Sustainability is fast becoming just as important in the workplace as it is in our personal lives, offering numerous benefits for the environment, the economy, and employees.
There are many reasons your business should look to improve its green credentials. Workplaces significantly impact the environment through energy consumption, waste generation, and carbon emissions. Whether this is excessive printing, electronics being left on all night or no bicycle park facilities, the chances are your business is having a negative impact on the environment which, in turn, will hit your bottom line. Sustainable practices can include reducing energy and water consumption, lowering waste disposal costs, and supporting cost savings.
However, the rise of ESG clauses when onboarding new suppliers means sustainability initiatives are not just a “nice to have”, but a business imperative. Still need convincing? Well, here we’re going to look at why your business should seriously look to adopt a sustainability policy, and how best to go about this so as not to be left behind.
Benefits of a sustainable work environment
As alluded to above, there are many benefits to ensuring your workplace is sustainable, from both a commercial as well as social perspective:
Cost savings: Reducing waste, improving efficiency, and utilising renewable energy sources can save money on energy and resource consumption. In 2007, British retailer Marks & Spencer published its “Plan A”, requiring product suppliers to equip their traded products with sustainability attributes by 2015. While this is tough requirement for many suppliers, it made sustainability a prerequisite of doing business and helped to identify cost savings on both sides. After only two years’ time, the break-even point of the Plan A program was reached, according to Marks & Spencer. Nowadays it contributes tens of millions to the company’s profit every year.
Improved reputation for your employer brand: Demonstrating a commitment to environmental responsibility and social impact enhances your businesses reputation with customers, stakeholders, and the community.
Employee attraction & engagement: Employees are more likely to feel engaged and motivated when their company prioritises sustainability and social responsibility.
Health and well-being: Providing a safe and healthy working environment, encouraging physical activity, and promoting healthy eating improves employee health and well-being as well as lowering absenteeism.
Innovation: Sustainable workplaces foster creativity and resourcefulness, offering employees a wider set of opportunities to develop new skills and knowledge.
Regulatory compliance: It is also important to consider your suppliers & vendors respectively. As referenced earlier, ESG policies now often dictate that the sustainability credentials of suppliers are actively assessed, meaning that by not seriously implementing a sustainability policy by simply paying lipservice to it, the potential for falling short on new or repeat business you’re accustomed to, can have a material impact on revenue and profit.
Creating a Sustainability Policy in the Workplace
Implementing a sustainability policy must include environmental, social, and economic elements. However, before your company starts on its mission to become more sustainable, it’s important to set out why you want to do this and what you want to achieve.
Your policy should act as a roadmap, guiding employees as well as external suppliers on how they’re required to operate in order to help your business achieve its sustainability goals.
- Firstly, you will need to conduct an assessment to identify the areas in which you need to improve. This might be energy consumption, how you facilitate employees commute to their place of work or waste generation. Be open and transparent when assessing your business,flagging what areas you want as well as need to improve in.
- From here, you can develop a meaningful plan. Making sure you consider targets, actions, timelines, and responsibilities, you should then be checking in regularly to ensure these objectives are being met.
- Finally, you’ll need to communicate your policy. Internally, the sustainability policy will be used to underline your objectives with current and future employees as well as ensuring their buy-in.
- Externally, you should be communicating your goals to key stakeholders, whether that’s your investors, shareholders, clients or prospective new hires. It can also be provided to suppliers to show the standards that you expect of them.
The social, commercial and regulatory benefits of adopting a sustainability policy are clear and we anticipate this becoming an increasing priority for businesses across the world. Many of the global organisations we work with pride themselves on their green credentials and have inspired bpesearch to do the same. We’d be interested to hear the ways you’re improving your sustainability practices in the workplace, how they have been embedded as well as the obstacles you may have faced along the way.
