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We’ve three broad areas: A: What sustainability means to your business; B: Implementation; C: Maximising effectiveness. And within each area, programmes to support the key steps.
A: Strategy – What does Sustainability mean to my business?
Sustainability can seem like a big, blurred and complicated area. But it doesn’t need to be - figuring out what it means to you is pretty straightforward.
Step 1: Know the impacts ON your business.
Sustainability issues can impact your business in a number of ways: scarcity of materials/energy; changes in market demand due to governmental or retailer initiatives; stakeholder pressures and increased insurance fees. Impacts can be costly to you, in terms of time, energy, resources and money. But often companies haven’t measured these costs. We help you get a grip on this, so you know the scale of the costs today, as well as the opportunities for savings. (And, we assess where you can get a jump on competition.)
Example: When Interface, the world’s larges floor covering company, decided to work more sustainably, they started by measure their waste: which they defined as anything they were paying for that their customer wasn’t buying. Ten years later, they have ‘zero waste’ facilities, and energy efficiency programmes that have cut their energy use by 20%. They estimate they have saved over $360 million US.
STEP 2: Know the impact OF your business
In particular, know the impacts of your business on the environment and society: Where are the big impacts of what you do, and who cares about those impacts? Knowing this prepares you to address what matters – rather than dealing with areas that seem obvious but have low returns. This keeps your stakeholders happy, your risks low, and your returns high.
We assess these, and help you clarify what you want to focus on immediately, as well as what you want to keep an eye on, or establish longer term targets for.
An example: A laundry detergent manufacturer measured the impacts of its detergent from sourcing the raw materials through to use in a washing machine. They had expected that the largest impacts would be in the manufacture of the detergent itself, or perhaps in the transportation to distribute it. In fact, over 80% of the impacts came from the use in washing machines. But not any use: mostly from heating up the water. As a consequence, they have reformulated their detergent so that it is equally effective in cold water. This saves the consumer money, while saving energy and reducing environmental impacts. Now the company is working on concentrating its detergents to reduce packaging and transport – not only for its customers, but also for the consumer.
Example 2: One packaging company found that 40% of its negative environmental impacts – particularly CO2 – came from the use of one “ingredient” – that represented only 4% of their feedstock… Since CO2 comes largely from fossil fuels, it was clear that they suffered a double risk: the increase in materials cost due to energy prices, and the further increase in materials cost due to CO2 emissions. Until they measured the impacts, they had assumed that the areas of focus had to be transportation and operations, but it turned out these were tiny compared to the choice of materials… Armed with this information they were able to launch a redesigned package without the troublesome ingredient and with a better environmental and cost profile.
STEP 3: Know where you want to go
Knowing what matters and to whom is great baseline information on sustainability. The question is – what are you going to do with that information? What really makes sense to your company? What will lead to growth and profitability? And how do you build on your actions to create more value? We work with you to integrate sustainability with your core business goals.
An example: A packaging company realized that each time they replaced non-renewable resources with renewable resources, they lowered their environmental impacts substantially. Furthermore, they protected themselves from price hikes due to energy spikes and CO2 taxes. They consequently determined that their goal was to use only renewable resources for their products.
However, these benefits depended upon the renewables being sustainably produced. Consequently they established a partnership with an environmental group to ensure the sustainability of their key material sources. They further made a commitment to continuously shift energy demand to renewables. Together, these moves have ensured NGO support, as well as environmental certification. This made them a more valuable partner for their customers: safer from a cost perspective, and more valuable for providing an environmentally certified package.
For more about how this works, see our Strategy Services.
B: Implementation: “Making changes fast and smooth”
When you know what’s going on, and where you need to go, it can still be hard to make the important changes… You know what people can be like – dragging their feet, muddying the waters, and making progress slow and difficult.
STEP 4: Build a common understanding
Basically, your people need a common understanding of direction and how that translates into everybody’s work. We help you build that. And then we go a step further – and make sure that people know enough about the environment and sustainability that they start contributing their own ideas on how to do things more environmentally, more inexpensively, and more productively.
An example: At Wal-Mart they had long had a stand-off between marketing and operations: marketing wanted bright lights shining onto the freezer, because this made products more attractive, and increased sales. But operations complained that the heat from the lights made their freezers work twice as hard to keep products frozen. The extra work made for extra heat, and they had to get extra air conditioners to keep the ambient temperature acceptable. When Wal-Mart took a stand for sustainability, the guy responsible for the freezers and air conditioners could make his case in terms of money, energy and CO2; marketing could see the value of using warm fluorescents in the freezers instead; and for good measure they printed a sign for the freezer door explaining how they had reduced CO2. Lower cost, better profile, and increased sales. True sustainability, from the ground up.
Sound like something you need? Click here to view our services, or contact us.
STEP 5: Building Momentum
People like to say that nobody likes change. We would believe that if we hadn’t seen the Walkman come and go; i-Pods become ubiquitous, and mobile phones explode the market for phones. People make amazing changes voluntarily if they see the value. In fact, consider that there are tens of millions of blogs; tens of millions of twitter accounts; and hundreds of millions of pages on Wikipedia in 160 languages – all contributed, edited, formatted, annotated and cross-linked by volunteers. We help you get that kind of fervour and engagement from your staff so that they come to work excited about contributing. Not grudging about following the rules.
An example: One of the difficult things about becoming sustainable is that you don’t really know what that will look like exactly. A company we worked with needed to become leaner while differentiating itself. We held sessions with all staff in which we had them first talk about what really mattered, then start to build three dimensional models of what the new company might look like. And then each team had to explain their model to the other teams. Finally we remixed the teams, they each had to improve on the existing models to make them better thought out and more coherent. By the end of the day, understanding of roles and contribution between units in the company and among team members had increased enormously. Most importantly, almost a year later, the models are still visible in a common area, and people use them to initiate new people in the company, and explain how things really work, and what has changed because of the new focus. Morale is high, dialogue is high, and people are focused on moving forwards, not clinging to the past.
Sound like something you need? Click here to view our services, or contact us.
STEP 6: Communicate with stakeholders
No company exists alone, like an island deep in the ocean. Instead, we are all jostled by demands from government, customers, employees, community, suppliers, NGOs, quasi governmental organisations, planning authorities, tax collectors, and the like. Often, a conversation with someone from a different industry or from a different sector is like talking to somebody in a language you cannot understand. You can be frustrated that you’re not reaching understanding, and the temptation can be high to refuse to engage.
But actually, dialogue with stakeholders most often turns stakeholders into ambassadors. And when an NGO is holding you up as an example of what works, they are a thousand times more credible than if you try to make the same point yourself. So developing ways to work with NGOs – defining which ones matter to you, which ones have influence, and which ones are interested in constructive relationships, is rewarding – both economically and emotionally.
We have facilitated interactions between WWF, for example, and trade associations; or environmental groups and the plastics industry. Having worked for government, NGOs, small companies and multi-nationals, we help translate each sector to the other, and design and facilitate meetings and interactions to ensure fruitful dialogue, and the establishment of trust.
Ready to engage? Contact us to find out who to engage with, and how to work the process.
C: Maximising effectiveness
In the end, the strategy, the support for change, depends not just on ‘people’ but on individuals. And some will have greater struggles than others in helping you reach your goals. We support you and support them through trainings and coaching to establish leadership skills, and ensure that diverse opinions are used as a basis for fruitful discussion, not eliminated as ‘not the way we do things around here’ – the kiss of death when it comes to moving in a new direction.
STEP 7: Build Leadership and Effectiveness
We coach managers and staff to make business exciting – for themselves and for their staff. People who come to the office charged up and raring to work are infectious – pretty soon others stop complaining and start working better. Conversations flow faster, a buzz gets going, and the passive people who like to complain around the coffee machine start to feel like they’re missing out. And business gets done faster and better. That’s leadership.
And, since we’re all about independence, we also train your employees to be able to coach eachother: we work with the Coaching for Great Worktm programme to improve your time-strapped manager’s effectiveness while improving their staff’s performance – and all in 10 minute bites…. That translates into greater effectiveness for everybody, especially your business.
STEP 8: Build Resilience and Diversity
People hire people like them. People buy from people like them. People respond to people like them. And they like people like them. We are hard-wired to like people who are most similar to us. But it’s a global world – how do you overcome the flip side of that – resistance to differences – and the loss of markets that accompany that?
If you’re a western European middle-aged man, you probably don’t expect a young woman in Mongolia to understand what makes you tick: what motivates you, what inspires you, what outrages you… By the same token, that woman quite likely doesn’t expect you to understand her. And conversations between the two of you can be complicated and, without a lot of practice, not as meaningful as you would like. So how do you get employees who are not like you, to understand what you mean. And how do you really understand markets that aren’t that close to home.
We work with Springboard to build leadership and competence among the women in your organisation, helping them find ways to provide greater value to you and the business. And, the Springboard Consultancy provides broader trainings for men, for mixed groups and for managing diverse workplaces – in a way that brings you closer to your customers and to consumers.
If this makes sense to you, and even better – if this inspires you, click here for our 5 step guide to sustainability – with examples of companies that did the right thing – and a few who learnt from their mistakes… or contact us directly.
STEP 9: Inspiring growth
All these concepts are easy to understand at one level, but they don’t generate different behaviours. Stories do. So we uncover and write up the stories, examples and case studies, to help you see what’s possible. What arguments work. How to get things rolling. Or how to overcome gritty problems. And, to understand what’s going on behind the story: for example, who was it who attacked Clorox’s Green Works environmental credentials? (hint: not a green group – a competitor); Who is Wal-Mart’s target audience for their green initiatives? (hint: it’s not the consumer. It’s government – at every level, particularly planning authorities).
So you get information in a way that helps you Understand, see new opportunities and then Do.
Try it! Sign up here for Ren-newal, our newsletter, and take a look at our blog – you can search on key words (e.g. competitiveness; retailers; energy…), or by date to catch newer stuff, or just read what comes up.
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