Getting Your Company Started
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2. Land some quick wins — go for cost savings. To start, prioritize and focus on capturing the low-hanging fruit. Look for opportunities that will deliver results quickly, such as increasing efficiency and reducing waste. Scan your business and look for logical opportunities to save money and develop measurable metrics to track results.
3. Be authentic. If you are going to use sustainability as a product differentiator, be sure you have done all you can to be authentically green. This does not mean you have to be perfect. Consumers want honesty and transparency, not perfection. But with today’s social media tools, it only takes a moment on Twitter for someone to accuse you of greenwashing.
4. Develop internal partners. For directors getting started, begin to network throughout the company and create relationships with directors who oversee key functions, including product design, procurement, sales, supply chain, governmental affairs, social investment, analyst relations and employee engagement. Look for opportunities to gain their trust and educate them on the value sustainability offers the company, including product differentiation that can capture market share and drive top-line revenues.
5. Engage your stakeholders. McIntosh suggests meeting with as many people as you can outside of your company, “prioritizing to meet with the most influential and interested stakeholders first.”
“Stakeholder engagement is an important, essential element in good citizenship and good business strategy. You need to know what issues are most important to the people that are most relevant to your business,” suggests McIntosh.
Include your supply chain, customers, investors and employees in your outreach so you can understand what leadership looks like or what risks may be coming. What issues do they care about? What is important to them? How are they tackling their end of the equation? Answers to these questions can help inform your strategy and programs.
6. Engage employees. If you are short on resources to implement new programs, look to your employees. Bonnie Nixon, Director of Environmental Sustainability at Hewlett Packard, explained that the company engages employees on multiple levels, ranging from providing them energy kits to reduce their personal carbon footprint at home to offering incentives for biking to work to encouraging them to innovate more and find ways to imbed sustainability into product design, the supply chain and the sales process.
7. Develop a communications strategy. A key component to a sustainability program is communicating both internally and externally about your efforts and results. Develop a strategy that details how you are going to communicate your efforts — both your successes and future areas for improvement.
8. Develop a long-term strategy. Going green does not happen overnight. Hunter Lovins, the president and founder of National Capitalism Solutions warns, “avoid the temptation to be green all at once. This is a years long process, like continuous improvement.”
Bonnie Nixon adds, “in addition to a short-term strategy, you need to develop a longer term plan that looks at potential trends and regulations out there and what your future customer segment is going to look like.”
Ultimately, you want to aim for an authentic strategy that is linked to your company’s mission, vision, brand and values that will deliver significant, quantifiable, bottom-line results.
Other Resources to Help Get You Started:
Green IT For Dummies, is an entertaining and easy to read guide on ways to get your company on a “green” or “sustainable” pathway. This book gives you pointers on how any organization can decrease their impact on the environment. Though the focus is initially on IT, many of the pointers are extremely relevant to other manufacturers, and even service industry businesses. The focus is to help all parts of any organization to become more environmentally friendly, in the areas of transport, energy, and more. This book is highly recommended!
Grow Me the Money is an Australian site, designed for Small and Medium sized businesses that are getting started on Greening their businesses. The link will take you to their “Top Actions for Greening Your Business”. Many companies will already have addressed some or many of these, but it is a nice list to get anyone started. Click on any of the Actions for in-depth discussion of what is meant, the benefits and how to implement. You do not need to register to access the information.
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The Role of Human Resource Management in Corporate Social Responsibility – Coro Strandberg Consulting This report provides recommendations for human resource professionals in developing a firm’s capacity in sustainability.This will be most useful to companies who are just starting on their sustainability journey. Human resource professionals have a key role to play to help a company achieve its CSR objectives. They have the opportunity to leverage employee commitment to, and engagement in, the firm’s sustainability strategy. Sustainability can be integrated into the HR toolkit, thereby improving social and environmental conditions locally and globally.
A companion 10-step checklist is also available.
The Natural Step Primer Strategic, green advice is everywhere. But, the truly sustainable organizations succeed through collaborative, coordinated strategies. The Natural Step Sustainability Primer provides an excellent foundation for your sustainability program and to familiarize senior management with the basics of sustainability.
