1) Understand your baseline
“You can’t manage what you don’t measure”, so said Peter Drucker, the Austrian American management consultant whose work helped to form the practices of modern business. And it’s the starting point for financial directors worldwide.
Before setting any sustainable targets it’s essential to have a good understanding of where you are today. Separate everything in your business into categories; understand what you need to prioritise, where the low hanging fruit is, and what is the ‘biggest bang for your buck’?
In a rapidly changing market, with new technologies and entrants giving more choice than ever, it is so important for you to have access to your energy data and then, when you understand it implicitly, you can take those steps to reduce your consumption.
Data is vital to understanding how much energy your business uses as well as when and where. If you have the numbers to hand, you can start to reduce costs and increase your profit. Every business is unique and uses energy in different ways, and each will have its own opportunity to shop around and reduce costs; but only when the data is understood.
2) Be brave enough to lead the way
Disclosures are currently voluntary but under the TCFD’s recommendations, companies will be required to disclose the actual and potential impacts of climate change on their business and their supply chain, as well as how they manage the risks. This is potentially a seismic advance towards the global climate change standards that UK business is aspiring to.
Be prepared to be at the forefront and lead the change.
This is your opportunity to become a climate leader by playing your role in the global decarbonisation journey.
Companies are increasingly expected to take climate action. Setting Net Zero targets shows you’re taking responsibility.
3) Get your employees on board
If you are looking to create a robust sustainability strategy it is vital to have employee engagement. When creating a truly sustainable company you need to get your employees involved and personally engaged in your strategy.
Engaging employees in carbon reduction initiatives is an effective way to motivate staff and successfully achieve environmental goals. Companies can establish shared ownership of carbon reduction targets by taking a strategic approach to engagement and ensuring that leaders are accountable.
Paul Polman, CEO of Unilever, co-wrote a great article that describes eight ways to engage employees to create a sustainable business:
4) Report and communicate regularly
Once you’ve set a realistic target, start by setting some short and long term goals. You then need to report and closely track your performance and measure your impact.
Communicate you goals and performance with your employees, customers and shareholders; and share your challenges and celebrate your successes.
5) Collaborate with partners and the public
There is no single winner in the race to net-zero… we either win or lose together.
Collaboration is vital if we want to achieve the target of reaching net zero. We’ve already seen some collaboration between government, local authorities, business, the public and other stakeholders.
Work with your partners, colleagues and organisations in your sector and share best practices, solve problems and learn from others. And remember; be brave enough to lead the way… but don’t be afraid of sharing challenges with others.
What we do at Enerlytic
Spurred on by our passion for creating a greener world we have developed the Enerlytic informative energy platforms. Our goal is simple; to give power back to our clients and give them a clear overview of their energy usage and to help them with carbon reduction strategies.
Our insights and analytics platform allows businesses to see where they can reduce energy through behavioural change and energy efficiency measures.