Social Responsibility

Social Responsibility: I first ran into it while working for Enron. For lack of a better place to put it, organizational chartographers always attach it to the Health, Safety and Environmental Department. Initially it seemed like a nuisance, something that corporations had to talk about. In the early years, and of course, especially at Enron, it was a façade. Mostly, the thrust was to cultivate respectability among would-be investors of conscience – teachers retirement funds, for example. In practice, the SR practitioners would draft a rosy-sounding section for the next year’s annual report and then spend the balance of the year figuring out ways to make it come true. At Enron, the SR director and managers, having no job descriptions to anchor them, floated on inflated egos between meetings with stockholders and boardrooms, occasionally stopping by the office without ever producing anything tangible. Their’s was a caramely world of visioneering, consensus building and stakeholder partnering.
I ran into Social Responsibility again at BP, which is where I landed after Enron crashed. BP’s SR mission was more results-oriented. They were emphatic about documenting early compliance with the Kyoto protocol. My job, a 3-month contract position, was to calculate greenhouse emissions from its San Juan Basin coal bed methane operations. In talking with my counterparts from the other business units, it was clear that, although the calculations were legitimate, the comparisons with the base case were flawed, resulting in exaggerated claims of greenhouse gas reductions, which, of course, were trumpeted by the annual reporters.
These two exposures to Social Responsibility flavored my initial impression of this new and growing corporate mandate. Fast forward to Yemen, 2008.
As environmental manager for the YLNG construction project I am on the front lines. Gone are the slogany SR platitudes, the flowery vernacular, the business suits. I work in close quarters with 5,000 Yemeni workers, every one of them two generations removed from the 14th century, the cream and the crud of Yemen’s future: the clueless losers, opiated by religion, who resent the fact that their job is not an entitlement; and the up-and-coming laborers, foremen and professionals who see this project as a stepping stone to a better life for themselves and their families. I also have a somewhat unique position within Yemgas in that I interact with the local community in developing contracts, specifically for transportation and waste recycling services. Social Responsibility, seen from ground level, is real and pregnant with opportunity, for both sides – the developer and the developed.
The obvious example is teaching Yemenis basic skills that allow them to work efficiently. I’m talking basic skills, like, to begin with getting up every day and going to work. This ethic is ingrained in the western mind, whether we are employed or looking for employment, the lifelong struggle for compensation is a routine that occupies most of the daylight hours, most of the days of most of the weeks. The Yemen mind does not think this way, and by enlightening them, they can go out and share this insight with friends and relatives, and it will incrementally improve the competitiveness of an abysmally uncompetitive workforce.
Labor force development is not reported per se in any annual report as a social responsibility achievement, but the better managers at Yemgas are aware of the impacts they are making on peoples lives, and they go out of their way to teach their employees things that are useful, but are not necessarily applicable to the job at hand.
In recruiting contractors from the local communities, we initially tried the bid process; it was a disaster, resulting in contractor liens when the low bidder didn’t pay his employees and his equipment rental companies. So we adapted a procedure I learned at TxDOT: qualification-based selection. This was a zinger to the tribal mentality predominant here in the Shabwa Governate, a backwater even by Yemeni standards. We issued a Request for Qualifications along with a disclaimer stating that submitting an SOQ would not guarantee a contract. Most of the 12 proposals that we received were unreadable, or worse. When asked what was their proposal for disposing of non-recyclable waste, most answered something like “we’ll do whatever you ask us to do.” We selected a firm that had some experience with municipal garbage hauling.
Many competing firms couldn't grasp the concept of competition. They thought that the selection should be based on tribal status, and then once selected, the firm would figure out how to provide whatever service was needed. We had to blacklist one of the tribal heavies from entering the jobsite because he threatened our Community Relations manager. The government-privilege faction barraged us with angry visits from Ministers of this and that whose son or nephew was not selected. But we offered a contract debriefing to the 11 unsuccessful firms to explain where their proposal fell short. My expectation is that the next round of contracts in 12 months will yield to Adam Smith’s invisible hand: the tribes and government fatcats will tone down their bloviating and instead focus on giving the client what it asks for. This concept is the basis of every western business model; but it is, or was, until now, utterly foreign to the movers and shakers in Shabwa, Yemen. In a self-serving way we expect that this enlightenment will promote a better local contractor pool to support the upcoming 20 years of YLNG operations, but, one hopes, the ripple effect will penetrate into the broader business community as south Yemen continues to develop its natural and human resources.