We often hear from our clients and our webinar participants that they find it hard to change their business towards a more sustainable direction because the others are not yet doing so. The others in the same industry might not be as ambitious as you but who stops you from creating, accelerating standardization and inviting the others to share within your industry? We have only one answer to this. Shift your focus from what you cannot do to what you can do, and look at your business operations and processes from that perspective. Think of the sustainability actions you can take right away, create best practices yourself and start measuring first against yourself. You know your business and its sustainability challenges the best and it doesn’t require more than one company (you) to have an impact with its own example to the industry it operates. Then start integrating sustainable practices in a smaller region and go from there. The others will follow.
Integrating sustainability into the business strategy is slowly but surely getting standardized, however we are not there yet. One partially missing piece is governments active participation, the regional and national laws and legislations that needs to take place in order to get everyone involved. Setting standardizations to industry based goals, data sets and providing tools for measurement are in a key role supporting the change.
Image by Tim Mossholder at Unsplash
Ticking the boxes is not enough
Internal and external stakeholders’ requirements are getting more and more towards environmental, social and economic sustainability which leads companies to quickly tick the boxes. Specifically, owners, clients, investors and partners require sustainability strategy. So, once the sustainability plan listing your actions is successfully published, it’s not the time to tick that box and place feet on the table. Therefore managing the integration of sustainability into the everyday activities and efficiently communicating on the impacts and actions is important. Cutting your biggest challenges into small, measurable and concrete actions is the best way to manage a sustainability plan. When you can show your impacts, be concrete with your actions and measure your journey towards your goals, you are on the right track.
Communicate your sustainability performance
To sum up, we encourage you to start small and avoid making empty promises at the same time as using sustainability as a competitive advantage, promotional benefit, brand booster and a way to save costs. Showing impacts and openly communicating on actions progress brings the insight to your sustainability plan that you want to implement.
Working together within industries and policy-makers, sharing information and communicating on performance is the key in systemic change. Many companies are already doing the right thing but they do not necessarily understand how impactful it is to communicate efficiently and consistently about the progress. The more companies take the lead to communicate on sustainability, the more other companies follow the trend. Are you the one?
Read more about the business benefits of sustainability here.