Wednesday, July 20, 2011

How To Toolbox

How to be a more sustainable company

By Kyle Alspach

For a company to start a sustainability initiative — and succeed at it — one principle is paramount for those involved in the project: Keep it relevant.

“It does need to make sense for the company, from a business perspective and an economic perspective, because otherwise it won’t be viable,” said Cynthia Curtis, chief sustainability officer at CA Technologies Inc. in Framingham. “Otherwise, you aren’t going to get the necessary support and buy-in across the board. It could end up becoming more of a philanthropic activity, as opposed to part of the strategy of the company overall.”

For CA Technologies, a maker of IT management software, keeping sustainability efforts relevant has meant focusing on reducing the energy use at the company’s data centers and development labs, along with designing products that would consume less energy, she said.

Sustainability consultant Matt Gardner agreed that relevancy is the key, and said his goal in working with companies is always to get a deep understanding of what is motivating the company’s sustainability aims. A sustainability program can then be crafted around that, he said. “That’s our way of getting really good traction with boards and senior management, because they see the alignment. They get it,” said Gardner, a director of consultancy Sustainserv Inc. in Boston.

First and foremost, however, companies that want to pursue sustainability have to come to grips with the transparency that a sustainability initiative requires, Gardner said. “They will need to be talking about performance, and aspects of performance they may not have disclosed previously,” he said. Next steps include looking at labor practices to make sure they’re in alignment with the company’s values; looking at infrastructure to see how efficiently it’s operating; and looking at products to understand their impacts, Gardner said. In the early stages, he usually counsels companies to do a “footprint assessment” — doing an inventory of greenhouse gas emissions and other emissions.

“Another thing we will typically counsel a company to do is to do a sustainability report,” Gardner said. “The reason for that is that this opens their eyes to this commitment to transparency, and also forces them to take a very rigorous look across a broad spectrum of their business and its impacts.”

No matter where the sustainability effort is originating — whether from the top-down or from a more grassroots level — communication is going to be critical to the success of the effort, said Bryan Sheehan, founder and president of SymbioSus Sustainability Consulting Inc. in Southborough. But the communication strategy will differ depending on who is spearheading the effort, he said. “If you’re talking to upper management to convince them this is the right way to go, you should speak and present in executive summary fashion, give conclusions first, then give support,” Sheehan said. “It’s about communicating concisely and in language they understand, demonstrating mutual benefit. You have to show that it’s not just about sacrificing company performance for the environment, it’s actually a win-win.”

For management communicating downwards, “it’s really communicating early and often what the vision is, what the message is,” Sheehan said. “Managers often underestimate need to communicate the vision for new initiatives, by a factor of 10. They think they’re communicating enough but they’re not. Employees will be a bit concerned about what does this mean for us? They need to communicate why it’s good for the business, the environment and employees.”

At CA Technologies, Curtis, who began her role as CSO last December, said an important point to emphasize is the potential for sustainability initiatives to help with attracting and retaining talent. “People feel good about working here, and that will ultimately impact the bottom line of the business,” she said.

In keeping with the tenet of making the sustainability initiative relevant to different stakeholders, companies must also put in place a governance model that ensures the initiative has some longevity, Curtis said.

“People need to realize this is not just the initiative du jour, but there’s staying power,” she said.

Another key is integrating sustainability into as much of the company as makes sense, in the existing framework and processes of the company, Curtis said. “The last thing I wanted to do was hire 20 people in Framingham to run the whole office. That wouldn’t have made sense,” she said. “What we needed was to have (sustainability) integrated into different operations, business units and functions within the company, so there essentially became ownership in different organizations.”

If that happens successfully, the experts in each business unit will be able to make recommendations of the best areas to tackle in sustainability, she said. Ultimately, there is no silver bullet for any organization when it comes to sustainability, and it doesn’t happen overnight, Curtis said. “It’s a journey, I think, that doesn’t really have an end.”