You have skills, knowledge and even qualifications that enable you to approach with confidence most of what you face week-to-week, apart from in one area: engaging people around sustainability.
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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