Embedding sustainability: how to empower people to act

In a recent CBI Sustainability Community’s webinar on accelerating change in your organisation, Emily Hillier, Head of Customer Success at Pawprint, shared how you can make sustainability everyone’s business.

Understand fast vs. slow change

Within a business, there are some things that happen very fast. We get the news every day. We get emails. We get Teams messages. In contrast, some things may take a lot longer to change – such as your fundamental business model, your structure and how you finance your business.

Start with the things that are easy to affect and use them as a catalyst for changing the more fundamental things.

Embed the sustainability cycle

Approach every catalyst as a three-part problem:

• planning for
• activating, and
• reporting back on that change.

But don’t just work through each of these once – this is a wheel that keeps on turning. If you start the process and get round it, then you've got more information to do a better job the second time around.

Context is everything

It’s crucial to understand your context before you can apply this to your own organisation. What's your culture? What other things have you done that have worked? If, for example, your business has successfully rolled out a health app, or you’ve found a particular way of communicating with your employees works well, build on that.

It’s also important to understand the baseline, how much appetite people in different parts of the organisation have for it, and the history of what’s gone before.

Uncover the immediate opportunities to take action

Once you've understood this context, then you can start match that by thinking about the tangible actions to take. In firms where leadership team is vocal about sustainability and about their own actions, this has a big impact on how motivated and engaged people are across the organisation. If the leadership team don’t live and breathe it, it just makes people cynical.

Use reporting to kickstart the next round of planning and activity

Finally, reporting can be galvanized as a way of measuring the acceleration, the pace and the change. It’s about being honest about the successes and failures and making sure that everyone has their say.

In summary, if you want your people to get involved with sustainability, encourage them with the message and the action and don’t forget that they might like to be involved in the reporting too.