Our workIOSH / helping businesses Catch the Wave of social sustainability
The second wave of sustainability is coming… with new targets arriving in 2030. And while many businesses have plans to meet the environmental targets set by the UN’s SDGs, action on social sustainability is lagging.
But our client IOSH (The Institution of Occupational Safety and Health) has plans to change all that. As the Chartered body, and largest membership organisation for health and safety professionals, IOSH is passionate about social sustainability and showing its value. So they challenged us to develop a campaign that encourages businesses to not only meet the new targets, but embrace them and see them as a benefit to their business. But first, we had to get everyone on the same page to agree the story they wanted to tell.
The benefit for businesses
Businesses with stronger sustainability practices have stronger operational performance and cashflow – with over half of a company’s value estimated to sit within its intangible assets, including its people.
And social sustainability is very much an Occupational Safety and Health (OSH) issue. Things like safer environments and more enlightened attitudes to health and wellbeing, diversity and inclusion are all tied up in OSH.
The misconception around OSH
Yet despite its tremendous value, OSH has a reputation for making life more difficult and ticking boxes – an expensive barrier, not a wealth creator. So clearly perception needs to change…
Finding the right direction
But how do you get a large group of passionate stakeholders, all with strong views, to agree on the story they wanted to tell?
Slowly, gently and collaboratively. The heart of this campaign was a 5-stage workshop process, to understand the challenges, respect everyone’s views and get stakeholders to agree on a direction before we started on the actual work.
Delivering a striking campaign platform
Our client IOSH asked us to help develop a campaign to tell the story of human capital and sustainability that positions them as the lever for change, best-placed to harness and unleash the value of a sustainable workforce – thanks to its relationship with the UN, WHO and ILO and access to a vast global supply and value chain via its members.
Our brief was to develop a striking campaign platform and toolkit that IOSH’s internal team of creatives could deploy across a range of multimedia assets.
Introducing Catch the Wave
There’s an irresistible, unstoppable wave of change moving across the global business landscape, cascading through board rooms and sending ripples through supply chains and beyond…
We developed the campaign name – Catch the Wave – to serve as an optimistic call to action encouraging businesses to see the change as a good thing, and also an inevitability.
We placed people at the heart of the visual story, alongside a fluid, dynamic graphic wave device – a metaphor for OSH as it flows through businesses and cascade across supply chains. And it is as elegant in print as it is in animation.
A solid framework
The messaging framework was built around IOSH’s 4 key stakeholder groupings, encouraging businesses of all sizes to work with IOSH to develop a business case for change, plan the journey towards 2030 and create a reporting framework that reflects the value people add to the bottom line.
While in the first instance, we were asked to define the campaign framework, we’ve now been invited to activate the campaign – with everything from online content and videos to campaign packs and Powerpoint templates.
A pleasure to work on
This project has been a joy to work on, not least because of the immersive, collaborative way we arrived at a shared proposition and identity. It gave everyone in our team a more thorough, nuanced understanding of the UN’s SDGs and the targets that sit within them, and what they mean in practical terms for businesses and their value and supply chains. This also helped us understand the need to more formally measure and report on our own business’s social sustainability...