The 5 common mistakes of building an environmentally sustainable business, and how to avoid them

So you’ve decided you want your company to be more environmentally sustainable. That’s great news!

But are you about to make the mistakes that so many other companies do?

I’ve seen many, MANY organisations go through the same process of:

1. Getting excited about being sustainable,
2. Coming up with great ideas of all things they could do,
3. Creating grand plans,
4. Getting busy, and;
5. Wondering what happened to the big plans they made last year.

No sufficient change can be done in a day, a week, or a month. You have to be able to build the momentum, and bring the business ‘on the journey’ if you want to Make Your Change, and make it last.

We’ve identified the 5 common mistakes in creating a sustainable business, as well as the 5 Better Practices that will help your business to become more sustainable, reduce your emissions, and engage your staff on climate action.

Re-frame: Avoiding Carbon Reductionism

Carbon emissions are an important part of sustainability, but it is by no means the only part. Even if the entire world were to stop burning fossil fuels today, the land clearing, biodiversity loss, plastic pollution, strip mining, industrial agriculture and other massive threats would continue.

You can’t solve climate change by just reducing emissions. The more narrowly we define the problem, the more narrowly we define the solutions, and limit the good we can do.

Focussing on emissions also ignores the systems that create them. The lobbying of fossil fuel companies to get mining rights and political endorsement. The tax loopholes that are exploited to keep their profits high. The media outlets that spread denial, the big retailers encouraging ever more consumerism, the legal system that continues to ignore indigenous land rights.

You can’t measure any of these factors in terms of ‘tonnes of carbon’, yet they are just as much a part of the problem that needs to be solved.

We can’t just reduce emissions. We have to stop the systems that cause them, and help to build new truly sustainable systems.

The good news is: We already have most of the answers, and they’re not that hard, complex, or expensive. Often they turn out better for business, as well as society and the planet.

You don’t need more resources.

But you do have to be more resourceful.

The guidance below helps you to better understand how you can not only create a more environmentally friendly business, but change the system inside and outside your company to massively multiply your impact.

Mistake #1: Carbon foot-printing the whole business.

Many companies spend way more time, energy and resources measuring their carbon emissions, when those resources could be better put to use actually reducing it. Like someone stopping to buy a watch to better understand how late they are for the train, increasingly detailed measurements are unlikely to help you take better actions, measure performance, or demonstrate financial returns.

For example, almost any service-based business is going to want to improve the following areas:

• Adopting 100% Renewable Energy
• Reducing electricity usage through employee behaviour change
• Reducing flights and other fossil-fuelled travel through teleconferencing and alternative transport options
• Reducing money held in polluting financial institutions by switching banks and default super funds
• Buying from more sustainable suppliers through better supplier screening
• Driving employee lifestyle changes through education, culture and leadership.

You don’t need to measure the ‘carbon footprint’ of each of these initiatives to know they are the right thing to do.

Particularly when measurement is often for the purpose of reporting, adding tonnes of carbon to reports often makes things more confusing, rather than less. Which do you understand more as a measure of progress: “60% of offices have adopted 100% renewable energy” or “Scope 1 emissions from electricity consumption have dropped by 2.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent”?

Environmental impact assessments can be very useful for specific projects. Calculating the ROI of different projects, from both a cost and waste reduction perspective, is useful for prioritising investment. However, these assessments should be best used for understanding the scope of an initiative (e.g. Is it better to buy renewable energy from the grid or purchase solar panels), and because they are bound to specific projects and decisions, are far simpler, cheaper and faster to create.

Keep reporting of sustainability initiatives simple, relevant, and clear.

Better Practice #1: Define, Deliver, and Celebrate specific initiatives.

If you want the measurements that really matter, focus on metrics that measure progress of activities, rather than emissions. Examples include:

• “Adopting 100% renewable energy” is a great metric in of itself, and doesn’t need to be further reduced to a carbon dioxide equivalent.
• “3 out of 4 Sustainability Initiatives delivered” allows organisations to set their own pace and goals, and track their progress towards it.
• “80% of staff participating in employee change program” shows uptake in the core drivers of both emissions and reductions in your business: your people.

These are just examples. All these ‘metrics’ can help to articulate impact to the board, celebrate successes with employees, and demonstrate your climate commitment to customers, in ways that ‘tonnes of carbon’ can’t. There may be a time when you want to certify that you are carbon-neutral, or even better, carbon positive. But if you are reading this article, this isn’t you. Furthermore, many of these schemes have a ‘do your best, offset the rest’ attitude. Whilst offsets can be good, and no business can operate with truly zero-impact, relying on offsets adds cost to sustainability initiatives, and stifles the innovation, reduced wastage and credibility that come from creating a truly sustainable business.

Mistake #2: Focussing too much on operational impacts, and not enough on people.

If you are a services business, the people working in your business will emit up to 20 times the emissions of your business operations. Whilst your heating, cooling, lighting and travel all have an impact, your staff are significantly more carbon intensive to run than your business.

From the food they eat, to the electricity they use, the financial institutions they support, to the way they move around, their choices are a massive force, and one that can be used for good with the right guidance.

Businesses already have strong influence on much of their employees’ personal lives, from when they have to get up in the morning, how far they have to commute, and even what is appropriate to wear.

Despite all this, many organisations shy away from educating or encouraging their staff to change their diet, financial institutions or electricity providers, out of some sort of notion that it is ‘not their place’ to do so. Not only does this stance ignore the central role that work plays in all our lives, but is a missed opportunity to show that an organisation is there to holistically support staff to do the right thing, and in return, gain the trust and respect of their staff along the way.

Helping your staff to live better lives is not a crime, but a responsibility.

Better Practice #2: Address operational and lifestyle emissions together

The more practices you help your staff to address in their own life, the more it will naturally and easily work its way into the work place. The interest, experience and habits that staff learn in their own life will help to bolster the internal ‘green culture’, creating a positive feedback loop of increasingly better actions.

Even for the more ‘selfish’ reasons that companies want to engage in sustainability (competitor differentiation, brand equity, marketing opportunities), personal stories driven by employees and supported by the business are real examples that don’t need to add cost or complexity to your business.

Furthermore, staff feel good when they do good. The benefits of this approach include:

1. Having an immediate impact without the need to change business operations
2. Building the habits and mentality that staff need in order to integrate sustainability into their work life
3. Building confidence and awareness of sustainable practices
4. Normalising sustainable behaviours amongst peers
5. Deepening engagement with sustainability in a more nuanced, experience-driven and practical way

Mistake #3: Industry Benchmarks

This sounds a lot less controversial than what may appear.

The idea seems appealing: “If we know how we are performing in the industry, we’ll know how much we need to improve by”. This ‘relativism’ hides the harsh reality: irrespective of your industry, revenue, headcount, or location; everyone needs to be doing as much as they can, as fast as they can.

Comparing yourself to others, apart from detracting away from the resources required to take action, doesn’t give particularly useful information. If you are ‘better than average’ does that mean you are doing well, or your competitors are doing poorly? Is your performance different, or are you just measuring different things?

We need audacious goals and realistic plans to take action that is meaningful for the planet, your staff, and your customers.

Building a sustainable business has very little to do with what others are doing, and everything to do with what you are doing.

Better Practice #3: Measuring Progress against Short, Medium and Long Term Goals

Let’s break this down. Your long-term goals don’t need action plans today. Between now and the next 3–10 years, technology, society and everything we know will continue to change. These long term plans help shape the ambition, direction, and focus of the organisation.

Examples of these goals could include: “Net Zero Emissions by…”, “B-Corp Certification by….”, “Zero Waste by….”.

There’s no one answer on what that goal should be, but the guiding principle should be: ‘How can our business have a positive impact on the environment?’. The deeper you think about all the ways your business and staff impact the environment, the bigger, and more exciting, this principle becomes.

Short-term goals make these audacious plans tangible, realistic, and stop the cultural ‘not my problem’ issue that comes when goals are too big and distant to think about. These should be 6–12 months into the future, and have a reasonable, if not complete, understanding of how they can be achieved. They should be assigned an owner and where required, the resources to deliver it.

This should look and feel more like any other business project, with plans, status updates, and a real sense of ‘activity’ happening to deliver them.

Medium-term goals help the board, executives and others plan, particularly when it comes to capital investment. Should leases for petrol vehicles be renewed if we want to halve petrol usage in the next 18-months? Do we need to consider a smaller office foot-print if our work from home policy means less people are in the office? Medium-term goals can help avoid ‘locking in’ environmentally expensive assets, processes or technologies that are difficult to change once they have been committed to.

Mistake #4: Running ‘sustainability’ separate to the business.

Sustainability simply needs to become part of the way you do business.

Just as you would talk about finance, marketing, costs or risks, it’s hard to build sustainability into the business if it is managed completely separately (or not at all).

To begin with, many businesses opt to have external experts, internal champions and employee-driven working groups to get the ball rolling. And sadly for many, the ball, and the progress, stops rolling there.

Performance coaches often say: “Where focus goes, energy flows”. If your organisation is saying that they want to be more sustainable, but there is no focus on the topic in meetings, business cases, operations or performance reviews, there is no way it will get the energy it deserves.

NOTE: Intelligent sustainability is cheap. Lazy sustainability is expensive. Just like birthday presents, when you really know what is required and are thoughtful in your choices, the cost is not nearly as high as when you are doing last minute guessing.

Sustainability is not a side-hustle, after thought or a special project. It’s how your business delivers value.

Better Practice #4: Put ‘sustainability’ wherever you would normally think of ‘cost’

It’s quite simple: Pollution is a cost that someone else bears, so it makes sense to consider the cost to the planet and to the business at the same time. Costs are a factor in any business decision, just like risks, strategic alignment and values, and ‘environmental costs’ should be too.

Importantly, just like these other factors, they need not be explicit and arduous each time. Having ‘environmental impact’ on a template for renewing software may not need any more thought than ‘values alignment’ would in this context (i.e. not much). However, when proposing to open a new office, it absolutely would require more attention.

By building it into the ‘DNA’ of the organisation, sustainability consideration becomes low-cost because everyone is thinking about it, planning for it, and acting on it as part of the normal business.

Some tangible examples of this include:

• Incorporating sustainability metrics/initiatives into OKRs, Performance Reviews and Performance Reporting Templates
• Including ‘environmental impact’ in business cases, including options that balance cost and impact.
• Having ‘Sustainability Progress’ as a standing agenda item on team meetings, company town halls and board meetings (NOTE: This is deceptively difficult to get right, as ‘token’ efforts will feel inauthentic, and detractors will want to skip and/or de-prioritise the conversation. Having a clear owner of sustainability agenda items will help ensure they get the air time they require).
• Adding ‘environmental impact’ to the screening questions when engaging with new suppliers (and new customers, depending on your business model). Specifically, asking suppliers for their sustainability strategies and policies, progress towards renewable energy, waste reduction, and resource-usage reduction targets, and how they will incorporate these into the arrangement not only helps you to reduce your environmental impact, but encourages them to do the same.

Mistake #5: Making sustainability a hassle

It’s easy to forget that any change takes time, and that the harder you make something to do, the less likely it is to be done. Often when businesses come up with new policies, processes or projects, they become additions to people’s already existing workloads. Whilst this is a reality of the changing world we live in, if sustainability is framed from the get-go as just being ‘more work’, it’s going to be hard to get teams on board and excited about the opportunity to make a real difference.

Signs you are just ‘adding more work’ include:

• Adding extra fields to templates without explaining how they are used, or showing the value the new information will add.
• Creating extra reporting without a clear idea about how it drives decision-making (refer to Mistake #1)
• Delegating work to already overworked teams
• Setting up new projects and initiatives without answering the question: Where are these resources going to come from?

Almost any new idea requires new work, at least to implement. The great news is that because most sustainability ideas are fundamentally about reducing waste, many of them have operational and financial paybacks, and therefore success can build on success.

Better Practice #5: Chase the traction and celebrate success.

Sustainability is no different to any other business change: you have to bring your staff on the journey. With sustainability, that may mean starting on the actions that are visible and ‘feel good’ rather than the most strategic or even the most urgent priorities. From incinerators to garbage trucks to offshore-drilling, humans are exceptional at putting pollution out of sight and out of mind. By starting with actions that are visible, habit-forming, and ‘feel good’, your company can build the sustainability muscles required to take on the more important, and often more abstract steps.

Tangible examples include:

• Office recycling, composting and worm-farm projects (particularly the composting and worm farm projects are great, as staff can see how waste can be turned into products of value, and shift their mentality from linear to circular processes)
• Local Area Clean-ups (these are great team building exercises, and spark great conversations about other sustainable actions as people see single-use plastics in parks, oil slicks in waterways, and discarded electronics in the streets)
• Low-Carbon Cook-up (by sharing food that is plant-based, organic and/or locally produced, teams can understand the critical role food plays in our environmental impact, and give a positive experience for action).
• Shared Champion Stories (Sharing stories in newsletters, bulletin boards and internal social media helps normalise behaviour and build sustainability into the identity of your company)

None of these ideas are expensive or difficult, and may not be that different to what you are doing already. However, by linking them to your goals (Better Practice #3) and specific initiatives outlined by the business (Better Practice #1), they take on more meaning, and more importantly, become the start, and not the end of your sustainability journey.

So what should I do next?

Whilst every business is different, there are common steps to success that consistently help organisations take these initial steps. Ideally, you already have executive support and there is strong environmental leadership, in which case life is a lot easier. For most people reading this, the following can start to get the wheels turning on: How do I make this change happen in my business?

1. Set up communications channels for staff to start talking about this (an email thread, a Slack channel, or a regular meeting)
2. Start with an action. Many of the actions in Better Practice #5 don’t need executive endorsement, and are likely to get it anyway. Too many teams spend too much time on the big picture, without getting the feel good momentum they need to take on bigger goals
3. Identify quick-wins: See the Make Your Change Climate Action Guide for over 50 easy actions your business can look into. Often, reducing waste, whether that is travel, lighting, heating, cooling, catering, or single use materials is a way that you can reduce your environmental impacts and your costs.
4. Get leadership buy-in to quick wins, and encourage them to start setting goals, projects, and aligning to the Better Practices laid out in this document. By this stage, you have already shown initiative, demonstrated success, and shown that you have the business’ and the planet’s interest at heart.
5. Identify key stakeholders to be involved in defining goals, signing off on projects, and committing team resources (this will typically be a level or two down from the CEO) and organise a workshop for them to brainstorm and agree the direction. Allowing a month or so to prep for this will better prepare them to do the research necessary to be informed and engaged in the session.

Final Thoughts:

There is a natural tendency to overly rely on the sustainability department (if one exists), managers for approvals and decisions, leadership for defining strategies, and for staff to do all the work outside of ‘core hours’.

Sustainability isn’t the job of any one person. We’re all in this together.

Whilst you need to respect the policies, processes and economic realities of your business, taking action is critical for the success of your business and the planet.

You may feel awkward. You may need to be brave in some of the conversations you have. It’s not going to be 100% smooth sailing.

But nothing worth doing ever is.

We’ve written this guide to try and help with the less obvious parts of making your organisation more sustainable. Make Your Change also has a range of services to help with this, from facilitating sustainability strategy sessions, to kick-off workshops, to staff training and coaching, to consultations on specific initiatives and options.

We’ve done thousands of hours of research on how to make meaningful change happen. And we’ve done them. We’ve helped Europe’s largest bank to engage staff in climate action (BNP Paribas). We’ve run workshops on climate science in a 50,000 person logistics company (Bollore). We helped a $100 million mental health organisation (Neami National) on actions they can take in the workplace to start their sustainability journey. We’ve helped dozens of start-ups here in Sydney to build sustainability into the DNA of their growing companies.

We love what we do, because it matters, and we know we can help.

We are not-for-profit, not-for-giving-up, and not-for-maintaining-the-status-quo.

We are for doing good in the world, for helping others do good, and for feeling good whilst we do it.

Book a meeting. Give us a call. Send us an email. We’re here to help you Make Your Change.