How to start embedding sustainability in your daily work

SUMMARY

There is a clear financial benefit of becoming a responsible business that focuses on creating value for shareholders, customers, society, and the planet. According to McKinsey sustainability programs are strongly correlated with good financial performance. The challenge is embedding sustainability into the company culture so that everyone can contribute.

This post explains how employees can start to embed sustainability in their daily work, particularly in these four areas: Strategy, Value Chain, Operations, and Society. It’s adapted from a version created for Lloyds Banking Group.

Sustainability is a good business

Two-thirds of SMEs in Britain see the move to a greener economy, not just as a challenge to be met, but as a positive opportunity for growth according to the SMEs: Key Drivers of Green and Inclusive Growth report.

Sustainability continues to move higher up the agenda of CEOs around the world. Business leaders are starting to see a clear link between sustainability and business value, as it could help to develop a competitive advantage, attract new markets, reduce costs and increase employee satisfaction and retention. Sustainability has become a corporate imperative as it’s now a key part of the decision-making process for investors, authorities, customers, and employees.

Sustainability needs to be embedded into the company culture

To become a responsible business, CEOs should embed sustainability into their purpose, business strategy, and company values. For instance, Charlie Nun, Lloyds Banking Group’s CEO, has stated in the company’s 2021 climate report:

“Our focus on sustainability is core to our new strategy. We are focused on building an inclusive society and supporting the transition to a low-carbon economy as this is where we can make the biggest difference while creating new avenues for our future growth. It is only by doing right for our colleagues, customers, and communities that we can achieve higher, more sustainable returns for investors, whilst meeting the needs of broader stakeholders.”

Once the business has a clear vision of the role it wants to play to benefit society and the planet beyond its profit, the next step is to create the financial and organisational mechanisms to support the business to deliver on that vision. However, to become a sustainable business, it’s critical to develop and nurture a sustainability culture so everyone in the organisation is able to contribute to it.

More and more employees care deeply about the future and would like to contribute to fighting the climate crisis. However, they are not clear on how to behave at work in this regard. These are the things that you might hear them saying:

“I struggle to link climate change and scary statistics with daily life.”

“I don’t understand what sustainability means within my role.”

“I want to see us having an impact on things I see in the news.”

“I have no idea how to even begin measuring carbon footprint, let alone reducing it.”

Businesses need to enable all of their employees to contribute to their sustainability agenda. But how can they achieve this goal?

Embed sustainability into your organisation using a design principle

At Lloyds Banking Group, there have been multiple initiatives to consider sustainability and inclusivity in everything that we do.

I led one of the initiatives in order to create a Sustainability Design Principle to help guide our decisions. I set up a working group with colleagues from different business units to ensure that we created a principle that was relevant and applicable to everyone in Group Transformation.

The principle stated the following:

RESPONSIBLE

We care about the impact of our actions.

Customers are proud to bank with us because we keep environmental and social responsibility at the core of our products and services.

The principle is inspirational, defines a clear vision, and explains why it’s important. However, it doesn’t explain how it can be put into practice. As sustainability is a broad topic, we decided to focus on the environmental aspect of sustainability in order to explain how colleagues can make the planet a key stakeholder in their daily work.

We started by speaking with subject matter experts, and reading reports and playbooks such as the 1.5C business playbook, in order to understand where and how employees can include the planet as a key stakeholder.

Our conclusion was that employees will be Responsible if they continuously explore opportunities in four areas: Strategy, Value Chain, Operations, and Society.

RESPONSIBLE

We care about the impact of our actions.

Customers are proud to bank with us because we keep environmental and social responsibility at the core of our products and services.

We will be RESPONSIBLE by continuously exploring opportunities to:

• Integrate climate change into the business strategy

• Reduce our value chain emissions

• Reduce our operation’s own emissions

• Influence climate action in society through our services and data.

This report includes a guide to help employees to explore opportunities for each of these areas. It includes practical questions that every employee can use to start influencing change and help their teams to think differently about the impact their decisions make on the planet.

I’ve tested and iterated this guide with colleagues across different business units of Lloyds Banking Group with great results. In addition, various internal leaders and subject matter experts have also found it very useful and relevant for the whole company.

The table below provides an overview of key elements to consider within each area: Strategy, Value Chain, Operations, and Society:

The areas to explore provide an overview of different aspects employees could consider in order to reduce the company’s carbon emissions and start thinking of the planet as a key stakeholder in everything they do.

However, it’s difficult to know what to say to start challenging the status quo and how in practical terms they could assess the impact of their decisions on the planet. To help employees get started I’m proposing some questions for each area.

Questions are powerful because they create transformation, inspire innovation and result in true change. Giving people facts and information is helpful, but questions help teams to start thinking differently and reflecting on the impact of their decisions, not only on the business and the customer but also on society and the planet.

These questions should be asked, and answered, by a diverse team in order to reach deeper insights from different perspectives.

Below you will find a more detailed explanation of each area to explore, some questions to get started, and links to some useful resources to provide deeper context.

Areas to explore

Strategy

Integrate climate change into the business strategy

• Ensure teams’ OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) support the company’s sustainability commitments. Make sustainability a priority and influence stakeholders to get their buy-in.
• Assess risks and opportunities. Leaders and teams need to understand what are the physical, transitional, and reputational risks related to the climate crisis, and then explore creative ways to convert these risks into business opportunities that also deliver value to people and the planet. For example, reducing the number of letters sent to customers reduces cost, the need to cut more trees for paper, and waste.
• Create a business case that creates value for the business, people, and the planet. Explore opportunities to achieve the company’s objectives through a sustainability lens. To pitch the idea to key stakeholders and get funding, create a business case that explains how these opportunities generate value for the business, society, and the environment.
• Measure your carbon footprint and define targets to reduce it. Measure the current carbon emissions of existing services to ensure the proposed solutions will achieve some progress toward the targets defined by the team. For example, by 2025, in line with the company’s sustainability objectives, a team measures the carbon emissions of delivering a service and decides to reduce them by 50%. Therefore, on each decision, the team assesses how it could help them to achieve their targets.
• Balance short-term and long-term goals. Teams generally define their delivery plan for the next 12–18 months. However, with a clear long-term vision for the next 3–5 years, teams can align their short-term goals with the long-term vision.

Questions to get started:

• Why is it important to be responsible for the impact of our decisions at work?
• What is our current carbon emission and where should it be in 3–5 years?
• How could our team contribute to the company’s Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) commitments?
• What are the key benefits of the strategy for the business, the planet, and society?
• How could we go from ‘doing less harm’ to ‘doing more good’?

Resources:

• Three strategies for aligning your business with Sustainable Development Goals
• The comprehensive business case for sustainability

Value Chain

Reduce your Value Chain emissions

• A Value Chain is a process by which businesses use inputs (suppliers, people, technology, infrastructure, procurement, logistics, marketing, and sales) to create outputs or finished products or services to offer to customers in order to provide value to them.
• The sustainability of a company value chain is key to maintaining the integrity of a company brand, ensuring business continuity, and managing operational costs. Practicing eco-awareness in every aspect of the business improves business reputation. It also helps to increase business efficiency in order to deliver the most value for the least amount of expenditure, gaining a competitive advantage when its optimised.
• Teams should consider the impact of each of the inputs and outputs of their value chain’s carbon emissions as they will contribute to increasing the total carbon emissions of the services they create.

Questions to get started:

• What is the impact of the suppliers and partners we are using? Can we choose others with lower impact?
• What are our suppliers doing themselves? What are their priorities?
• How much energy is used in the production of the inputs and the outputs? Where does that energy come from?
• What are the transport inputs? What’s moving where? How are things moving around? Are we increasing or decreasing the use of sustainable types of transport?

Resources:

• Porter’s Value Chain
• Supply Chain Sustainability: A Practical Guide for Continuous Improvement

Operations

Reduce your own emissions

• Teams should consider the impact of their decisions when creating products and services to avoid unconsciously doing harm. Applying systems thinking approach to sustainability will help teams to better see and understand the impacts of their business decisions and avoid unintended consequences. It will also enable them to explore opportunities for innovation and assess how each element of an end-to-end service proposition will impact people and the planet.

Teams should seek to:

• Reduce the environmental impact of their products, services, and processes
• Develop socially and environmentally sustainable solutions, beneficial for people and the planet
• Design out waste of raw materials and energy by optimising consumption at each stage of the product/service life cycle. In digital services, a service lifecycle includes software and visual assets, design and development, server uploads, network downloads, interaction, disposal of data, code obsolescence, and investing in updates.

Questions to get started:

• How could we optimise the energy consumption of the services we deliver?
• How can we minimise waste?
• In what other ways can we reduce our carbon footprint and our customers’ carbon footprint?
• Inputs: Where in the product/service lifecycle are inputs creating the biggest impact? Look at each stage of the process: The creation, testing, launch, and maintenance of the applications; the hosting and servicing of these applications; the downloads and interactions of users within these applications. Can they be changed to something lower impact?
• Outputs: What gets used or created as a result of people using the product or service? Examples include waste such as packaging, transport, and data.

Resources:

• Designing for sustainability. A guide to building greener digital products and services by Tim Frick
• Digital waste and its impact on the planet by Gerry McGovern
• How to stop data centres from gobbling up the world’s electricity
• Principles for Designing sustainable services by SNOOK

Society

Influence climate action in society through our services and data

Teams should be looking at:

• Helping customers and society to understand the impact of their actions
• Empowering customers and society to adopt sustainable practices

Questions to get started:

• User action: What are users doing? What decisions are they making? Why? Are we encouraging or enabling an unsustainable choice or behaviour?
• Habits/Behaviours: Is our service creating or modifying any behaviours or habits? What is the knock-on effect? If they switch to this service away from another, is the environmental impact better or worse? Are our default options making it easy for people to make poor decisions?

Resources

• Closing the ‘say-do gap’: How businesses can help consumers build sustainable habits
• The CEO Imperative: Make sustainability accessible to the consumer
• 5 ways to shift consumers towards sustainable behaviour

Conclusion

To become sustainable and responsible, a business should embed sustainability in the company DNA and empower their employees to adopt sustainability practices in everything they do.

The four ‘areas to explore’ aim to help employees to start considering the impact of their decisions, not only on the business and the customer but also on society and the planet.

Employees from all areas of the business can start exploring opportunities to make the planet a key stakeholder in their daily work by asking questions such as the ones suggested for each area.

These questions are designed to help anyone in the organisation start a conversation with their team about the impact they have on the environment and what to do about it.

In your next team meeting test one of these questions with your team and observe where it takes you. You will be surprised.

What do you think? Can you see this approach working for your organisation? Join the conversation in the LinkedIn group: ‘SustainabilityTransformation’, I’d love to read your comments and feedback.

About the Author

Paola Miani

Paola is a leader in strategic design and innovation, with more than 20 years of experience designing multi-channel experiences for tier-one international companies in different sectors including telecommunications, government, banking, insurance, travel, and retail.

Paola is the former Head of Design Culture at Lloyds Banking Group. In this role, she worked with key stakeholders across the organisation to develop a design-led culture in order to help the bank to transform and adapt to constant changes in the market and in customer expectations. She has led the creation of the ‘Value Circuit’, an approach that combines Design Thinking and Agile to help colleagues to learn rapidly what matters, which she scaled up with the creation of an online course for the entire Group.

Paola’s purpose is to use her skills and experience to help create a sustainable world in which people can live in harmony with the planet. Her passion to use Design as a catalyst of change motivated her to take the Cambridge Sustainability Management course, which gave her the background and inspiration to lead several initiatives at Lloyds Banking Group, including the ‘Sustainability Design Principle and areas to explore’ described in this post, in order to develop a sustainable culture where employees know how to contribute to sustainability goals in their daily work.