tori Reichman joins the show to discuss how employers should embrace their employees’ expectations, use tech solutions to report misconduct, value ethics and mission alignment more than ever before, and what companies should do to retain top talent.

 ▶️ Supporting the S in ESG through Tech Solutions with Tori Reichman:

Key points discussed in the episode:

✔️ Tori Reichman explains her interpretation of the S in ESG.

✔️ The role of ethics and ESG implementation in a company's culture. Employees are encouraged to report misconduct so cases can undergo evaluation and investigation.

✔️ Tech solutions help businesses have a more precise grasp on their ethical health. Having data all in one place takes away all the extra work.

✔️ Companies are now held to a higher standard due to employees being more vocal when their practices are considered unethical or go against their morals.

✔️ While millennials and Gen Z-ers are more comfortable leaving jobs for greener pastures, baby boomers and Gen X-ers prefer to stay longer. However, both choose employment in companies that align with their values and beliefs.

✔️ The Great Resignation resulted from employees realizing they disagreed with their workplace’s culture and mission. As time passed, workers shifted to a more realistic approach in selecting their employment.

✔️ When companies are true to their vision and mission, this encourages employees to stay longer. The interest to evolve and implement ESG platforms has reached organizational levels that have never been seen before.

✔️ How a business interacts internally attracts new talent. Modern employees consider things beyond the 8 hours when working for you.

Tori Reichman is a Founding Team Member and Chief Customer Officer in Vault Platform, where the vision is a world in which workplaces are inclusive, safe, and diverse. Vault’s mission is to provide companies with the world-class ethics and compliance tools they need, delighting them with innovative, simple, intuitive, and empathetic technology and surprising them with unrivaled customer support to help them achieve their goals.
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Lawrence Heim joins the podcast to discuss PracticalESG, the CCRcorp-run blog working to provide ESG information in bite-sized pieces, SEC’s proposed framework and its contents, the processes of regularizing standards, and what organizations must do to ensure accurate tracking and reporting.

 ▶️ Practical ESG with Lawrence Heim:

Key points discussed in the episode:

✔️ Practical ESG receives tons of positive feedback and aims to cut through the fluff and marketing.

✔️ With an expert advisory board, PracticalESG has had in-depth contributions on climate issues, investor perspectives, corporate culture, and how they all relate to a successful ESG program.

✔️ Just recently, the ISSB has made public a new multi-jurisdictional working group of regulatory agencies in the accounting and securities arenas for a number of countries.

✔️ Convergence is the process of establishing standards as regulatory. When IFRS adopts a standard, it isn’t automatically established as regulatory. Countries must go through legal and administrative processes to make them enforceable. FASB is responsible for this function in US jurisdiction.

✔️ The SEC’s proposed framework has three scopes: direct emissions, third-party emissions, and supply chain emissions.

✔️ Lawrence Heim notes a potential misunderstanding in the SEC proposal: CO2 emissions reporting by companies to EPA is limited to operations that emit 25,000 tons of CO2 annually – either directly from their locations or as a result of third-party combustion of the products manufactured (such as gasoline). EPA’s CO2 emissions reporting will not ease the proposed SEC emissions calculation burden for companies that are below the EPA threshold.

✔️ Manage and track responses to information requests in your organization. With receptionists, monitor how they reply to more technical questions and equip them with the right tools and know-how.

Lawrence Heim is the Editor of CCRCorp’s ESG platform, PracticalESG.com, where he shares insights based on over 35 years of supporting companies in environmental, health & safety compliance and management. He’s led various types of non-financial audits, designed corrective action programs and helped implement sustainability programs. He spent nearly a decade in-house at a Fortune 150 manufacturer and went on to help create the Global Environmental Risk Consulting Practice at Marsh USA. Later, Lawrence founded & led the Sustainability practice at Elm Consulting Group, and most recently, he led the development of supply chain due diligence standards at the Responsible Business Alliance/Responsible Minerals Initiative. When the SEC’s conflict minerals rules were under consideration, Lawrence was the only non-financial auditor selected to give testimony to the Commission. In 2018, he published the book “Killing Sustainability.” Lawrence also sits on the board of ASSET, a non-profit anti-slavery organization.
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Attorneys and professors in law David Snyder and Sarah Dadush join the podcast to discuss the role of contracting in ESG, how a conventional approach to writing contracts may not be the best choice, which issues are fixed, and how accountability should be on both the buyer and supplier.

 ▶️ Contracting for ESG with David Snyder and Sarah Dadush:

Key points discussed in the episode:

✔️ Supply chains are doing enough for ESG compliance. David Snyder and Sarah Dadush aim to combat this with more effective measures.

✔️ Policies remain unimplemented if they aren’t in the contract. Having a supplier code of conduct written with the assistance of a business lawyer isn’t enough to create change.

✔️ Working at an oil refinery helped David Snyder learn the true culprit – organized crime. He wanted human and environmental efforts to be treated the same way as product manufacturing.

✔️ ESG can impact both consumer and investor decisions. The California Supply Chains Transparency Act pushed for full disclosure directed at the customers. 

✔️ Focusing only on forced labor leaves out other problems.

✔️ Traditional approaches to contracting ESG don’t work, Sarah Dadush says. Not only does it aggravate human rights risks but also increases the company’s chances of legal violations.

✔️ David Snyder emphasizes the importance of risk as part of supply chain management and compliance obligations. Lawyers should also play their part in handling clients properly instead of resorting to risk shifting.

✔️ Contracts don’t fix all supply chain issues. It all boils down to supply chain resilience. A weaker foundation puts companies in greater danger, especially in times of difficulty like the COVID-19 pandemic.

✔️ Buyers should be responsible when exiting contracts. Contracts have been misused at the height of the pandemic, and consumers are now urging businesses to be accountable for their shortcomings.

David Snyder was appointed professor of law at the American University Washington College of Law in the fall of 2007 and was appointed director of the Business Law Program in 2008. During 2021-2022, he also holds a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship at the European University Institute (Florence). He graduated summa cum laude from Tulane University Law School in 1991, and he has been a professor of law at Tulane, Indiana (Bloomington), and Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. He has been a regular visiting professor at the law school of the University of Paris II (Panthéon-Assas) since 2012, and has also been a visiting professor at the University of Paris 10 (Nanterre La Défense), Boston University, and the College of William and Mary. In addition, he has taught summer courses at the University of Mainz (Germany). After graduating from law school, Professor Snyder served as a law clerk to the Honorable John M. Duhé Jr. of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and subsequently joined the D.C. firm of Hogan & Hartson (now Hogan Lovells). In 2014 Professor Snyder was awarded a MacCormick Fellowship during which he delivered the annual Wilson Memorial Lecture at the University of Edinburgh.

Sarah Dadush’s research lies at the intersection of business and human rights. Her scholarship explores various innovative legal mechanisms for improving the social and environmental performance of multinational corporations. She directs the Law School's newly-established Business & Human Rights Law Program and co-leads an ABA Business Law Section Working Group that has developed a comprehensive toolkit for upgrading international supply contracts to better protect workers’ human rights.

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Do you have a podcast (or do you want to)? Join the only network dedicated to compliance, risk management, and business ethics, the Compliance Podcast Network. For more information, contact Tom Fox at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.

Assent Compliance’s Travis Miller and Jared Connors join us as they discuss their work in conflict minerals supply chains, how ESG compliance plays a role, what companies should do to interpret data and increase efficiency and recovery, and the future of risk management.

 ▶️ ESG Supply Chain Compliance with Travis Miller and Jared Connors:

Key points discussed in the episode:

✔️ Companies are starting to realize the significance of making a commitment to ESG through responsible sourcing.

✔️ Outsourcing usually occurs in the most regulated, most dangerous, and least profitable businesses. 

✔️ Business continuity planning is crucial in risk management, more flexible disaster response, and efficient operations. Aside from environmental and social, risk is also a financial concern.

✔️ The most important letter of ESG is P – product, people, and policies. Middle-aged workers are the most vulnerable and highly targeted in inhumane business practices and violations.

✔️ Dig deeper into organizations and understand their commitments to mitigate and prepare for risk. 

✔️ Non-financial risks are pressuring investor disclosures.

✔️ ESG is reorienting the global market and the world. Large-scale environmental and social scandals ruin reputation and business.

✔️ Educating the supply chain contributes to overall company efficiency and risk management.

✔️ Compliance toolkits should be utilized even outside the company. The legal space has become the ideal practice ground for compliance.

✔️ Companies should be proactive in detecting supply chain issues internally.

✔️ Translate technical speak to an executive language to gain interest from the C-level suite.

✔️ Assess supply chain maturity.

✔️Companies are now compelled to make a change due to their global influence. Consumers’ cries for environmental and social accountability are now heard – all thanks to social media.

Jared Connors is a senior subject matter expert on Corporate Social Responsibility at Assent Compliance, the worlds’ leader in supply chain data management.

His expertise involves achieving ESG goals by understanding and mitigating potential supply chain risk, the transition from CSR to ESG, how companies can take a holistic approach to ESG, and ESG-related regulations, such as those pertaining to human trafficking and slavery, conflict minerals, and anti-bribery, anti-corruption.

Travis Miller is an international trade and compliance attorney who specializes in ITAR/EAR/sanctions, global anti-corruption and anti-slavery, codes of conduct, environmental health and safety, product stewardship, and corporate social responsibility.

He manages Assent’s worldwide legal activities, advises the Board of Directors on legal matters, and oversees corporate compliance, governance initiatives, and other commercial transactions. Before coming to Assent, he served in various high-level counsel positions with companies such as Microchip Technology, Foresite Group, and St. Jude Medical.

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Do you have a podcast (or do you want to)? Join the only network dedicated to compliance, risk management, and business ethics, the Compliance Podcast Network. For more information, contact Tom Fox at tfox@tfoxlaw.com.