Business Sustainability Breakfast with Chamber of Commerce IOM
By Sarah Mercer
How do you kickstart ESG in your organisation? That’s what the Chamber of Commerce Business Sustainability Breakfast aimed to understand. We were delighted to be asked to speak as one of the guests, delivering an excerpt from our Building Sustainable Cultures talk (which you can get for your own organisation through our Catalyst Series!).
We developed the talk based on our research about what makes a sustainability strategy succeed. There are three main reasons for success. They are
- Leadership Support
- Employee Engagement
- Measurement and Reporting
As you can see, all three involve people. That means, organisations who want to succeed in their sustainability strategy need to know how to engage people. And that means building sustainable cultures. But how do you go about doing this?
To keep things easy, we split the actions needed into three: Direction, Embedding and Assessing Impact (with a little bonus suggestion if you read to the end).
1. Setting your Direction
The first step is to get your bearings. This involves understanding your current position, the landscape, and stakeholder needs. But don’t just focus on the usual suspects. Expanding your view to include supply chains, investors, employees, customers, communities, and nature itself will provide clearer direction and stronger support for your sustainability goals
Secondly, you can incorporate this knowledge into setting your goals. We won’t go into depth on the goal setting or governance part here, but we emphasise the importance of people in this process. Goals set with stakeholder interests and existing values in mind are far more successful.
Then you need to work out the course – the strategy to meet your people-led goals. Again, consider how your strategy will continually re-embed itself into the fabric of your company and stakeholder identity through a sense of ownership.
In our full talk, we delve into case studies of organisations who have done this effectively, and found significant improvement in their sustainability success.
2. Embedding Sustainability Throughout your Organisation
If you’ve done stage 1 well, this part is easy. Engaging people at the goal setting and strategy level means you have a running start on getting people on board with your organisations sustainability plans. Key actions here include creating a shared vision, highlighting people’s specific roles, and helping people make it part of their day to day roles.
Once you have people on board, you need to ensure you maintain continuous momentum for action, in essence, fuel the journey. This includes creating genuine feedback loops for continuous improvement, ensuring the values of the organisation are aligned with the vision, the vision is front and centre, and empowering people through training and engagement days. Training is one of the key actions (hence why Earthscope was established!), when done right. This means training that is:
- Aligned with organisational goals
- Collaborative and interactive
- At all levels of the organisations
- Long-term.
Training that covers all of the above generates empowered, engaged employees who are aligned with the vision and specifics of your organisations sustainability strategy, and who are contributing to the ongoing development of your sustainability transformation.
The final element in embedding sustainability is to empower leadership. To do this, leaders need to feel like they have an awareness of the interconnectedness of their organisation’s values and sustainability plans with the every day of their roles and duties. They also need to have an understanding that the demonstration of ethical leadership is also a powerful fuel for sustainable company culture.
3. Assessing Impact
And to address the final key for sustainability success – assessing impact. This can be done on the macro-level (emissions data, annual reports, KPIs etc) and the micro-level. This means understanding whether people talk about sustainability in their everyday conversations. Are pertinent issues on the agenda in meetings and performance reviews? Do people talk with enthusiasm about the purpose of the workplace? Do they feel ownership of what is happening?
Conclusion
Corporate culture change is hard to realise, but it’s also the holy grail of sustainability policy. Intrinsically motivated stakeholders are the ones who will push forward the long-term value of your company and hold you and others accountable for its sustainable development. In achieving this intrinsic motivation, their ownership, their sense of knowledge, agency, and identity towards the project, is absolutely crucial.
The Promised Bonus!
If you’re going to truly embed and reap the benefits of a wholehearted value shift to a sustainable corporate culture, learning to tell your sustainability story is crucial. Here on the Isle of Man we have a ready-made story to tie into. Something that binds together people, place, and a sustainable future: and that story is Biosphere.
As you enjoy the rest of your day, we hope that you will be thinking about how you can be part of the story of our global and our Manx Biosphere.
And if you’d like to have these insights tailored to your own organisation, and training that matters, our Catalyst Series (high-impact training) and Scopes Programme (full sustainability strategy and implementation support) have been designed for just that. See more below!
get in touch
Let’s Collaborate!
We are all stronger together – we want to work with all the other amazing people and groups working towards a flourishing Isle of Man, so tell us who you are and what you do!
EarthScope Enquiry
Tell us about you and your organisation and we will get back to you with how we can support your organisation’s sustainability goals.
EarthScope Isle of Man
hello@earthscope.im