At almost exactly the same moment as I delivered my first environmental behaviour change workshop for a client in January 2007, M&S launched its groundbreaking Plan A.

I’ve come a long way in the last five and half years and so has M&S, as demonstrated with the recent release of its 2012, ‘How We Do Business Report’, so this blog will review M&S’ progress and highlight five of the reasons for its success.

Boldness

A key factor in the success of Plan A is its boldness in both scope and ambition.  That boldness has led to significant, even surprising, benefits.  Richard Gillies, director of Plan A and Sustainable Business, states: “If I’d been told that [...] the supporting business case for Plan A would generate £185 million over the first five years, I think I may have been sceptical. Certainly, I’d have struggled to believe that Plan A would become integrated across the business to the extent that it has in just five years”.  To give an example of where that value has come from, their energy efficiency has improved by 28 per cent.

Leadership commitment

M&S’ ambition hasn’t waned over the last five years, because as Marc Bolland its ceo states: “In the first instance, we will ensure that by 2020, every M&S product has Plan A built into it, making sustainability a new norm”.  This demonstrates another key to the success of Plan A: whilst leadership has changed in the last five years (Marc replaced Stuart Rose in 2010), the company has stay committed to the journey and rapidly embedded sustainability into its culture.

Transparency

A particularly impressive aspect of Plan A is M&S’ transparency: it has the confidence to tell the world, and its competitors, what it is doing and how well.  But, in contrast to many corporate sustainability reports, the ‘How We Do Business’ reports detail exactly how many of its 180 commitments are behind plan or haven’t been achieved. This tells you a lot about M&S as a company and how it stays true to its values of ‘Quality, Value, Service, Innovation and Trust’.

Measuring benefits

The benefits to the business are accelerating, as last year 15 per cent of profits (£105 million) came from Plan A, up from 10 per cent the previous year.  The fact the company can track very accurately these benefits is another key reason for its success – as the old management adage goes, ‘you can only manage what you can measure’.

Employee engagement

The success of Plan A doesn’t just bring down costs, it also impacts positively on how its people feel about the company, which in turn leads to higher retention, motivation and other business benefits.  This is highlighted by the dozens of sustainability awards the company has won.  For example M&S was recognised by Management Today as one of their ‘Most Admired Companies 2011 for their ability to attract, develop and retain talent’, and won the, Guardian Sustainable Business Awards 2011 Employee Engagement Award.

All these points show how a structured approach to employee engagement, behaviour and culture change in sustainability can lead to considerable triple bottom line benefits.

You can download the report here: http://corporate.marksandspencer.com/howwedobusiness/hwdb_reports

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A challenge for many sustainability practitioners working in organisations is their senior leadership doesn’t have the same passion for sustainability that they have.  There are, of course, exceptions to the rule. One shining example is the granddaddy of corporate sustainability, Ray Anderson, who until his death last year, was the ceo of £1 billion turnover modular carpet manufacturer, Interface.

So what can you do when you don’t have an inspirational leader such as Ray to help you deliver sustainable change?

I suggest  the ‘three Ps’ approach– priority, psychology and politics.

Interface is the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpeting, and also peerless in the success it has had in generating a sustainability culture. Its  journey started over 15 years ago, when Ray had a ‘Eureka’ moment regarding the future of business. He then set the company on the path toward it’s staggering target of having zero overall impact on the environment by 2020: ‘Mission Zero’.

This is fantastic, and as a pioneering organisation which is demonstrating how to deliver profitable sustainability, it creates momentum for those who follow.  The challenge is how to get significant movement without your own Ray.

This topic was explored when PeopleProfitPlanet, and our new parent company, Carbon Credentials, recently held a workshop with Interface’s European Sustainability director, Ramon Arratia as a speaker.

Whilst Ramon was clear that having Ray made a massive difference in the 1990s and 2000s, he believes that sustainability has become such a competitive issue that organisations will either survive or fail based on their attitude to sustainability. He stated that organisations can design sustainability into their operations by working with the middle management in fields such as supply chain, marketing and R&D.  Ramon gave the example of the car industry as one that is being transformed not due to the individual ceos, but by market pressures; and this pressure will start permeating all organisations sooner or later.

Survival is clearly critical for any organisation, so fits the first ‘P I mentioned earlier – your opportunity is to position sustainability as a key priority.

The second two ‘Ps’ – psychological and political – are intimately related, and is the space that I personally find myself helping many of our clients.

Why psychology and politics?

You may have excellent environmental qualifications, but you possibly don’t have as much experience in behaviour (e.g. psychological) and cultural (e.g. political) change. The key, therefore, is how you think around this challenge and identify the psychology concerning resource efficiency and how to encourage sustainable behaviours.  Once you have done that, you can then work out the politics of your organisation, and how you can change its culture.

Neither of these is easy, but it is possible with careful planning to create a programme that will embed sustainability into your people and organisation.

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PeopleProfitPlanet UK Limited is delighted to announce that the business has become the cultural change division of the leading sustainability and energy management consultancy Carbon Credentials Energy Services Limited. The PeopleProfitPlanet brand will be maintained, and the division will continue to provide change services, as we have done for our 40+ clients.

Adam Woodhall, Founder of PeopleProfitPlanet, comments:

“Over the last 6 years, the business has developed from focusing mainly on employee engagement, to helping change behaviours. Now, we’re looking broadly at how to create a sustainable and resource efficient culture. There is a great team at Carbon Credentials and I’m really pleased that PeopleProfitPlanet will have an even wider impact; and we’ve already started work with new clients, including a highly prestigious professional services company.”

Richard Green, Commercial Director of Carbon Credentials, remarks:

“Whilst behavioural change is desirable, only when it becomes second nature can we claim to have impacted ‘culture’. Not only does culture change lead to improved sustainability and profitability; doing nothing can be terminal!  Organisations that attempt to change their behaviour through sporadic initiatives only get sub-optimal results, or in some cases, fail completely.”

“We were attracted to PeopleProfitPlanet because of their reputation and experience in this field. We also share the same values of ‘client success’ and measurable results, central to our business culture. Their E³ Programme is perfectly aligned with our professional services portfolio and offers outstanding value to our clients. Our aim is to become the leading provider of sustainability and energy services in the UK, and delivering culture change is a vital part of that.”

Adam, who is now Carbon Credentials’ Culture Change Director, continues:

As a Harvard Business Review study has demonstrated, 70% of all change initiatives fail. This typically happens because organisations haven’t understood their long-term needs and thus fail to develop an appropriate plan to ensure that change behaviours are embedded. We have developed the E³ Programme to help clients make those difficult, yet very achievable, steps toward being sustainable and profitable.”

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How does a business overcome ‘process paralysis’?

Common process barriers have the potential to paralyse your sustainable change progress, so being aware of them is critical. Embedded systems and methodologies – fossils of previous processes – may no longer suit your sustainability model.

Implementing a sustainable change management programme requires integrating, monitoring, managing and reporting of energy and sustainability information at the department and location level.

Brilliant environmental efforts might be being made at one of your smaller offices, but if your head office follows an entirely separate set of processes, these opportunities won’t be capitalised upon.

Standardising your processes from the start offers your organisation the opportunity to build significant, widespread sustainability efforts and prevents process paralysis.

Communicating Change: what’s the answer?

Sustainable change is about more than just addressing design and processes – it has to be made human. Staff buy-in will be critical to bring about change and achieving this will require creative communication.

Whether or not sustainability efforts ‘fly or fail’ often boils down to how the work you’ve achieved is communicated.

Widely recognised as one of the most comprehensive sustainable change programmes in the UK, M&S’ ‘Plan A’ didn’t succeed overnight, nor were staff enthused from the start.

More than just communicating a sweeping corporate vision, M&S’ sustainability programme was successful because it created a positive feedback loop. As sustainable changes across the organisation were achieved, they were promoted. Where pitfalls occurred, they were not condemned, but used as a motivation to achieve. Through these feedback loops, staff was more likely to come on board with the sustainability programme, feel a sense of ownership and be proud of their efforts in the long-term.

By addressing the three sets of barriers discussed over the last two blogs; design, process and communication, you’re well on your way to achieving a meaningful programme of long-term sustainable change.

This post first appeared on the GreenWise Business blog.

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This two-part blog series will focus on three broad obstacles to sustainable change. This blog investigates the initial design barriers, with the second delving into embedded process and communications barriers, on the journey towards sustainability.

Design as the Differentiator

Borrowing a quote from Steve Jobs, “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating… but to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Design is what separates successful sustainable change programmes from surface-level efforts. The success of M&S’s Plan A, or of  leading carpet sustainable manufacturer’s InterfaceFLOR commitment to become carbon neutral by 2020, or Puma’s environmental profit and loss account, are all directly linked by a comprehensive design strategy. These three companies didn’t consider sustainability an ‘additionality’. Instead, these organisations each evaluated their core corporate mission and developed a method of integrating sustainability into each part of the business – from the ground-up.

Tackling Design Obstacles

To deliver sustainable success, the first step involves evaluating your business model and processes for not only obstacles, but also opportunities.

An intimidating task for one individual, this is where you begin to source ideas from your surroundings: speak with your engineers, supply chain managers, other trusted colleagues and external consultants.  Provide an open forum for exchange and encourage innovation. Perhaps even take another lesson from Mr. Jobs and hold small-scale ad hoc meetings for employees keen to present “the coolest new thing ever” (Mr. Jobs’ words) to their colleagues.

Adaptable Design and Long-Term Sustainability

Where design acts as the seed of sustainable change, adaptability will be required to grow sustainable wealth in your organisation.

The challenges of designing an effective programme to deliver sustainable change are broad and varied. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution and an adaptable attitude is essential to creating an appropriate design. Ideas must continue to flow and sustainability programmes ought to be created with the flexibility to accommodate and capitalise on these new ideas.

For the second post in this series about Process and Communications, click here.

This post first appeared on the GreenWise Business Blog.

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Carbon Reduction Commitment

An example of the potential power of reputation is the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC).  The effectiveness of it might have been reduced due to its conversion to a form of tax, yet it nonetheless offers the prospect of highlighting high performers, mid-table dawdlers and low-end laggards.

A company’s placing in the CRC League Table is already influencing the minds of boards that report into the CRC.  Coupled with the increasing price of energy, boards are beginning to realise that a poor placing in the table may hit their bottom line with both direct and considerable force.

Recognition & Loss Aversion

The other dawning realisation in boardrooms is the reputational aspect of the CRC.  The organisations that have succeeded in the first league table will be congratulating themselves and those at the bottom will be considering what went wrong.  Coming in the bottom quartile of a league table is often a more powerful driver for change than success.  This is a well known behavioural trait called loss aversion (ask a sacked football manager for his views on this).

The most powerful external recognition/loss aversion drivers are those against your direct competitors.  Considering how competitive certain industries are (food retailing for example), you would not want to be the energy manager of the organisation that came bottom of your section of the CRC League Table.  Serious questions would be asked by your boss, and perhaps even the board.  To detail the ranking of particular industries, the sustainability management software experts at Hubsphere have created a very useful break down of the league table.  You can access their information here.

Internal Status

The power of reputation and status also works internally.  Departments, sites and individuals are often put in league tables.  Even if they have no direct financial benefit attached to success, there is often fierce competition both to come first, and possibly even stronger, not to come last.  Furthermore, recognition via awards and other similar tools offer a great motivator for people.  These incentives make people feel good about their efforts, increase their own internal PR and also makes others perhaps even a little jealous and motivated to contribute.

There are some great of examples of making the power of internal reputation work in sustainability, including InterfaceFLOR.  For more detail, you can read the GreenWise blog I wrote about them here.

Leveraging Reputation

In summary, if you want to deliver sustainable change, regardless of your organisation, one of your most important tools is leveraging both internal and external reputation to create multiple benefits.

This article first appeared on the GreenWise Business Blog.

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Due to your position you are expected to manage a number of areas of your organisations environmental sustainability.  This can cover your technical building systems, waste & recycling contracts, standards such as ISO14001 or CDP and last but not least, how to engage your people and create sustainable behaviour change.

In the five years that I’ve been running PeopleProfitPlanet, it is always this final point, of engaging people, which comes out as the most challenging, and the area where people have the least experience.  The good news is there are organisations, both famous and not so famous, who have successfully engaged and changed their people.

Where to start?

The key is to take a step back and think about this as a normal change management situation.  Within your organisation you will have had new systems and process brought in (e.g. IT, HR, Finance), and if this has been done successfully, there will always be a plan behind this.

A famous example of this is Marks & Spencers ‘Plan A’. M&S head of Sustainability, Mike Barry, spoke at a PeopleProfitPlanet event recently. He said Plan A wasn’t seen as a ‘nice to do’ CSR project, but from the outset was presented as a long-term project, which needed both a business case building and senior buy-in.

What delivery tools do I go for?

OK so, you have a plan, senior leadership are bought in, but a plan is only as good as its delivery.  It is critical therefore that you choose delivery tools that are appropriate for your organisation and will engage and even excite people to take action.  Also make sure that you engage with fellow colleagues to check out what they know has worked or failed.

Just as in other change management fields, you will also need to approach this with both carrot and stick: reward high achievers, but also give targets so middle managers know when they are falling behind.

An example of a small company that delivered excellent results when it utilised simple and easy tools to engage and focus its staff and management is Keycare.  They reduced their paper usage by a whopping 64 per cent in the space of one quarter and car mileage by 37 per cent over a year.  Further detail of this case study can be found here.

Can I rest on my laurels?

You’ve now spent a year delivering the tools set out in your plan with considerable success.  Can you rest on your laurels?  Well you could, but if you do, you might find yourself back to square one after another year.  Sustainability isn’t something that comes naturally to most staff or organisations and so it is a case of ensuring you not only keep going, but also keep innovating and involving everybody from senior leaders to grass roots staff.

As Mike Barry says the journey up to now for him hasn’t been easy and he believes M&S is only 10 per cent of the way along their journey to true sustainability (but that’s for another blog!).

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People Driven Sustainability

As HR is now a developed management discipline and many organisations are only just starting to understand sustainability, to be able to exploit People Driven Sustainability, it is absolutely key that an organisation involves the HR department.  Your first job will be to help your HR colleagues understand how sustainability can help them in their role of delivering a more effective workforce, and why sustainability is key at delivering broad organisational goals.

At PeopleProfitPlanet we have developed an approach to managing sustainability called the ‘E³Approach’, this stands for Establish+plan > Empower+deliver > Embed+own, and I will use this to outline some of the methods of engagement that HR can provide.

Establish+plan

HR professionals are very aware of the famous maxim ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’ and they can offer a key support in delivering a robust sustainability plan.  This will enable you to bring some rationality and rigour to choosing the empowerment and embedding tools.  For example it is critical to understand the attitudes of management and grass roots staff.  In many organisations, HR will already have created ways of doing this through surveys or focus groups. Utilise these to find the information.

Empower+deliver

There are many tools HR can help deliver to increase your sustainability.  A key part of HR’s role in managing an organisations employees are the appraisal mechanisms and targets/KPI’s which are utilised to create carrots and sticks.  Work with your HR department to create appropriate targets, for example in energy reduction or increasing webinar use.  This could be done on an individual or departmental level.

Embed+own

An excellent method of ensuring that you begin to create ownership of sustainability is by involving your people in the ongoing innovation of this field: leading to what we call ‘Sustainability 2.0’.  HR should be well versed in connecting with your staff and gaining ideas from them, so utilise this experience.

The ideas I’ve outlined above are just some of the ways that HR can help you with your sustainability journey, so the message is: don’t delay, set up a meeting with your colleagues in Human Resources!

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This quote comes from the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development report ‘Motivated Staff Make Lighter Footprints’.  Training your management and staff in skills for sustainability is an excellent way of bringing your environmental policies to life. However the impact of an organisation’s employee engagement will only be as good as the commitment put into its green training.  To ensure a good return on investment, it is critical to ensure that there is sufficient time, money and thought put into a environmental training programme.

Over the last five years, PeopleProfitPlanet has delivered training for sustainability to thousands of staff in dozens of organisations, sometimes with over 100 people in the room or as little as four on webinar. What is apparent through all the work we’ve carried out is that the better planned the training the more success it has, both in the long and short term.

How do you get training participants engaged?

It is important when delivering green training that the direct engagement has a number of characteristics that ensure the participants gain the maximum value from their time spent in the training room or on the webinar.  First and foremost, it is crucial that participants recognise that the green course is something that will be good not just for the planet, but also their organisation.

It is also very important that the training – and trainer – should be engaging, interactive and professional. If some fun and humour can be injected into the session, even better.  An example of this is when we have delivered a three-hour training for ‘Green Champions’.  The session is split relatively equally between considering the commercial and environmental drivers behind taking action (where they play ‘Carbon Bingo’), thinking how the Champions can become ‘Great Green Influencers’ and finally what and how they are going implement when they get back to their office.

Should you take into account different needs?

When planning and designing the green training programme we need to start by recognising that different organisations and people have different triggers and needs.  This point was well made by, Ramon Aratia, Sustainability director at InterfaceFLOR at one of our recent events, when he observed that: “Every person has a different door” (see my previous GreenWise blog for further detail).  Therefore, ensure the training is familiar to the participants, and also help them achieve their objectives as easily as possible and in a way that fits with their core job role.

How do you stop green training being a ‘nice to do’ activity?

However good the actual training session is though, it will only deliver long lasting value to the organisation if it follows a good management planning and embedding process (e.g. PPP’s E³Approach).  This structure of preparation and follow up is very familiar to experienced managers and training professionals, but because some organisations still see sustainability as a “nice to do”, it is often ignored.  It is important that people are excited and engaged even before they get through the door, and there is impactful follow up (such as a webinar) after the event to help them retain their learning.

So, in summary, you need to remember that old maxim: failing to plan is planning to fail!

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Any great sustainability story will appeal to appeal to the heart, head AND wallet. To translate these in terms which should resonate for a business story, I’d suggest these are represented by Ethics, Authenticity and Commerciality

Wallet/Commerciality
To many people and organisations environmental sustainability is a bonus; what they really care about is delivering a great service or product and staying profitable. If you can demonstrate that sustainability and profitability are intertwined, then that creates to an immediately powerful story.

Head/Authenticity
Your people, customers and suppliers will appreciate honesty and humility, and will see through any attempts at greenwash

Heart/Ethics
Focus on your ethics, e.g. why are we doing this? Whilst people need to see their company is being profitable the Harvard Business Review (http://bit.ly/nRmbAZ) recently observed that; “Everyone knows a business needs ethics, customers, and profits, but a lot of companies fail because they get the sequence wrong. The most common mistake is to put profits first. When you do, numbers become all-important, and you can justify almost any behaviour if it makes money.” Doing the right thing will help drive your profitability and loyalty of staff, suppliers and customers.

If you want more ideas on how to influence culture, the Harvard Business Review also has some more tips here: http://bit.ly/oattIB

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