With President Trump recently withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, the subject of sustainability has once again stepped out of the realm of good business practice to the sphere of international politics and an outraged press. Whatever your opinion on this matter, one’s thing for sure: all this chatter around sustainability will have businesses wondering if they’re doing enough to tackle the size of their environmental footprint.
If you’re now considering your business’s environmental impact with renewed interest, or have seen recent developments as an opportunity to persuade key stakeholders to take it more seriously, here are some things you should be doing to ensure you’re tackling sustainability at a corporate level…
Hire the right people
Nowadays, it’s not just ‘fashionable’ for businesses to care about sustainability – it’s essential. Your reputation depends on it, as well as your profit and investment opportunities, which is why you’ll need to hire the right people to drive change in the right direction. Experienced sustainability officers are incredibly valuable to a business, so ensure you’re hiring individuals with the right skills, knowledge and values to drive sustainability advancements in your organisation.
Refine your strategy
As you’ll know, ‘sustainability’ is about so much more than recycling and finding renewable energy sources. But, that’s something that those who work outside of EHS issues often fail to understand, which means you’ll need to spend some time persuading key stakeholders and decision makers to work on a proper sustainability strategy. From getting buy-in from senior managers to putting together a resourcing plan for both the development of your strategy to its implementation, formulating and refining a sustainability strategy is crucial.
Invest in good quality software
A robust strategy inevitably requires having a process for capturing usable data relating to suitability. That way, you can translate data into something useful and meaningful to work towards your business’s goals. Good quality sustainability software, such as the kind available from the likes of Airsweb, will help you to measure, manage, report on and reduce your environmental footprint. It does this through a sophisticated range of real-time analytics tools and dashboards, giving your business the ability drill down into the causes of poor performance (or highlight strides in progress), while demonstrating compliance with targets and regulatory bodies.
Ultimately, good software takes your business’s sustainability efforts from to-do lists and Excel spreadsheets and frames it within a tool that’s designed to make a role relating to sustainability streamlined, thorough and efficient – so it’s worth checking your software is up to scratch, or replacing it altogether.
Attend sustainability summits
Finally, unless you have a great deal of resource to keep pouring into your sustainability initiatives, you risk falling behind on advancements that are happening in the industry. Close the gap by ensuring that representatives from your company are attending at least one or two sustainability summits every year, learning about recent developments while networking and coming back to the business with fresh ideas.