If you sit at a table of sustainability professionals and ask them to name their top three industry leaders you can pretty much guarantee most, if not all, of them will name InterfaceFLOR as one of them. For those who have never heard of them, they produce around a third of the world’s carpet floor tiles.
I’d personally put InterfaceFLOR as the leading exponent of sustainability globally. A few years ago I, therefore, felt lucky to meet Ramon Arratia, who is Interface’s Sustainability director for Europe, Middle East, Africa and India. Whilst it would be a real privilege for my company, PeopleProfitPlanet, to work for Interface, I recognised that the best thing for our consultancy would be to partner with them. This is because the practices we empower and advise organisations to take, are pretty much what Interface has been working towards for the last 15 years!
Earlier this month, this partnership was realised at a breakfast event that PeopleProfitPlanet organised and which was held at the InterfaceFLOR showroom near the Barbican Centre in London with around 20 senior sustainability officers in attendance.
So what did Ramon Arrita have to say about Interface’s journey? First of all it was a humble tale: they are aware that they have been working on sustainability for over 15 years now, and as well as making many great strides, they have made many mistakes on the road. They are also very aware that they still have a long way to go to achieve true sustainability; in fact they have set themselves a target called ‘Mission Zero’; to eliminate any negative impact they have on the environment by 2020.
How are they doing this?
The first key step is recognising that in addition to it being the right thing to do, it also makes commercial sense on many different levels; not only does it save cost, but it also marks them out from their competition and makes them a ‘sexy’ company to work for. As Ramon pointed out, making carpet tiles isn’t the most exciting industry in the world, but by making sustainability a core mission of the business, this has attracted some of the brightest people in manufacturing to work for them.
Ramon then took us through the top eight lessons learned by Interface in how to embed sustainability into organisations. In summary, these were:
• Show sustainability is part of the CEO’s thinking every day, not just in sporadic speeches on green issues
• Give sustainability status in the company
• Win over employees, one mind at a time using a targeted approach
• Make people accountable for sustainability goals
• Invest in employees to let them come up with solutions
• Engage with a purpose
• Reinforce the sustainability strategy in every communication
• Prevent cynicism
There isn’t space in this blog article to detail all of these, so as I will be writing a blog every month and I thought the best thing to do would be to give more detail about them over the coming months.
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