Report
Länsförsäkringar is an insurance company combined with a bank and with real estate brokering. At the moment this interview was made, spring 2021, the company had a sustainability advisor, and on their way to recruit a sustainability director.
Method
The interview with the sustainability advisor was made over telephone and done as a conversation on the topic of sustainability activities performed by the company and what they implied for staff recruitment.
Summary of the interview
The sustainability advisor explained that the company was actively looking for opportunities to become more sustainable over the entire range of activities. The sustainability advisor´s task was to have an oversight of almost everything, to discuss with staff members and also to encourage them to listen to customer´s ideas. She could see that much of her work was to find ways of getting employees and management to see the opportunities of becoming more sustainable.
Many of the sustainability activities had direct implications on the company´s profitability. As one example, Länsförsäkringar was the first insurance company to decline insurances of real estate located in areas prone to flood hazards to create awareness of risks connected to climate change and to influence climate adaptation within municipal planning. From the conversation it was clear that an increased dialogue with municipalities would be desirable from an economic perspective. The company had had to weigh the risk of loosing money on an increased number of insurance cases due to floods, and the risk of loosing clients. The latter could be avoided if municipalities made their physical planning more risk avoidant. This part of the conversation indicated the need to weigh different goals to each other and the need to be in constant dialogue with planners in the public sector.
Another insurance matter, which is one of the most common related to real estate, is the need for restorations in buildings due to water leakage. In many cases, this is seen by clients and the restoration companies to completely renew bathrooms, kitchens and laundry rooms. Länsförsäkringar has put up guidelines for the procurement of repair and restoration to ensure that the firms doing the job undertake to recycle as much of the material as possible. This is not necessarily keeping the costs down, but it is a normative statement on recycling and responsible use of resources.
In the bank sector, the selection of funds to sell to investment prone customers is gradually shifted to investment funds that score high on sustainability indexes. This has put new demands on the responsible staff members to ugrade their routines from scrutinizing purely financial to also understand the sustainability aspects. At the moment for the interview, this was mainly done by assessing the indexes from international actors, but a shift was underway to improve the internal capacity to assess portfolios from a sustainability perspective. To a large extent, this was an adaptation to an increased customer demand, but also a part of the company´s aim at branding themselves as a sustainable company.
Another example from the bank sector was the switch to only use recycled plastics in the fabrication of credit and cash cards. Many cards are issued each year, but in kilograms of plastic it is not that much. The action should rather be seen as a way of showing to clients that also minor measures matter. The decision was also made because it was a suggestion from an employee, thus encouraging other employees to come up with sustainability ideas.
Conclusions for higher education
There are two instances in the interview that highlight the need to strengthen student´s communication skills. The first is the need to communicate harsh decisions on climate change related risks and to influence the regulatory frameworks beyond the company´s own domain. The other example is the opportunity to express and get buy-in for own ideas on sustainability measures to take. Another indicated need is the capacity to make choices between opposing claims and to be able to defend the directions taken.
How to make complex analysis of an investment portfolio is another item worth while to ponder in the curricula for students of economics.
Specific suggestions on training on complexity and systems thinking
It is quite evident that companies in the financial sector are faced with more complex challenges. Complexity theory and Systems thinking have a number of theories and methodological approaches that could come to use.