Nov 135 min read

An A-Z of Sustainability: X is for eXchange eXperiences

OK I’m cheating this week with X, but you try linking sustainability with a xylophone or X-rays!!

This week we are looking at eXchanging eXperiences, something that is important for sustainability managers whether you are at the beginning of your company’s journey or whether you have a well-established programme of activity. It’s important both in sharing experiences from a practical point of view, but also in terms of establishing a support network.

Getting the internal team together

There are benefits to be had from sharing both internally and externally to your company. We’ll start by looking at internal sharing. Unless you are only a small company you will likely have multiple sites from which your company operates. Whilst there are cross-learnings from offices to labs to factories to shops, it can be more beneficial to compare like with like. What I nearly always find with companies is that certain sites have done particular actions, proving that the activity works, and yet most if not all sites have not done everything. You might have had someone in one site whose key focus was energy efficiency, so their site has got LED bulbs, motion sensors, heat pumps etc, whereas another site has focused on waste and taken away general bins, replacing them with segregated collection streams and also taken actions to reduce waste at source.

A good place to start, particularly in the earlier stages of building a sustainability programme, is to get teams from different sites together and share what they have done, maybe focusing on different topics at different meetings. As well as looking at the technical aspects of what they have done (how much it cost, what did it save etc.) also get them to talk about the softer aspects. What barriers did they have to overcome, what concerns did people have before they started, what training was required, how did they celebrate success, what would they do differently? These are often the most useful parts of the discussion as this is really where a lot of the hard work is in sustainability implementation.

Benefits of sharing roll out

Even if you have a well-established sustainability programme this is still worth doing occasionally. One thing I see time and time again is where a site has implemented something successfully, but it has not been rolled out everywhere. Sometimes this is because of company culture, where sites are pretty much autonomous, so the sharing is more along the lines of “if you did want to do this sort of activity this is what we found when we did it.” But whatever your culture, I would really encourage you to move beyond this to “if it works there, it should happen in all sites unless there is a very good reason why not.” In this way you can use activities as pathfinder projects, learning a lot and using that to ensure successful implementations in all sites. Different sites can pilot different projects but with the intent that all sites will then implement them if the pilots have been successful. This can be especially beneficial approach where there is a lot of up front spend, learning in one site before you spend the capital for all sites. Even if your company culture is such that you can’t mandate centrally, you can still move from “sharing to inspire” where you are just offering up ideas, to “sharing to challenge” where you are sharing and then challenging people to think about how it could work for them.

The reason why sharing is so important is so that we can learn from others’ experiences, both good and bad. Why would we want to do everything from scratch when people have already made the mistakes and we can avoid them, allowing quicker and more successful implementation of plans? Internal sharing may help, but sharing externally opens up a vastly bigger pool of experience to draw on and yet often companies are very reluctant to do so. Let’s look at some different ways that you can bring some outside experience in.

Industry associations

One place to consider is industry associations. These can be particularly useful where you are having to deal with new regulations or requests from customers. By working together through the association, you can bring some degree of standardisation to such aspects, making them more efficient for everyone and drawing from industry specific experience. One thing to be careful of here though is competition law. The UK government published guidance in this area last year and it is worth reading if you are looking at industry collaboration on sustainability related activity. You are able to collaborate to educate consumers as an industry, and you are able to collaborate on standards. In certain circumstances an environmental sustainability agreement between competitors that restricts competition may still be lawful if it meets the criteria for an exemption.

For instance, “agreements that result in price rises (for example, because the more sustainable input is more expensive) may be permitted if businesses can show the benefits of the agreement to consumers who purchase the product or service outweigh the additional costs to those consumers.  If an agreement helps to combat climate change, the benefits of that agreement for all UK consumers may be able to be considered.”  My advice if you are planning any work with competitors either directly or via industry associations is to read the full guidance and seek legal advice in all cases. The consequences for you and your business if you get it wrong can be very serious.

You could cast your net wider than your industry and use wider peer groups – people who are in similar situations to yourself but in very different industries. Just going to conferences and hearing speakers or chatting in coffee breaks can be useful, and there are many LinkedIn groups too for sustainability professionals. There are also cross-industry working groups on any number of topics, set up by the participants themselves or by third party organisations who will facilitate either industry specific groups or groups related to particular types of companies e.g. retailers or manufactures, to help share experience. Again, be mindful about what you share with regard to competition law, but this can be a great resource to get answers to questions and learn from other people’s experiences.

The benefits of consultancies

Lastly you can draw from the experience of companies like CEN Group who have supported many different companies across many different industries. You are likely to get more bespoke support and advice this way from the consultants and their own subject matter expert groups, and in some cases, they may also be able to put you in contact with some of their other clients directly. Whilst it can be useful to have contacts in other organisations like yours, having experts on hand who have encountered the same issues several times, no matter what the topic, can be extremely beneficial and save a lot of time and energy.

One of my old bosses always used say “none of us is as smart as all of us” and we’ve all been told “don’t reinvent the wheel”. Whatever route you take, I would definitely urge you to exchange experiences and collaborate with others. You’ll make better decisions and have more successful activities if you do.

About the Author

Chris is a senior strategic leader with over 25 years’ commercial experience including sales, marketing, strategic planning and major business change initiatives at AkzoNobel and ICI. He has a wide knowledge of sustainability and how to integrate this into business having held senior sustainability roles at AkzoNobel for 12 years, including as Global Sustainability Director Decorative Paints and AkzoNobel Planet Possible Programme Manager. Chris is now an independent sustainability consultant and a pension trustee director.