By Jensen Kirby, Gustavson external relations co-op student
How does lasting environmental and social change begin for business? We asked Assistant Teaching Professor Heather Ranson, 2019 recipient of the United Nations Principles for Responsible Management Education Award, to share her perspective on this topic, gleaned from fifteen years of teaching sustainable business. The associate director of Gustavson’s Centre for Social and Sustainable Innovation, Heather incorporates the topic of sustainability into business curriculum for hundreds of BCom, MBA and executive education students each year.
Gustavson: How do you integrate sustainability and social responsibility into your teaching?
Heather Ranson: I teach a broad range of courses, so it really depends. In my business and sustainability course it’s already embedded in the material. But for other courses like service management there are certain ways that sustainability can be brought in. When we’re talking about operations, for example, we look at sustainable procurement. When you’re working in a service organization, whether it be a restaurant, a hospital or a law firm, there are things you have to buy. If you’re thinking about sustainable procurement you’re considering things like how much recycled content is in your paper or how many trips the office supply company is making to your business every month. If you aren’t focusing on sustainable procurement you probably don’t care about these things and make your decision based on price or something else. But this gives students a different perspective on ways that decisions can be made and shows them that maybe sustainability is one of the things they should consider. It varies depending on the course that I teach but there’s always a topic that can be adapted to include sustainability, certainly in business anyways.
G: How do you choose your guest speakers and what do they bring to the classroom?
HR: When picking guest speakers I usually think about a topic that I want to go a little deeper into or that I think students might have trouble grappling with. Then I start thinking about who might be best to talk about that topic. I’ve been doing this long enough that I know a lot of people who can speak to various issues.
In terms of what guest speakers bring to the classroom, I think it’s the applied nature of it. They have to do these things everyday. So with ethics for example, they can talk about how they have things written in their policies and procedures manual, or how they are discussed in their team meetings. They can talk about how they handle ethical situations and dilemmas that come up on a daily basis. It’s different than giving students a reading on it and having a discussion about it, or being given an ethical problem in the classroom and being asked to solve it.
G: Can you tell me about some of your class assignments and how they enhance your teaching?
HR: In COM 362 students complete an online questionnaire that examines their ecological footprint. I then ask them to interview each other and compare scores, and they are often very surprised by their results. Many expect their impact to be much lower than it is because they recycle or bring their own bags to the grocery store. Last year I had two students comparing with one another, one of whom is a vegetarian who dumpster dives for food and the other who eats meat and buys food at the grocery store, and their scores were vastly different because of these choices. These are things that students often don’t talk about, but this kind of assignment forces that conversation and allows students to build awareness themselves. I’m not standing in front of the class telling them they should be vegetarians or ride their bikes to school. They figure it out by looking at their scores and talking to their peers. It’s a cool assignment because it drives change without any readings or lectures.
G: How do you get students excited about sustainability and social responsibility?
HR: It’s hard because it can be very depressing, to be honest. And in order to get any change you really need to show people how bad the situation is. So getting them excited about it is usually the second stage but first there’s an awareness-building piece. And we do lose some students in this, they think it’s too hard or that there’s nothing one person can do. But that’s really where I put my emphasis and my focus. Sometimes it is just that one thing that you’re doing, recycling a can or riding your bike, but then when someone else sees you doing those things maybe they’ll do them as well. So you’re really mobilizing change without even knowing it just by following your own values. So, it’s hard. I don’t think we reach everybody in the classroom but I believe really firmly in the power of one and I hope students see they can make a difference as just one person.
G: Are there any key topics or issues that you try to cover in all your classes?
HR: I always try to talk about the power that business has to make an impact as a force for good. When a company like Walmart, for example, calls all of its computer suppliers and asks that they change the default settings so that computers go to sleep after five minutes of inactivity rather than 15, that saves 10 minutes of power on every single computer they sell. Research shows that most people don’t change their default settings, so that’s a whole lot of electricity that’s not being used. This doesn’t do Walmart any good, it doesn’t save them money or sell more computers, they’re just doing good. I think that if students realize that, they’ll see how they and the organizations they’re working with can do a phenomenal amount of good, or at least less harm.
G: Are there any other thoughts on integrating sustainability and business that you’d like to share?
HR: The impact that building a culture of sustainability in an organization can have. Often in an organization people are focused on their jobs. They have e-mails to answer and deadlines to meet, tasks that they are going to be evaluated on. Usually sustainability isn’t one of those things that’s being measured. Building a culture of sustainability in your organization makes people want to be a part of that and puts sustainability on their radar. So they’re answering e-mails and meeting deadlines but they’re also recycling their paper towels and bringing in reusable water bottles. I really firmly believe that building that culture can have in a huge impact on sustainability within an organization. It can be a slow process, but it works.
Photo: UVic Photo Services
