What connects Barbara Turf and Vivian Pein
One, the daughter of Italian immigrants, has worked for the same group of companies since 1967. Barbara Turf knows all there is to know about making the perfect soufflé and likes to go shopping with her grown-up daughter. The way she dresses and talks shows her to be what she is – a veteran businesswoman. The other has a Chinese character tattooed on her left shoulder blade. Vivian Pein loves to ride her motorbike, twitters as ‘Zeniscalm’ and has a homepage at ‘Inthechaos.de’. She lives in Hamburg’s vibrant Schanze district, where offbeat squatters and Internet geeks coexist peacefully and meet up for the occasional latte macchiato.
At first glance, Turf and Pein have little in common. They are both women, have the same ethnic background, and work for the Otto Group - that appears to be all. Were it not for an invisible tie that links the CEO of Crate and Barrel and the Social Media Manager at Hermes Europe across the vastness of the Atlantic: their wide-ranging commitment to social responsibility.
The fact that the two women, who have never met in person, now know of each other is down to the new mission proclaimed by the Otto Group: ‘The Power of Responsibility’. Turf and Pein are both featured on the-power-of-responsibility.com, a Group-wide intranet site where staff members can propose specific ways of improving their work and social environments. It is a visible sign of how the mission is brought to life each day.
In practice, the four dimensions of the mission can overlap depending on the content of the project.
Since January 2011, Vivian Pein – who earned her business degree from Hagen Open University in a programme combining e-learning and online interaction - has been developing a social media strategy for Hermes Europe, an Otto Group company. Although her work would at first seem to belong in the area of innovation, the online dialogue with customers goes further than this: the online complaints management platform she has set up not only strengthens customer loyalty long-term as well as reducing in-house administration costs – so it also contributes to the ‘profitability’ dimension.
The dedication that Pein brings to the website goes far beyond her professional duties. “You can only make the social media work for you if you’re part of them yourself. It’s very important for me to show that the word ‘social’ is integral to ‘social media’,” says Pein. For the past three years she has organised ‘twestivals’, offline events that bring online communities together on a particular day to raise money for a good cause. Twestivals are initiated via the micro-blogging service Twitter, but take place in real life. A Hamburg event in March 2011 raised about 1,500 euros for Sternenbrücke, a hospice that helps families cope with their child’s illness and death.
Pein now coordinates Twestivals for all of central and eastern Europe. “Part of it is because I’m a bit of an agitator. I’m just not happy about the current state of our world.”
Crate and Barrel CEO Barbara Turf puts it a bit more diplomatically: “We all have the means and indeed the responsibility to leave the world a better place than we found it.“ The Illinois University graduate, who in 1967 approached what was then the only Crate and Barrel outlet looking for a summer job, has headed the American retail chain for high-end furniture since 2008, when she succeeded its founder Gordon Segal as CEO.
Turf takes responsibility on a number of levels. First and foremost as a CEO who is growing a profitable company and securing jobs. But also in countless individual measures: for instance, she introduced Kiva, an automatic order fulfilment system that has halved delivery times while also lowering energy consumption and electricity costs. Other measures proposed by Turf range from printing business cards on FSC-certified paper to switching to low-energy lighting in all stores. Many of them have already been put into practice.
“Personally, I’m fondest of the Crate Garden idea,” says Turf. “In 2010 we set up a ‘Green Committee’. It developed a plan for adding a garden to our company headquarters. The employees can design the garden as they see fit and grow whatever they want in it. A real community has blossomed from this – it cultivates flowers as well as organic vegetables. The best thing about it is that we have just enlarged the garden specifically because so many employees are enthusiastically donating the fruits of their labour to the needy.”
The Crate Garden example shows that an innovative idea improves employee satisfaction by creating variety at work – a factor that is positive in business terms as well. It also creates a sustained benefit for society. Finally, customers tend to find such activities very appealing, which helps boost the Crate and Barrel image.
The power that fuels this identity is the responsibility that each staff member embraces on a daily basis. Like Barbara Turf, who in the midst of a discussion about the new collection of recycled wickerwork takes time to ask how her employee is doing. And like Vivian Pein, who sometimes has better ideas sitting in a park or café – laptop and iPhone at the ready – than in the office. And like thousands of other people across the Group.
Campaign: The Power of Responsibility
Whether it is about profitability, innovation, diversity or sustainability, with each contribution, we live up to our responsibility a bit more.
