The maritime industry is one of the most pivotal and challenging sectors globally. It plays an essential role in transporting goods and fostering international trade. Despite its significance, the industry is fraught with complexities, including the safety and well-being of its two million seafarers who navigate geopolitical crises and mounting cost pressures.
Recent years have underscored the urgency for systemic and transformational innovations to address these multifaceted challenges, particularly focusing on human sustainability and inclusivity. The drive towards creating a safer and more attractive industry is becoming increasingly paramount as stakeholders seek to enhance working conditions and ensure the maritime sector remains viable and appealing to future generations.
With a rich background as a strategic innovation advisor, Susanne Justesen, the Director of Human Sustainability at the Global Maritime Forum, is a pivotal figure in these endeavors. Her passion for integrating diversity into problem-solving and decision-making processes drives her work towards making the maritime industry more innovative and inclusive.
An Odyssey in The Maritime Industry
Susanne joined the maritime industry three years ago after spending 20 years working as a strategic innovation advisor for senior leaders across different industries. She did a PhD exploring the role of diversity in innovation. Susanne specializes in making groups and companies more innovative by infusing more diversity into their overall problem-solving and decision-making.
She left her consulting career behind to join the maritime industry because she was fascinated by the thought of working in a truly global industry and saw enormous potential for driving systemic and transformational innovation.
The Global Maritime Forum gave her the opportunity to take a leading role in setting up a program focused on improving overall human sustainability across the maritime industry, both at sea and on shore. Sussane is passionately driven by finding ways to collaborate to become a truly attractive industry for all, particularly young people who are ambitious about sustainability.
Overcoming the Challenges of Maritime Industry
The maritime industry is probably one of the most dangerous industries to work in, especially for the two million seafarers transporting goods worldwide. The last decade has brought significant challenges to seafarers’ overall quality of life, notably due to increasing pressure to reduce shipping costs and numerous geopolitical crises, such as COVID-19, the invasion of Ukraine and attacks in the Red Sea.
At the Global Maritime Forum, Susanne and her team want EVERYONE working in the maritime supply chain to be part of a safe, inclusive, respectful, sustainable, and fair industry. They do this by engaging with senior leaders and multiple stakeholders across the value chain to build ambitious coalitions willing to drive the necessary changes.
Global Maritime Forum’s current pilot project, Diversity@Sea, is an example of working with various companies to find ways to make a career at sea inclusive and attractive to both men and women. The organization has done this by initially identifying 15 pain points for women at sea and co-designing possible solutions to best address these. Susanne and her team are now piloting and testing these solutions onboard 12 different vessels to understand which measures and solutions seem to be the most impactful in making living and working conditions more attractive.
Sailing a Cruise Full of Responsibilities
In this post-COVID era, Susanne has learned how important flexibility is across multiple generations. “A leader can no longer lead by assuming there is only one right way of doing things because, oftentimes, there are multiple ways of getting things right,” she quoted. This is exactly why diversity of perspectives is incredibly important, not just when the team works with long-term strategies but equally so when collaborating on day-to-day problem-solving and decision-making tasks.
Susanne shares, “When it comes to leadership, the biggest qualities, in my view, come from aligning around objectives that give meaning and purpose to the work we do every day and defining clear goals and outcomes that will make us proud – as a team – when completed.”
Other important leadership qualities that Susanne fosters are curiosity, humility, and empathy. Curiosity helps one avoid being stuck in the status quo and insist on exploring alternatives. Empathy makes the path forward a deeply shared one. Humility allows one to admit when one is wrong.
Susanne struggles a bit more with the managerial side of leadership, such as planning and coordinating resources. However, she has strong hope that she will get better at this one day, but in the meantime, it really makes her immensely appreciate these qualities in others.
A Blend of Technology and Sustainability
Susanne’s primary focus is human sustainability—the S in the ESGs (Environmental, Social and Governance)—and how Global Maritime Forum can drive change through transparency and mutual accountability. Working together with the company’s partners and stakeholders, Susanne and her team rely heavily on technology to not just identify the most important problems and challenges across the industry but also to quickly collect and analyze—especially with the use of AI—the data they need to dig deep and co-design solutions across a global community of maritime stakeholders.
When it comes to safety at sea, her team also increasingly sees new technologies emerging that can help the organization make life at sea safer—both psychologically and physically. For instance, drones that can inspect closed spaces, wristwatches that can alert you that you need to move out of a heated space, or blockchain technologies that can help Susanne and her team track work/rest hours in reliable ways. Last but certainly not least, new onboard technologies can also help detect and prevent sexual assault.
Managing The Complexities of International Regulations and Standards
When Susanne and her team work with human sustainability across the global maritime industry, one of the big challenges is navigating the many different jurisdictions, especially when working at sea. The Maritime Labor Convention defines minimum standards for working conditions at sea, and her team aims to work together with their global community of maritime stakeholders to define standards better than what is mandated by regulation.
Creating A Safe, Sustainable and Inclusive Industry for Generations
As a Director of Human Sustainability, Susanne’s top priorities remain making it safe, inclusive, and attractive for young people, especially those ambitious about sustainability, to work in the global maritime industry. Now, the industry is falling short. By working closely with the more ambitious parties across the maritime value chain, she aims to define tangible standards for what a safe, inclusive, and attractive vessel looks like.
By clearly defining what good looks like and aligning on a set of global standards and metrics that can be vetted accordingly, the Global Maritime Forum can ensure transparency and mutual accountability across existing working and living conditions that would otherwise remain invisible. Susanne ensures that everyone is treated with respect and dignity.
The number of parties with an actual stake in improving working and living conditions at sea is growing. This transparency is important not just for future employees but increasingly also for legislators, investors and the financial sector, the many retailers that transport their products via sea, and the end users buying such products. With such transparency, everyone can more easily decide whether the products they buy, the vessels they invest in or the cargo they ship have been transported in a way in which the people involved are treated in a fair and respectful manner.
A lot of shipping companies already treat their employees in a respectful way and are building sustainable maritime businesses where people are treated with dignity and respect. We want these companies to be able to highlight their better human sustainability practices transparently as well.
Global Maritime Forum is looking forward to calculating CO2 emissions to determine whether its transport harms the climate. Similarly, the company needs to know whether its choices and decisions across the maritime supply chain harm the people working onboard the vessels transporting goods.
Susanne’s aim is to find out how they can work together to make the future maritime industry not just humanly sustainable, but truly safe, inclusive and attractive to both existing and future generations.
