If you’re looking to build a business around sustainability, then you’ll need to ensure that the entire organisation is animated by a particular set of values and behaviours.
This is invariably a matter of instilling the right culture. Once you do this, you’ll push every decision made within your organisation in the right direction – without the need for top-down oversight.
But what exactly is a good sustainability culture, and how can we create it?
Establishing a clear sustainability vision
It’s worth first being clear and explicit about what we really mean by sustainability. Set out your ethos in a company-wide document, called an action plan. This document should contain several key principles, and these principles should be expressed as clearly and succinctly as possible. This way, you’ll ensure that everyone understands what you’re trying to achieve, and how they should act.
Engaging and empowering employees
When your employees view sustainability as a set of obligations that are arbitrarily imposed from above, they might not buy into what you’re trying to do. Because of this, you might find that they don’t push toward your sustainability objectives as enthusiastically as they otherwise might. Make sure that you create the right incentive structure, and that you involve everyone in the process of crafting your action plan.
Singling out high-performing individuals for praise and recognition can help to send a message, and encourage the right kinds of behaviour.
Embedding sustainability into operations and decision-making
Sustainability should not be considered an afterthought at any level of your organisation. When every stage of your operation has sustainability built into it, you can send a clear message that sustainability really matters. It should be worked into the way that you procure supplies, the way you use energy, and the way that you run your office. The right business energy solutions can often provide a practical means of streamlining your operations, and making them more sustainable.
Measuring progress and driving continuous improvement
If you’re going to be sure that your efforts are really making a difference, then you’ll need to monitor how you’re performing, and track progress over time. In doing so, you’ll want to conform to a variety of global standards for reporting. This will ensure that your progress is clear not only to people within your organisation, but to external stakeholders, too. In other words, your claims of being sustainable will hold that much more weight.