Sustainability Transformation does not end at environmental issues. A company’s social footprint is just as important as its carbon footprint, and should never be an afterthought. With organisations increasingly expected to take a position on issues such as human rights, gender equality and diversity and inclusion, leaders must ensure that their sustainability strategies consider people as much as planet.
So what is the social pillar of sustainability — the ‘S’ in ESG — and why is it often overlooked?
In this interview, Hannah Stubbings, senior editor at FT Longitude, talks to Melanie Kubin-Hardewig, vice president of group corporate responsibility at Deutsche Telekom, about how companies should be addressing their impact on society.
Conversation highlights
Why social responsibility goes hand in hand with sustainability
“We know that overcoming all these big challenges ahead of us on environment, on social divide, on anti-democratic tendencies in our societies, we have to come together. It requires a cohesive approach. It requires working together. And you're back again in the middle of driving social initiatives because this is also what social initiatives are about — bringing people together.”
Why Deutsche Telekom is taking a stand against online hate speech
“We do have a CEO who has a view, and he clearly said, ‘I will raise my voice. I will say something about this.’ So we just dared to. We felt it's time to say something on a topic, a technology topic, a development that goes in the wrong direction. We're part of that technology development, so we should take a standpoint to make very clear what we're expecting from ourselves and what we're also then expecting from society in order to behave in a democratic and fair way.”
