Background
In May 2015, Bullfrog Power invited leading sustainability experts from the B.C. business community to participate in a panel discussion on how organizations can better integrate sustainability to increase organizational performance. The panelists included:
- Allana Williams, Energy and Environment, Whistler Blackcomb
- Jason Boyce, Sustainability Manager, Nature's Path Foods
- Ted Williams, Senior Director, Operational Sustainability and Planning, Ivanhoé Cambridge
- Moderator: Mike Rowlands, Principal, Junxion Strategy
Attendees learned how these three organizations embed sustainability into their corporate culture, align initiatives with key business drivers, and help to keep up momentum through employee engagement.
Green from the ground up - Allana Williams, Whistler Blackcomb
Allana spoke about her unique sustainability challenge of having more employee buy-in than she can handle. Whistler Blackcomb (WB) has up to 4,000 employees, many of whom are millennials, and it can be difficult to manage all the ideas employees put forward. Last year in the Whistler Blackcomb conservation survey, 78% of staff noted that the organization’s sustainability initiatives are one of the key reasons why they choose to work at WB.
Igniting the WB sustainability journey 22 years ago, Allana created a job for herself through the money she saved diverting waste. From this grassroots beginning to getting senior leadership on board with the help of Karl-Henrik Robèrt from the Natural Step, Allana has implemented unique sustainability programming that has embedded CSR into Whistler Blackcomb’s brand identity.
Allana explained how the conversation shifted from convincing others as to why sustainability is important to exploring ways the company can best align their sustainability efforts with business drivers. The highest impact green investments are not always the most sexy; it’s important to be able to make sustainability-related decisions based on data and metrics that indicate the project will help the bottom line.
A game-changing engagement step for Whistler Blackcomb was tying sustainability activity to employee performance. Employees are now rewarded with bonuses and other incentives based on their environmental activity. Meanwhile, Whistler Blackcomb is able to save significantly on energy costs through the program.
Farm to bowl: The deep sustainability journey - Jason Boyce, Nature’s Path
Jason’s largest sustainability challenge is short versus long-term planning. Many people consider climate change a problem of the future – when the company is experiencing its effects today. Setting reduction goals can be difficult for Nature’s Path (NP) when they’re simultaneously trying to figure out what absolute reduction targets they need to achieve in terms of carbon, water, energy and other impacts.
Luckily for Jason, the NP founders embedded sustainability into the company’s roots. Having a triple bottom line in the company mission statement enables those values to cascade throughout the organization, coming from the top down. With support from the company’s leadership, Jason works to ensure that sustainability is rooted in each department through a variety of progressive initiatives.
First, sustainability is a core part of everyone’s job at NP – from the interview and training processes to setting goals and receiving bonuses. Additionally, one way NP helps to increase uptake and effectiveness is asking each business unit to develop its own sustainability strategy; the company then provides support along the way.
NP encourages the team in their sustainability work through celebrations and storytelling. Progress is shared through internal newsletters and communications, and outstanding team members are awarded each year, after being voted for by their peers.
Another challenge for Jason is identifying the best metrics to measure sustainability in each department, ensuring that each employee can actually have a positive impact. One of NP’s key sustainability metrics used to be the amount of energy consumed in manufacturing per pound of product produced. Diving deeper into the metrics, it turned out that the two factors had no relation. In order to maintain effective engagement, NP had to re-identify which metrics were actually driving results for the employees and the business.
Integrating sustainability into a global company - Ted Williams, Ivanhoé Cambridge
Ted’s biggest sustainability challenge was previously around measurement. Properties were doing a good job at becoming more sustainable but it was difficult to measure the results. Measurement systems are, for the most part, now in place, and progress is being made. Ted’s team is now focused on aligning their sustainability strategies with business strategies. Ted wants to ensure that Ivanhoé Cambridge’s (IC) sustainability commitments align with their key business drivers. (This concept appeared to be a unifying theme amongst the three panelists.)
Four years ago, Ted was tasked with putting together a corporate sustainability strategy. He started by creating a multi-disciplinary committee, which wrote the company’s first CSR report. The Committee then created a gap analysis to identify areas for improvement and departmental business plans to advance those improvements. Although this was a good strategy, the need for more senior level leadership was recognized.
Ted was then successful in gaining approval to create a sustainability executive steering committee and since that milestone, IC has seen greater momentum and uptake from various areas within the company. Departments are now approaching Ted and his team to see how they can imbed sustainability within their respective areas.
Ted’s team recently wrote and introduced several policies including an overarching sustainability policy, and an energy, water and atmosphere policy. Each policy sets out strategies and minimum requirements, and provides best practices for properties that are more advanced. Having senior level support, and integrating the program from the top down were keys to establishing the policies.
In terms of gaining momentum and engagement, Ted meets with the executive steering committee twice per year to report on performance and seek their guidance and support on new initiatives. Demonstrating value by highlighting quick wins, such as cost savings, helps create interest in long term sustainability initiatives.
Audience Q&A
How do you keep your company’s sustainability initiatives fresh in the marketplace when it’s always been a core part of your organization and many competitors are now leveraging it?
Jason, Nature’s Path: We’ve recently broadened the scope of our “responsibility.” We no longer just consider our own operational footprint, but those of our suppliers, partners and consumers. This larger sustainability consideration is what the market is increasingly looking for and is what will help set us apart in the industry.
How are you communicating your sustainability results and initiatives?
Allana, Whistler Blackcomb: We initially started by educating our staff. We also have information on our website, use social media, and create an annual climate change report that we try to make as interesting and easy to read as possible. Our next challenge is external communication as many people in our own backyard don’t know what we do in terms of sustainability.
Ted, Ivanhoé Cambridge: Ivanhoé Cambridge has always been modest in our sustainability communications and we recently decided to focus on encouraging and educating our employees to be our sustainability ambassadors. This month we completed a cross Canada employee sustainability tour. We’d also like to work closer with our tenants and build our reputation on tangible results. The rest will take care of itself in time.
Jason, Nature's Path: We share information through our website, social media, and packaging. We find it advantageous to be specific in our storytelling which we have the space and opportunity to do so on our packaging. The key is finding those stories that are going to help strengthen the brand relationship with consumers and we’re always trying to do a better job at that.
If you had to choose one department in your organization to partner with to achieve the most sustainability integration, which would it be?
Ted, Ivanhoé Cambridge: That’s easy, it would be our construction and development department - to plan and build a more sustainable product today for the future. It’s a lot less efficient to retrofit a building after it has been built. We recently started discussions with the construction and development department and are starting to build a strategy to accomplish this.
Allana, Whistler Blackcomb: Apart from where I work now, with Operations and Maintenance, I’d choose Finance. Understanding the numbers behind the sustainability work that we’re doing and where we’re going is so important. We’d also like to create a green purchasing standard.
Jason, Nature’s Path: HR. Because they know all the secrets. But also since they are able to touch every department and have the largest reach.