What is this so-called sustainability? What does it mean for a company to operate in a sustainable way? Who cares anyway?

Corporations use a lot of work and money to convince the public opinion about their level of sustainability. Comprehensive annual sustainability reports are written, seminars organized and people hired. Naturally these actions are steps forward to a better world, but my question is could sustainable actions be more concrete and organized more effectively than they are now?

For Finvacon sustainability and especially corporate social responsibility (CSR) are not marketing tricks, but the most important things in our strategy. Sustainability is also part of our daily routines: today we are an industrial, ISO certified company of 100 employees. Over 50 of these are with different kind of disabilities. However, we do not get much public funding, our success is based almost up to 100 % on income from our customers.

Our slogan “we believe in better work” reflects well our thoughts about work and society around us: by doing our work for customers as well as possible, we create new possibilities to employ special groups in the future, too and serve our society even better. We are masters of combining labour with normal and lower ability to work. We want to create “a new normal” by turning difference into excellence. The essential thought behind new normal is that it is perfectly normal to be a human being and employee with disabilities. Noboby’s perfect, we all have our deficiencies and we do fail sometimes!

Our model achieved a great acknowledgement in 2018 as we were awarded with the Global Outreach Award and Grand Prix at CWIEME exhibition in Berlin. A year earlier the Global Outreach Award was given to ABB for its University Partnership Program for Zambia. This Award is handed over to a company, group of employees or an individual in the industry who have taken their knowledge, electrical engineering capabilities and initiative to support others in a charitable or community outreach context.

We know that sustainability as a corporate theme is becoming more and more important. We wish that our customers and partners would have a courage to take a full advantage of our special knowledge and reputation in their sustainability activities. We really want to help other companies to implement and improve their sustainability performance. Let’s keep in touch!