BuildBackBetter. Short and long term sustainability actions you can start in your business today.

BuildBackBetter. This phrase has been appearing across sectors as we negotiate our way through the challenges that COVID-19 has brought. The phrase implies we have a choice. It suggests that we can take control. It’s suggestive of optimism and of solutions. I’ll use this article to describe what I think it means in the context of building a more sustainable approach for business.

So much of the previous narrative on climate change and its effect on our planet, our people and our economies has been fatalistic. It’s too late, the trajectory we’re on means all we can do is limit damage and we can’t really change the inevitable outcome.

COVID 19 has provided a shake up to the foundations we’re built on. The death toll is horrendous and the disease continues to cause huge suffering. Our global reaction to the disease and the subsequent pausing of business (even for a short time) has meant that for those of us lucky enough not to have been directly impacted, we have had time to review what we previously thought of as normal business behaviour.

Now, I’m under no illusion that the economic wheels need to start turning. Priority will be rightly given to returning teams from furlough and getting back to a semblance of normal, as business leaders look to secure the long- term future of their business in an increasingly altered world.

However, amongst all of this there is an opportunity to question what was normal pre-March 2019. What decisions can be made that will have a positive and regenerative impact on our society, our environment and our business? Where can we align societal, economic and environmental impacts so a richer future is possible?

Whether you are naturally optimistic or not, the scale of the challenge can feel overwhelming. All of us working in this sector feel a degree of overwhelm at times. Under the banner BuildBackBetter there is scope to work on immediate actions, whilst spending time thinking and planning how to address the harder questions that are relevant to your business.

By taking immediate action and by starting to put plans in place, feelings of overwhelm disappear as your path to BuildBackBetter becomes more defined. Whilst we’re in a period of disruption, now’s the time to question everything. It’s also the time to get started, so I’ve listed below some ways to do this.

Immediate actions

We know the facts. Greenhouse gas emissions cause climate change which makes it harder for our planet to sustain human life. We have to cut global emissions in half by 2030, half again by 2040 and to net zero by 2050. Even this radical change only gives us a 50% success rate of hitting the 1.5 degrees target. We need to decarbonise and we need to do it now and there are steps you can take, over the coming weeks to do this.

Switch your business’s energy to green energy.

It’s easy to do, and it has an immediate impact. Encourage your teams who are working from home to do the same. Offer an incentive for them to do so and highlight the benefits it brings.

Review your travel policy

Homeworking has shown that we don’t need to be in the office every day, or to travel to meetings all of the time. Put some numbers on the savings you’ve made in carbon emissions from travel or hotel stays. It’s a good news story that can be celebrated and built on.

Promote active travel

Reward team members who travel by bike or foot. Why should employees be able to claim for car travel but not for travel on foot or by bike? We have to reward the behaviour change we wish to see.

Encourage public pledging

Sites like Do-Nation make it easy for your teams to make public pledges about changes they are going to make to their lifestyle which have a positive impact on society and the environment. It inspires idea sharing and a healthy dose of competition! It also keeps your teams connected at a time when many teams are still working remotely.

Get a benchmark of your business’s carbon emissions- Scope 1,2 and 3

We know that what gets measured gets done and we know we need to decarbonise.

A good place to start is to measure your greenhouse gas emissions across your business using the greenhouse gas protocol. The diagram below gives a great visual representation of where each type of emission in your value chain sits. For many organisations this calculation is a mix of data and estimates. There is a process that can be followed and it doesn’t all have to be done at once. Start with scope 1 and then move on. The very act of getting started in measuring it, setting targets to reduce it and reporting on it can be galvanising for your leaders and teams. Especially as when looking at scope 1,2 and 3 it also becomes a great way to review potential cost savings.

Source: https://ghgprotocol.org/sites/default/files/standards/Corporate-Value-Chain-Accounting-Reporing-Standard_041613_2.pdf

The Carbon Trust are also a really useful go-to resource for advice and have a great guide for how to do this

https://www.carbontrust.com/resources/carbon-footprinting-guide

The likelihood is you have people in your organisation who would LOVE to do this piece of work with support and guidance. If they are involved in creating it, they’re likely to own it and promote it.

Longer Term- Materiality Assessment. Understanding your business’s impacts

For a longer term, more strategic approach the best place to start is with a deep-dive - a materiality assessment. It sounds like sustainability jargon, but it is such a useful tool both for forming your strategy and for reporting on.

Its basic premise is that it becomes a way of reviewing all of your businesses value-chain impacts. To start, you identify a list of material impacts across your business- covering economic, social and environmental impacts. It shows clearly where your company’s biggest impacts on the world are.

Once you have this list of issues, it’s important to gain stakeholder feedback on what is important to them and what they think is important to the business. This enables the list of impacts to be plotted on a grid. Unilever are often held up as an organisation that use their regularly conducted materiality assessment to shape their strategy and reporting- you can read how they do it here. Prioritising those issues which are important to stakeholders and important to the business ensures engagement, impact and focus.

Source: Unilever (link above)

It is also useful to position those impacts that the business can control and those which it can’t. Additionally, materiality impacts can be ranked by significance of environmental, economic and social impacts which gives a truer indication of where to start with your strategy.

In her article for Green Biz, Mia Overall shows the difference in axis for reporting (which is plotted against influence on stakeholder assessments and decisions) and for strategy (plotted against ability to influence or control).

Here at 7Forward we are always happy to be a sounding board, to offer advice and guidance through the process. In particular, as you’ll have seen above, business leaders need to be asking;

What can I do now?

What can I do over the coming months?

What can be done next year?

No doubt there are areas of great work that you are already doing that can be built on.

To really BuildBackBetter we all need to focus on regeneration.

As Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac say in their excellent book The Future We Choose, “ we can choose regeneration as the overarching design principle of our lives and our activities.”…..”when considering an action, we have to ask: does it actively contribute to humans and nature thriving together as one integrated system on this planet? If yes, green light. If not, red light. Period. “