ESG and the Communications Imperative: interview with Eleanor Tan and Simon Bennett of The China Navigation Company
Eleanor Tan (bottom right) and Simon Bennet (top right) with team members posing with their eco-friendly daily work essentials.
Our series ‘ESG and the Communications Imperative’ interviews leaders across a range of industries, exploring how ESG strategies are reshaping communications, and what companies can do to maximise the impact. In our third interview, Eleanor Tan, Global Head, Corporate Communications and Simon Bennett, General Manager, Sustainable Development at The China Navigation Company share their priorities around ESG and communicating about it effectively.
Please provide a little bit of background about The China Navigation company.
Formed in 1872, The China Navigation Company (CNCo) is Swire's oldest operational business. We operate a global network of services managing around 180 multipurpose liner and dry bulk ships through Swire Shipping and Swire Bulk and in early October 2020, announced the establishment of a specialist unit to provide shipping services to the energy, resources and infrastructure sector to tap on emerging opportunities.
CNCo is privately held and our global headquarters are in Singapore, a busy maritime hub, and gateway to Asia. Our staff force is about 2,600; with the majority of colleagues serving on our vessels. For more information, please see https://www.swirecnco.com.
[Simon] Starting with ESG, what are some of your current priorities at CNCo?
On the sustainability front, by far the main priority now is radical decarbonisation; 2.5 - 3% of the global carbon footprint is from the shipping sector, which if it were a country would roughly equate to that of Germany.
Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) is another important area focus for us. Shipping companies currently struggle with their diversity footprint. If you look at seafarers, as one example, only 3% of them are female; but of that number, few are actually seafarers on cargo ships, some 2.9% are working on cruise ships as stewards and other support staff. As a result, as career progression and shore jobs are generally from seafarers, we tend to be woefully under-represented by women in senior management positions.
[Simon] How has the ESG narrative affected your corporate strategy and relationships with clients?
We are seeing a push from our larger clients for greater transparency in our governance, environmental and social initiatives.
Many firms have a good handle on the ethical and governance aspects of their first-tier suppliers, but we/they need to go deeper than that. In the shipping sector, we are now seeing a material increase in questions from multinational clients in their tender process, asking whether we have recycled our ships in a responsible way at the end of their lives, checked that we are promoting best D&I practices, that both we and none of our suppliers use slave or child labour, that we pay our crews fairly, offer adequate working conditions and so on.
These big companies are exposed reputationally in the same way that we are and have been pushing their reputational due diligence down the line – which we are doing as well. The questions we are getting are more and more detailed. These companies want to know what you do and whether you actually ‘walk the talk’.
[Simon] What has been the impact of Covid-19 on the sustainability agenda in the shipping industry?
On a macro level, for CNCo the ‘new normal’ is going to be very different from the ‘old normal’ because the lockdowns have shown that existing supply chains are much more fragile than had been assumed. Longer supply chains are now shown to be not resilient; after having spent 30 years putting together long supply chains in a global marketplace, relying on offshoring to countries with more competitive labour costs, many of our clients are now looking at unwinding this and reverting to shorter and more regional ones. We believe that once the world has recovered from Covid-19, our clients will reconfigure back from ‘Just in Time’ to ‘Just in Case’.
On the technology front, the impact of COVID-19 has given momentum to innovations like distributive manufacturing and 3D printing. We suspect that shipping may prove to be as ripe for disruption from outside the industry as hotels were from Airbnb and booksellers were from Kindle.
[Eleanor] Shifting to communications, what changes to the company’s strategy have you overseen since joining?
I joined the company in 2018, drawn by the opportunity to make a sea (pardon the pun!) change in communications. Since joining, my team and I have been able to launch a range of face-to-face and digital communications platforms to inform, connect and engage with our audiences which include our worldwide staff force as well as with the media. We also work closely with leadership to drive the company narrative and USP externally, and internally, to align colleague behaviours and objectives to fulfill CNCo’s purpose of connecting communities. It’s been a most rewarding journey as we have seen an increase not only in positive media coverage but also in how colleagues support and engage with our content.
The team has delivered several big projects including a brand-new corporate website, Intranet and the launch of our virtual global townhall series for both onshore and seafaring colleagues.
We’ve also used LinkedIn to grow our online presence; we doubled the number of followers organically to about 22,000 without spending on advertising and instead leveraging on content to drive engagement.
[Eleanor] How are you amplifying your sustainability work through your role in communications?
As far as content, our sustainability stories and our newbuilds get a lot of traction. Whenever people come for job interviews, especially younger candidates, we consistently receive great feedback on our sustainability work. Some have even commented that they didn’t know the extent of what we did – for instance in the area of ship recycling or in waste management in the Pacific Islands. It’s really gratifying! While we are indeed very grateful for the support from our media friends and fans, ultimately what we want to do at CNCo is get as many people as possible informed and involved in our sustainability work. This was why, even though we were not clients of Paradigm, we decided to do this interview, with the hope of amplifying our work in sustainability and in raising overall awareness.
In our 2019 sustainability report, we have provided data on how many (previously uneconomic) waste streams we have shipped out and how much we have recycled (plastics in particular). We created a video last year of our sustainability initiatives and it really instilled a sense of pride in our employees.
An example of this is the Moana Taka Partnership (MTP) between CNCo and The Secretariat of the Pacific Regional Environment Programme (SPREP), an intergovernmental organisation whose mandate is to provide assistance to protect and improve the environment in the Pacific Island region. The partnership is to help local communities move waste out of Pacific Island territories to countries with sustainable recycling plants. More information on MTP can be found here.
We also share updates on our sustainability initiatives through a global weekly bulletin in addition to on our Intranet to inform all colleagues. We see ourselves as communications partners to the Sustainable Development team and work with them collaboratively to highlight or report on activity. In a recent staff survey, colleagues were overwhelming positive and proud of the work that CNCo does in the area of sustainability.