Embedding sustainability: how you can achieve your objectives quicker

In a recent CBI Sustainability Community’s webinar on accelerating change in your organisation, Gregg’s Paul Irwin-Rhodes shared his top tips for integrating sustainability into wider corporate culture:

1. Try to engage and inform all of your colleagues and stakeholders. We try to take everybody's take into our decision making.
2. Show the cost of inaction. If you don't do anything, what would be the impact on the business? We talk to our economists and the board on a regular basis. Often with sustainability it makes a complete business and reputational sense to act, and we’ve made strong links between sustainability action and our risk management model.
3. To drive an accountability and performance, try to set quantitative targets. And if it has to be a qualitative target, make it a very strong one. This leaves less room for veering off track and keeps all our teams on track. It keeps our internal audit team happy as well.
4. Don't see the sustainability as an add on to your strategy. For Greggs it’s a key part of how we do business, it sits in our business plan and the commitments in the Greggs’ pledge.
5. Keep your reporting transparent, focused, and easy to read. At Greggs, we like to see what we've done and to explain why we haven't done well and where it's been a challenge. It means you’ll see a lot of reporting from us. It’s important to be keeping a constant drumbeat and not just having a half yearly review or a half yearly update for colleagues. We try and have something that we put out on a regular basis.
6. Engage with different groups at different levels to upskill and educate. At Greggs, we might do a high-level upskilling with our exec, or with some of our sustainability team, or a finance team. We create toolkits and give general advice to our colleagues in operations so they can make informed choices at home. It’s also important to consider a two-way approach, making sure everyone in your business has an opportunity to feedback. For example, our 30,000 staff can ask any question to our digital suggestion box. It goes directly to one of our senior management team and there is an expectation on them to respond. This generates energy, accountability and creates innovation.
7. For all your sustainability commitments, have an executive champion. This defined ownership helps drive delivery. To support this, Greggs has a clear governance structure, and we are clear as to where decision making needs to sit and where proposals needs to be made.
8. Creating a strong, responsible business brand is important. We've always done a lot of good stuff around sustainability at Greggs. We've been a responsible business for as long as Greggs has been around. Having that brand has been helpful. By openly committing to doing the right thing, it’s having a behavioural effect on people.