Sustainability Management

Your organization is embarking on an exciting journey to become and remain sustainable. What does a successful journey look like? Who needs to be engaged to succeed? What skills and knowledge do you need to chart your course?

Sustrana has developed a process, represented in the graphic below, for doing sustainability work.

The Sustrana process helps organizations learn how to manage sustainability work, build internal capacity, and grow a program from a solid foundation. The Sustrana process is action-oriented and focuses on a learn while doing approach. Over time, you will be able to integrate sustainability with key business planning processes for your organization.

Having a process provides a systematic way to improve sustainability performance. You learn how to gain buy-in from management and employees, create accountability, and continuously evaluate and improve practices, policies, and procedures. Study the Sustrana process graphic above, starting with Assess, to learn the steps and the work that gets done at each stage. As organizations iterate the process, building increased stakeholder engagement and buy-in at every step along the way, they mature from being reactive, to tactical, to strategic in their approach to using sustainability best practices as a business management tool.

Throughout the process, sustainability work is done by different people within the organization. The balance of how the work gets done is depicted below. The graphic highlights the importance of cross-functional team building.

Those managing the sustainability program work (on the left) provide sustainability best practices and overall strategy information to others. Those who are doing projects in business units or departments (on the right) learn about and feel connected to sustainability program strategy, which enables them to provide more relevant project information and data. This collaboration (the arrows) builds broad support and results in greater success for the sustainability program.

This section provides detailed education about each of the process steps as you travel the path to embedding sustainability in your business culture.