Every job should be a climate job. But we can’t do the work without operational targets.
Last week, our second cohort completed Low Carbon Business School’s foundational five day email course ‘Introduction to Low Carbon Business’. Our goal with this course is to help employees, particularly of consumer goods companies, see themselves as part of a system of climate action. Breaking down the role of businesses, the role of products, and the opportunities for individuals to influence both — we hope we can encourage every participant, in any job, to see their job as a climate job. Moving from understanding to action is essential for every workforce. Why?
“Somewhere along the way individuals caused this whole mess, and it’s up to us to fix it. If the world won’t listen to me as an individual, perhaps they’ll listen to the voice of a company of a thousand individuals.”
There’s a heavy focus on individual climate actions as a consumer. Eating less meat, flying less, shopping sustainably. All are important — but we’ve missed a crucial area of influence that everyone has. Our work.
What if we took some pressure off individuals to be ‘perfect’ consumers, and helped them understand the impact of their decisions at work instead? We dig into how this can be achieved through businesses and products in our course. A key reason is compound impact and influence.
If a product designer makes a material choice that reduces the greenhouse gas emissions of that product by 3%, it might not seem like a huge amount. Then consider sales of that product are in the hundreds of thousands, every year. That 3% is a huge reduction — intentional or not. Decisions are made every day that influence a business’ or product’s environmental impact, but so many of these decisions are taken either without realising or without a clear understanding of how — we have to change this.
At MadeFrom, we want to push a product to be better, each time a product is designed or redesigned. To do this, everyone involved in bringing a product to life must see themselves as a crucial part of a system of action, where every decision can make a difference.
Our mission at Low Carbon Business School is to facilitate this. Every job should be a climate job (if you haven’t seen Jamie Alexander’s TED Talk on this topic, I highly recommend it).
The missing step: operational targets.
More and more companies are declaring their ambitions for net zero. 60 of the UK’s FTSE 100 companies have signed up to the UN ‘Race to Zero’ campaign, and pledges from UK businesses have quadrupled in the last year alone (Gov). Recently, renewed commitments by the Fashion Industry Charter for Climate Action put in place a decarbonisation plan, calling for companies to halve their emissions by 2030 (up from a 30% reduction by 2030) and align with the Science Based Targets initiative (SBTi) (read more on that here).
This should indicate that more and more employees are considering the environmental impact of each decision they make. All too often, this isn’t the case. Responsibility is felt at the strategic level, and rarely filters down to operational decisions by individuals. Employees don’t see themselves as someone tasked to meet ambitious company goals. For targets to be realised, this needs to change.
Let’s take an imaginary ‘Company A’, a mid-sized 7 year old shoe company with ambitions to be net zero by 2030 and to reduce the product footprint of their shoes by 50% by 2025. Inside Company A, the 5 person strong sustainability team is working round the clock to set, track and meet those targets. A large portion of their time is spent communicating with other departments around goals, implementing initiatives to meet them, and working hard to collect important data from the company and its complex supply chain. They’re the experts, and it’s reassuring to the rest of the company that they will ‘handle it’. However, the sustainability team isn’t designing the shoes, and a 50% reduction in emissions from each pair of shoes is a reduction that needs to be designed. Product designers and product developers within Company A need a basic understanding of how each small choice can make a difference, and ultimately how their actions can influence progress towards the two company targets. Importantly, they also need to understand the significance of this challenge, and what impact their business can have if those targets are met.
How can we bridge this gap, and enable every employee to see themselves as taking climate action? One of the most important things any CSR, ESG or sustainability team can do within an organisation is to make targets operational. Big commitments need to be operationally relevant for employees within a business. Many businesses, especially when aiming to reduce their Scope 1 and 2 emissions, focus on commuting, office emissions, and business trips in their employee engagement strategies.
But what does a target mean for decisions made by individual teams? How does it fit alongside existing OKRs, KPIs, or any other performance indicator? You have to make goals and targets relevant within performance frameworks and existing company structure — otherwise it doesn’t truly appear in people’s day to day jobs.
The challenge: To avoid being job agnostic.
For managers, and those in charge of translating targets into action, helping your junior product developer and senior marketing manager individually understand their points of influence is a necessary challenge — but their workflows are completely different. I’m not suggesting we add more to the task list for already busy managers. If anything, better alignment, from a clearer system of aligning employees, will ideally reduce time spent tracking, collecting and managing information on changes being made.
In time, structures within companies will be reengineered to allow existing jobs to have a clearer path to positive environmental impact. Fundamentally, it’s another form of adaptation. We can’t tear down existing companies, particularly successful thriving ones that are serving customers and demonstrating that through sales.
However, it is a skill to be able to look at existing processes, workflows, systems and say: how do we embed something within this that doesn’t fundamentally change it, but helps us adapt to the shifting environment around us? Harnessing thousands of employee decisions is a good place to start.
So next time you think that an individual action can’t change a system, remember that it’s a series of individual actions that have created our current system. Operational employee action is a crucial point of influence that can lead to better products, better businesses, and a better world for us all.
I’d love to hear from employees who have acted on behalf of the climate at work, in big and small ways. We all have a lot to learn from you. Please get in touch if you have a story you’d like to share, or forward this to a friend if you know of someone who does.
Finally, we’ve had some really great feedback on our ‘Introduction to Low Carbon Business’ course so far. Cohort 4 closes soon, you can sign up here.
