Plan & Implementation

Overview

Good planning is a blend of preparation and action. Some companies are so eager to work on sustainability they jump in head first without a clear idea of where they’re going. Others spend so much time planning that they miss important opportunities to create value. The sweet spot is somewhere in between.

Most companies are able to identify more good project ideas than time and resources can accommodate in a single work or planning cycle. This is a good thing, but it also necessitates a plan of action that corresponds to priorities. Mapping project work in a plan based on time, resources, and priorities is the surest way to succeed in achieving the business objectives of a sustainability program. The goal is to have a plan that is accessible to everyone on a cross-functional implementation team, with work has been evaluated and ranked based on criteria that makes good business sense.

Getting down to work means specifying requirements and gathering resources. First decide what can be done with internal resources and where outside help is needed. Leverage existing resources where possible to minimize costs and time to success. Connect with those from various areas of your Knowledge Base who should be on the project team. Work together to create effective requests for proposals (RFPs), scopes of work, and contractor evaluation criteria, and then choose vendors.

As projects progress, a major driver of success will be keeping the work on track and inspiring accountability. A group of engaged employees helps maintain momentum for the sustainability strategy and is always needed to get projects done. Sometimes they are just managing vendors, but often they are doing the work themselves, building internal capacity, and helping to shift company culture.

Sustainability can be leveraged to engage employees, enhance creativity, and build collaboration across an organization. This creates a win-win both for the company and for employees. It is important to pay attention to what’s going on and how projects are progressing.

The project team will need to pay special attention to collecting data on projects for which there are established metrics requirements. Minimize the possibility of getting to the end of the project and discovering the information is insufficient to communicate success to stakeholders.

Identify projects

With only a little research, businesses can come up with many ways to improve their sustainability, especially in the early years of program development. You can find projects for recycling, engaging employees, community impact, transportation, energy management, work-life balance, and many, many more.

Many of the project ideas that surface at the outset of sustainability work are quick wins. These are great projects to get started on while strategy and planning get underway. They can and should be done to gain immediate operational efficiencies and to demonstrate successes needed to get buy-in and build program momentum.

But you should also have a solid understanding of your company’s most significant sustainability risks and opportunities. There should be projects on the list that correlate with the significant sustainability issues you’ve identified as being important to work on. These projects constitute the strategic work that will create the most value for the company and demonstrate the power of sustainability thinking long after all the tactical quick wins have been exhausted.

The best project list addresses both operational efficiency needs and strategic initiatives that mitigate risks, seize opportunities, and work toward sustainability goals.

Build the list of possibilities

Don’t worry about having too many ideas. As you work through assessing and prioritizing, some project ideas will be abandoned, others saved for a later work cycle. Consider many different types of projects during the initial process of identifying projects to get people thinking about all the possibilities. It is better to gather lots of ideas across the breadth of sustainability issues.

It also makes sense to identify and take advantage of work that lets you “learn while doing.” For ambitious initiatives, particularly those that require behavior changes, identify a limited scale, pilot project first. You can’t go wrong if you follow this formula: think big, start small, learn fast, then scale.

Don’t forget about the work required to manage the sustainability program. Planning, tracking efforts, calculating results, and communicating to stakeholders all take time and resources, so these activities must be a part of the planning and budgeting process. Be sure to incorporate projects related to these types of activities into your list of proposed projects so that the sustainability team has the time and resources it needs to maintain and build the program.

Once you have established a robust list of potential projects – ones that support a sustainability program and address the company’s identified risks and opportunities – the next step will be to determine which projects go furthest fastest, contribute the most toward goals, and are most likely to gain approval and succeed.

Project selection process

Because most teams generate a list of potential sustainability projects that is much too large to tackle in one year, it’s most likely that you will have more than can be managed in one plan or work cycle. Narrowing the list requires weighing costs and benefits and using criteria to prioritize projects that best align with organizational goals. For example, if one of the goals of the sustainability program is to reduce energy use, there are many ways to do this, from behavioral changes to lighting retrofits; from replacing equipment with more efficient models to installing smart strips. Even a list of goal-aligned projects may be too long for one cycle. It helps to reinforce that sustainability does not happen overnight; prioritizing and being strategic is essential.

Be sure to leave room in your plan to course correct and cope with the unexpected. If you end up with extra time and resources in a given cycle, you can always add other projects later.

Assessing Projects

The first step in assessing projects is to gather basic information that will inform decisions on whether to move forward with a project. Consider:

What are the benefits of implementing the project?
What are the steps to get the project implemented?
What financial and human resources are needed?
What or who might interfere with project success?
Whose approval is needed to move forward and succeed?
What will this project achieve and by when?
What metrics will you use to measure success, over what time period, and at what cost?
How well does the project align with business strategy?
Who is needed to assess all of the above?

Keep in mind as you go through assessing a project that you will need to create a business case for any project you submit for approval to work on. The information you gather at this stage will be an important part of the project business case.

The first step to prioritizing the list of projects is to develop a set of criteria that will help you evaluate each project against the others. Setting criteria helps you think about what is most important for getting a project through the approval process. You can weigh your criteria to further reflect the importance of each consideration. Evaluate each project against the criteria to get a ranked list of projects.

As your projects are ranked, priorities emerge. Select the number of top projects you think you can reasonably achieve during your plan period. Be realistic! Teams often take on more than they can accomplish, which leads to disappointment and frustration. It is better to take on two to three projects and succeed than to take on ten projects and not complete most of them. This is particularly important in the early years of a program when the organization is still warming up to the idea of sustainability. Select projects that are practical, affordable, and realistic for the company. That’s a solid foundation on which to develop a business case or rationale for doing the priority projects and getting approvals.

Multi-year or staged work

Some projects may need to be broken up into smaller projects that get implemented over time. Or it may be better to make small improvements on multiple fronts, rather than a giant leap on one front. Sometimes doing a pilot project first is the best course of action. For most organizations, multiple projects help achieve several goals over a period of years, with interim targets for each year’s work adding up to the overall goal.

Whatever was on the initial list that is not feasible to get done right away can be saved for consideration in the next year’s plan or mapped out for later stages of a longer-term plan. Assess whether the projects selected for a given period of time add up to achieving goals set for the same period of time. Course correct as needed by adding or removing projects.

Pilot projects

Think of a pilot project as a testing ground for an initiative. It provides a way for you to work out all the kinks and bugs before launching the full-scale initiative. A pilot gives you the flexibility to refine or abandon your approach based on lessons learned. Troubleshooting your strategy through piloting will save you time, money, and frustration in the long run.

There are a lot of reasons to do a pilot project. Some projects are large and costly with unknown or unproven outcomes. Some projects have the potential to generate negative or controversial reactions. Whatever the reason, pilot projects can provide valuable information to help you catch and correct missteps or avoid failure.

Benefits of pilot projects

A pilot is a trial run. You get to confirm whether you are ready for full-scale implementation. You can make adjustments to your implementation plan based on the test case. You can uncover unforeseen challenges.

Pilot testing gets reactions. By working with a smaller group, you can get reactions and feedback without creating negative or pre-formed attitudes in the ultimate project audience.

Pilot testing gets you prepared. Practice can make perfect. Your project team gets to work together before full implementation and learn how to troubleshoot issues that come up. Feedback from your test case helps the team make better decisions, optimize time and resources allocations, and adjust for unanticipated results. Doing a pilot will help the team put its best foot forward and steer like a pro to the desired outcomes.

You can fail fast and fail small. Pilot projects give you the benefit of quick discovery with little cost. Where there is a reasonable degree of an outcomes uncertainty and a high cost – on either a financial and/or reputation basis – your company can mitigate risks by doing a pilot. That way if the project is not meant to be, you can cut your losses, having saved time and risked little.

Pilot project tips

Select a test case that best represents the larger project. This is true for demographics, where a project involves a group of people, and for physical assets, where a project involves a building or equipment.

Developed a process and a timeline. A pilot is pointless if you do not have a template to use for the larger project. Carefully outline all details of how you will implement the pilot. Be sure to define the scope of the pilot and include all steps needed to successfully complete the project. Time is money, so be sure to also include a timeline for each step in your process. Your plan should include metrics for how you will measure results. As you run your pilot, record everything that aligned with and differed from your outline. Track facts and figures, but also attitudes, knowledge, and behavior of the people involved in the pilot.

Don’t fall in love with your design. Be open to feedback that requires changes. Maybe you’re providing too much information or not enough. Your cost/benefit analysis may be off or require a different solution for the problem you are trying to solve. Perhaps you chose the wrong metrics, or discovered better ones. You may need to change your strategy if your underlying assumptions or choices turn out to be misguided based on what you discover with the pilot.

Do not leave monitoring and information gathering to chance. The time you invest in creating a system to monitor and capture information will be worthwhile. Your pilot is the best opportunity you have to learn what goes well and what doesn’t, so don’t squander it. Create a plan and forms for soliciting feedback, tracking activities and outcomes, and recording any adjustments you make – or need to make – to get the desired results. Be sure to allow time for your team to do this vital work.

Don’t over-correct. Remember that a pilot is a test, not a scientific study. The results are preliminary. They are meant to give you information to make decisions about full implementation. If your underlying assessment of a need for the project is sound, you should be making moderate adjustments to your implementation plan. If your pilot results in an urge to go back to the drawing board, it’s more likely that your assessment of need was flawed or the project is just not feasible.

When the pilot is done

Discovering something different from what you originally anticipated is a gift. It helps you shift direction, adapt, and improve, or fail fast and small. The results from your pilot are not the same as evidence from the results of a large-scale project implementation. But they provide you with valuable early information about positive effects or losses avoided. Either way: share the news.

If your test results are negative, explain why, extoll virtues of failing fast and small, and move on. Be sure to include lessons learned; they may have real value to others.

If your test results are positive, spread the word about your results, with the caveat that the results are preliminary findings. Use the opportunity to begin building support for a successful full-scale implementation.

Demonstrate project value

Your sustainability committee or project team will need to create a solid business case to get approvals for each of the individual projects you select. The project business case is the groundwork for demonstrating the feasibility of achieving goals and getting approval to move forward. It should include:

the project benefits,
why you selected the project,
the project scope,
the resources required to achieve success (costs, savings, benefits, and resources required),
how a project will further one or more sustainability and business goals or a sustainability management need,
a list of important stakeholders who support or ask for work in the project area, and
how you will measure project success

If projects are thoroughly assessed and the rationale for each is documented, you will be in good shape to go for whatever approvals are needed. Getting approvals will also be easier if you use and describe a process to prioritize and select projects based on stated criteria. Aim to get budget approval at the same time you get project approval. Prepare cost estimates for your projects, and make requests for any employee or other support you might need.

Many projects unfold and deliver benefits over a period of time. For longer-term projects, the results may be somewhat uncertain at the outset. In these circumstances, be sure to state that the process of measurement, analysis, improvement, and communication is cyclical and adaptive. You should show that the project team has the ability to optimize a project over time.

The CDA framework

You can use the project description in the Project Selector to get you started on building your project business case. But that may not be enough for approval within your organization.

You will need to customize the project business case for your company. To better ensure project approval, using the following Contextualize, Define, and Adapt (CDA) framework as a guide.

Contextualize Benefits

Convey: This project is desirable to everyone involved.

Company perspective: How does this project further your company’s goals?
Stakeholder perspective: Whom does this project help and how?
Sustainability Program perspective: How does this project further your sustainability strategy?

Define Parameters

Convey: This project is feasible.

Outline project goals: What will project completion achieve? What does project success look like?
Define measurement system: How will it demonstrate success? For longer projects, what are the KPIs for success? What metrics will you use? Are your KPIs and metrics quantitative and/or qualitative? How will you collect and report on measurement data and KPIs?
Present project timeline: How long will it take to complete the project? How long will it take to realize project benefits?
Explain required resources: Who will be involved in project work? What are the costs of doing the project and measuring it? From what budget will those expenses be sourced?

Adapt Process

Convey: This project is less risky because it will be well managed.

Measure: How will you make sure your measurement system is working as intended and are you getting the expected results?
Analyze cause-and-effect: How will you determine if the project is not going as expected? What will be done if problems are discovered?
Improve efficiently and effectively: How will you identify and implement changes needed to reach desired results or at least optimize them?
Communicate with stakeholders: How will you communicate changes in the project should they arise?

When you address these concepts, you will have built the best possible project business case!

Approvals for sustainability management projects

Sustainability requires involvement from many people across the organization. Most programs need a decent amount of time for education, engagement, and assessment. These activities should be included among the proposed projects. When businesses embark on sustainability planning, they often underestimate the resources required. When getting approvals for your sustainability projects, include projects and resources that will be needed to continue to build and run a program.

Put it all together

With your well-developed projects and a rational request for the resources needed to keep the sustainability team rolling, all that remains is to put it together and get a date to present your plan. To increase the rate of success, review the tips on how to create a great presentation.

Align resources

The initial step in implementing a project is to marshal the necessary resources to complete each project. Consider each project’s complexity, size, scope, timeline, and deliverables. Mapping out these factors will drive the comprehensive list of resources needed to ensure success.

Resource allocation and timing

Gathering resources involves preparing human and material resources. Each project should have a team associated with it and all projects together should be mapped out in an action plan. The action plan will help the project team understand roles and responsibilities. The project team leader should work with the team to establish:

a project description (scope and purpose)
the timeframe for completion
goals the project supports
expected ROI (if applicable)
metrics and data collection requirements
who is on the project team (including the lead/responsible department)
tasks to be completed, by whom, and when
a repository for notes and other communications

This should result in a project timeline that is well thought-out and feasible.

The project team’s timeline should account for resource availability and procurement. For example, if a needed product takes 30 days to deliver, this may impact other aspects of the project timeline. Or one of the key Knowledge Base participants in the project may have a vacation planned during a critical time in project implementation. Be sure to keep the critical path in mind as the project timeline is established.

Securing commitments

Employees are important players in a project team. Employee engagement is one of management’s most important and challenging responsibilities. Engaged employees make more positive contributions in the workplace. Picking motivated and knowledgeable employee team members keeps a project on track and boosts morale.

Another crucial aspect of keeping projects on track is making sure that the employees on the project team are able to perform. Beyond the employee’s willing participation and commitment to the project, project teams need approval from supervisors for the time each team member will need for sustainability work. If a group of team members is working on several projects, consider having the group create a charter to formally state commitments and objectives. A charter clarifies the group’s objectives, responsibilities, and commitments, and helps reduce misunderstandings and underperformance.

If people outside of the organization are needed for the work, map out what it will take to engage those resources. The project action plan should include this process. Consider:

Do you need to write a request for a proposal?
Is there a bidding process you need to go through?
How long will it take to identify and enter agreements with vendors? Are there standards, certifications, and legal requirements to be incorporated in proposals and scopes of work for the contracting process?

Planning ahead helps avoid disrupted work schedules, postponed task completion, and increased costs. It is important for keeping things on track and moving forward.

Being strategic

As project teams and resources are pulled together, consider how to use the projects to integrate sustainability into the organization. Each project team should include a Sustainability Committee member who can help educate the team and report back to the committee as the project moves forward. The representative can use project work examples to help the committee promote and embed sustainable thinking across the workforce. The committee will then be better able to provide recognition for the work the project team is doing and attract others to the organization’s sustainability work.

When project teams have these types of committee resources, each team will feel valued and well supported to get the most out of all the resources devoted to a project.

Manage projects

Good project management is an important organizational competency. It supports resource efficiency and professional development. It cultivates pride through effective project implementation, and reflects well on your capacity for getting things done. It also enhances the ease and ability to report on accomplishments and challenges.

It’s a waste of time to try to document every single thing that has to happen to move a project from start to finish. Too much planning delays doing. Likewise, you can also end up wasting a lot of time if you try to execute on a project without having a good idea of what needs to happen. You end up pursuing a wrong path, spinning wheels, or failing to understand who is responsible for doing what.

Good, time-efficient project management is somewhere between. You map out enough to reflect the critical elements of what has to happen, create a rational timeline, and get started. Build in a little time cushion for the unknown or unexpected. Then get going, communicate a lot as a team, and adjust for the details as they emerge.

The aim of managing projects is to make sure that project activities stay on track with time and resources. Core components to project management are:

Assign clear roles, responsibilities, tasks, and milestones;
Identify project team dependencies to enhance commitment and accountability and strengthen your team;
Make project completion and success a project team responsibility;
Collect verifiable data at every stage;
Continually track progress towards goals; and
Communicate progress as well as any departures from original milestones/timelines.

How much planning detail is enough?

The art of project management is in getting the details right. There is no rule of thumb other than to refine project tasks and subtasks in relation to the capabilities of each project team member and what needs to get done.

The project leader and the project Sustainability Committee representative should work on the project task list. In doing this, ask questions like:

What do we want the team member to do and how clear is the task to that person?
Does the team member have all the skills, resources, and training needed to complete the task and do so on time?
Does each team member understand the Sustainability Committee’s expectations for the project?
How will the project work deliver on those expectations?
Are there any prerequisite tasks that impact the project plan?

More junior or less experienced team members may need more detail and training than workers who are veterans in the project subject area. All team members may need some level of sustainability education and training to be effective. As the action plan evolves, the level of detail each user needs or wants will emerge and the team will develop a rhythm. Be patient but persistent with these types of questions to allow this to emerge.

Adjustments along the way

Once a project is underway, consistent team communication is a critical aspect of holding people accountable and meeting outcome expectations. Demonstrate to the people who gave the approvals that the project is moving forward and adding value.

Regular status reports and/or meetings keep projects on track and ensure people have what they need to succeed. These meetings should be frequent enough to identify issues before they become full-blown problems with negative impacts on the whole project.

Following the project management best practices covered above will enable you to report results clearly, and continually improve how you implement projects and help you to win support and recognition.

Monitor progress

Monitoring a project to assess the assumptions and projections on which project approval was based will improve the team’s capacity for creating realistic project proposals in the future.

Resource and time requirements

The key benefit of measuring resource expectations against what actually happens is to gain information about how effective the team is. Some common issues arise when there’s a mismatch. Look at whether the project team is:

Needing unanticipated education or training
Not fully understanding the project scope
Changing the project scope
Using project management tools effectively
Meeting agreed upon work commitments
Spending more or less money than budgeted
Taking more or less time than expected

Monitoring a project for these issues will help improve estimates of what it takes to do project work. As the team gets better at taking these issues into account, it will improve the decision-making process for what work to take on, setting up a project team, and keeping projects on track. This establishes a positive feedback loop.

Expected benefits and outcomes

Monitoring a project to see if projected benefits come to fruition builds credibility and supports accountability. Even if all projected benefits are not realized, testing and validating outcomes will reveal lessons and shape how to assess and propose projects in the future. It will highlight strengths and weaknesses.

The benefit of doing a project is often demonstrated through data. Each project for which there are established metrics should have a method of data collection. Whether data is gathered during the project or over a period of time after project completion, collect and review data early and review it often. Doing so delivers a triple advantage:

Assessing the value of data and the chosen metric at an early enough stage permits making adjustments or a change if the results are not up to expectations;
The process of verifying data accuracy and reliability at the end of the project is easier when smaller batches of data are checked along the way; and
There’s no big scramble at project completion or at reporting time to gather information generated from the past, only to find out that the data is missing, irrelevant, inaccurate, or unreliable.

This approach will put the team in a better position to ensure that expected outcomes and benefits are delivered, and provide a solid basis for explaining any shortfalls or differing results.

Real-time lessons learned

All lessons from mistakes and successes are best learned when absorbed and analyzed after project or plan completion. A technique called The Five Whys will help get at the heart of the most important things that go right and go wrong.

Keeping records as part of the project file memorializes them. Creating a summary is a great way to archive project milestones and accomplishments. It can also function as the foundation for various types of reporting.

Memorializing the main steps, challenges and lessons learned from the project makes the wisdom gained available to others on the sustainability team and within the organization. This is a huge value to institutional knowledge and will optimize implementing similar projects at different locations. Having a database of this information improves organizational productivity and capacity.

Project prioritization

Projects should be assessed and prioritized based on impact, ability to create business value, and feasibility. Overloading the sustainability program with too many projects or with projects of minimal value wastes time and resources, causing frustration and losing credibility. To grow a sustainability program, companies prioritize short-term cost savings projects, but use those savings to justify other high-priority projects that will add significant longer-term value despite high up-front costs and/or long payback periods. Matching project selection to organizational capacity helps companies set and achieve realistic sustainability goals. Successful projects and goal achievement can then be used to garner broader buy-in and resources for continued and often more challenging efforts as a sustainability program gains traction and matures.

Project rationale & approvals

Getting approvals is easier if you can demonstrate how a project will further one or more sustainability and business goals. Approvals are easier to achieve if projects are thoroughly assessed and the rationale for each is documented in a solid project business case. Otherwise, it is an uphill battle to garner the resources and keep the sustainability team rolling. Mapping out all the resources that are needed based on the project’s size, scope, goals, timeline, and expected deliverables is a vital step toward putting together effective project teams and ensuring project success.

Data & project management

The two primary elements to monitor throughout a project’s duration are resource requirements and expected outcomes. Given the diverse nature of sustainability programs, implementation often spans locations, departments, levels of authority, and functions. This creates unique challenges in communication, record-keeping, and accountability. Collecting and verifying data early and often helps evaluate whether the time, resources, and results assumptions and projections on which project approval was based were accurate. Well-organized and effective project teams communicate frequently and establish time, task, and budget accountability. Monitoring progress and recording lessons learned can improve capacity for creating realistic project proposals for the next iteration of work. When goal achievement is tied to project results, project progress also informs planning and reporting on goals.

Accounting for externalities

In economics, externalities are benefits and/or burdens that are not accounted for in pricing the goods and services. Positive externalities occur where benefits are provided, but not valued or paid for. For example, natural resources provide numerous benefits, such as cleaning the air, sequestering carbon dioxide and other ecosystem services that have tremendous value.

Negative externalities, on the other hand, are the by-products of many business operations, including pollution caused by the production process, such as carbon and other GHG emissions, water use, air and water pollution, land use conversion, and waste. Externalities also include the costs associated with workers’ adverse health impacts.

Historically, markets have failed to account for the social and environmental externalities of their operations. Because externalities are not included in standard accounting systems, they are not part of product pricing. Instead, the true costs incurred to address the damage are passed on to society. Often, this is the local community where the operating business is located.

Society usually stops footing the bill by passing laws and regulating behavior. When this happens, your costs go up. Think about increases in CAFE standards to regulate the pollution from motor vehicles. These increases in regulation have cost impacts on car manufacturers, who pass cost increases on to consumers.

Companies are beginning to understand that the true costs of products must be accounted for. One way to do this is through a Sustainability Profit and Loss statement, which assigns a financial value to environmental and social impacts along the entire value chain of a business. The “Profit” refers to any activity that benefits the company’s Triple Bottom Line, and a “Loss” refers to activities that adversely impact its Triple Bottom Line.

Accounting for externalities by assigning them a financial value helps businesses make better-informed decisions about how to manage risks and minimize footprints.

Business Risks

Externalities are a free ride that can catch up with you. If you are not accounting for externalities, you are at risk if and when society decides to stop footing the bill.

An externalities risk assessment can help you determine where to make efforts to change inputs and outputs or realign your products and services to less detrimental options. This can put you at a market advantage when externalized costs are recognized in the marketplace if your competitors have not analyzed these circumstances and taken similar action.

An externalities risk assessment is something to consider in supply chain management as well.

Aligning with business goals

Evaluating sustainability issues and projects based on how well they align with business goals provides a clear rationale for proposed resource allocations. If there is no connection to these goals, it will be difficult to convince company leadership that sustainability is a worthwhile endeavor and makes good business sense.

Strategic sustainability focuses on what makes sense for the business for a variety of reasons. You get better buy-in when you are seen as a team player, helping others meet their goals; helping to create lasting business value for the company. Sustainability is such a broad subject that it should not be difficult to connect it to an organization’s broader vision and goals.

Provide participants in the process of evaluating and prioritizing sustainability work with a list of business goals. Many companies have a 3-5 year strategic plan where business goals are outlined. For companies that do not have a formal strategic plan, managers can provide information about goals. Ask about important business objectives such as reducing costs, improving customer experience, attracting and retaining top talent, gaining competitive advantage, and developing new products and services. The organization’s mission and vision statement can also be a source of information about desired direction.

Discipline in connecting sustainability work to business goals is critical for success. When business goals are used as criteria in the process for prioritizing issues, both project-level and issue-level sustainability goals will align with business goals. For example, a lighting retrofit project might have a goal of contributing 2% cost saving toward an overall energy management issue goal of a 15% reduction in energy costs; the project goal might also be noted as supporting a business goal to reduce expenses by 2%. Connecting sustainability and business goals enables you to show in concrete terms how sustainability work adds value. Without this alignment, sustainability efforts often become fragmented and lose steam.

Creating mutual alignment

Aligning with business goals does not mean ignoring negative social, environmental, and economic impacts the organization is not aware of or is not addressing. Instead, identify how those negative attributes will become barriers or risks to business success. Find ways to show how plans could be altered or innovations pursued to remove those barriers, mitigate or eliminate risks, and pave the way for continued and new business success.

When the value of sustainability work is understood in terms of supporting and helping to achieve business goals and continued business success, management will begin to look to sustainability experts for input in planning and decision-making processes. Over time, alignment evolves into sustainability becoming an embedded and important aspect of the strategic planning and goal-setting process for the organization.

The Value Driver Model

Understanding the ways in which organizations create value is essential to embedding sustainability thinking into a business. The Value Driver Model (VDM) was created specifically for this purpose. It is a tool to help sustainability professionals articulate how sustainability helps create, manage, and protect business value.

Drivers for measuring business value creation

The VDM uses existing key business value metrics (risk, productivity, and growth). By framing sustainability work in this context, decisions about how to allocate resources can be analyzed based on how sustainability activities protect and create value. Each of the three core metrics is further articulated into more refined ways to measure the value of sustainability work. Below is a more detailed overview of the VDM ways of measuring that value, taken from the VDM guidance.

Risk: Exposure to sustainability-related risks that could imperil key business objectives or otherwise impair a company’s performance, including:

Operational and regulatory risk management: decreasing levels of environmentally critical and/or constrained resource use; limiting business interruptions and risk of losing the license to operate; reducing emissions of key pollutants or toxins; and other areas that could expose the firm to regulatory actions or penalties, as well as increasing adherence to established sustainability-related operating standards, including results of related audits and certifications.
Supply chain risk: Increasing assurance (through use of assessments, audits and certifications) that suppliers are providing reliable, responsibly produced products and services in accordance with the company’s policies, industry codes and international standards.
Reputational risks: Decreasing exposure to reputational damage arising from various actions, such as fines, boycotts, public protests and/or negative media attention by implementing proactive policies and procedures that limit the risk of social and environmental harm.
Leadership & adaptability: Resilience; systemic risk management; ability to respond to changing conditions; reducing threat of business interruption; policy management.

Productivity: Total annual cost savings (and cost avoidances) from all sustainability-driven productivity initiatives and operations. Three primary sources:

Operational efficiencies: Cost savings and/or cost avoidance from more effective use of natural resources, reduced wastes, and/or using alternative materials with lower costs and impacts.
Human capital management: Reduction in the cost of attracting and retaining top talent as a result of a commitment to sustainability, and employees’ perceived value of that commitment; increased worker productivity due to skills and safety training, and inclusive and equitable work environments.
Reputational pricing power: Margin improvement and increases in price and sales volumes from customer perception of enhanced value from sustainability–advantaged products.

Growth: Increased revenue volume and/or growth from sustainability-advantaged products and services, comprised of four key sub-components:

New markets & geographies: Expanded market share /revenue streams from demand for sustainable products and services from new markets.
Products & services innovation: Expanded market share / revenue streams from developing innovative products and services that better meet customer needs while reducing negative social or environmental impacts and/or enhancing positive social and environmental outcomes.
New customers: Expanded market share / revenue streams from sales to new customers based on brand, reputation, or sustainability product leadership, especially where those attributes are differentiators.
Long-term strategy: Implementation of a long-term strategy and plan, along with the required investments, to deliver sustainability-advantaged growth.

The VDM is a valuable resource for thinking about how to balance the triple bottom line. It provides an analytical framework for remaining profitable while finding solutions for negative environmental and social impacts. The Sustrana platform provides access to the VDM in various tools. This helps those working on sustainability issues to think in more concrete business terms about how sustainability can be used to protect and create value.

Sustainability program resources

The following will give you some ideas about the sort of items to include in the approval process in support of developing a sustainability program.

A person to coordinate the work. Without administrative and research support, the team will struggle to make progress. This does not have to be a full-time position. Some companies hire an intern to fill this role.
Food. The sustainability team will need to educate others and get their input. There is no better way to get people to come to a meeting than to have food. Budget at least quarterly lunches or coffee breaks throughout the year.
Communications. Another pitfall of sustainability programs is insufficient workforce communications. Education and engagement is not a “one and done.” It should be ongoing and available for all employees to refer to as needed. Depending on what systems exist in your company already, you may need to invest in ways to consistently get the word out. This can be in the form of voice over presentations, email campaigns, posters, or an intranet site, to name a few.
Prizes and incentives. Many strategies focus on behavior change. There are few better ways to get people started on behavior change than to create a contest or competition. Have some money in the budget for promotional items or gift cards to incentivize the behavior you want and to recognize employee accomplishments.
Audits. Sometimes you can’t uncover projects that will deliver the most financial returns without doing an audit. You often have to spend money on the audit without knowing whether it will reveal any valuable opportunities. This is a tough pill to swallow, but it’s the only way to focus on the best places to reap the greatest benefits.
Recapture benefits. If you are proposing money saving projects, request that a percentage of those savings go into a sustainability fund for projects that require greater initial investments or have longer payback periods. This will enable the team to continue to grow and make more significant contributions.