The Challenge: Since the path to sustainability is rooted in local context, creating an overarching corporate program that is also relevant to numerous departments and locations may seem counter-intuitive. How do we create an overarching corporate sustainability program that is relevant to every employee and is implementable across an entire organization, especially those with diverse departments, services and geographic locations? How could we implement programming that would be relevant to office, laboratory, retail and field-based settings or perhaps in operations located in New York City, New Delhi and in a small rural town in northern Canada?
Another key consideration when we are thinking through the scope of corporate vs. local, is that the reverse also needs to be considered. How does the program engage employees to directly understand their impact locally on organizational performance? For example, would employees be able to read a sustainability report and relate their everyday actions to the outcomes that the organization reports on? Do employees feel that their daily actions make a difference toward organizational goals?
An Effective Approach: “Strategic Flexibility”: I encourage an approach that I like to call “Strategic Flexibility”. This approach is about finding an effective balance with aligned action between corporate level targets and locally organized events and activities.
What does this mean in action? Companies focus program efforts on their overarching sustainability targets, but provide local autonomy by working with all locations to plan how they will meet the company targets in a way that is relevant to their specific context.
Strategic flexibility is where the “top down” big picture planning, meets the “bottom up” operational insights and practicality. Each approach has advantages, but reliance on only one restricts the potential effectiveness and success of your strategic goals. It combines the strategic alignment of efforts with the business vision, while leveraging local experience, operational knowledge and momentum of existing initiatives. Creating efforts that are strategically flexible builds trust, commitment, enthusiasm, buy-in at every level, and company resilience by creating the space to be responsive to internal and external influences.
How it Works: Whether your program focuses on individuals or teams, create an overarching framework around your organization’s sustainability targets that is clear and relatable to your sustainability reporting. Using the focused framework you have created for guidance, allow local offices to develop their own plans to address each target. Local offices may or may not be implementing the same activities, but they will all be working towards overarching sustainability targets.
Some key elements for implementation:
Local Planning – Encourage the development of a local sustainability plan by involving the entire office/location. Sustainability/Green Teams often only look within their limited group for ideas, champions and resources. Developing a local sustainability plan by involving all employees will open up avenues for participation, discussion, ideas, solutions, collaboration and resources.
Encourage involvement in the process by providing various approaches that appeal to employees’ interests and time commitments. This is an amazing opportunity to build on the momentum of existing local activities, previous success and identify local champions. When it’s time to prioritize and decide on action plans, create space for productive discussion; for example host solution lunches, where you can bring into the fold anyone interested in a specific issue or initiative by discussing solutions to a particular challenge.
Local Support – This sort of “bottom coming up to meet top” approach will be a new concept to many people, so providing ongoing support for planning and implementation for local offices is important and necessary. Having a strong support network for them to move forward will be key. In addition to corporate assistance, creating a community support network of local champions/mentors is also effective.
Networking and Knowledge Sharing – Providing an avenue for discussion, sharing ideas, success stories and advice on lessons learned is an effective way to make offices feel supported and ultimately more successful. Learning from each other and feeling connected as a community working toward a common goal greatly increases enthusiasm and momentum.
Want to learn more?
Watch for the next installment of our 6-part “Start a Sustainability Movement in Your Organization: Part 4 – How to Systemize “ series. We will focus on how to systemize your program, no matter the size, function or structure of your organization or program.
Start a Sustainability Movement Series:
· Part 2: Building buy-in at every level
· Part 3: How to scale
· Part 4: How to systemize
· Part 5: All in for sustainability
· Part 6: Fostering culture & embedding sustainability
Connect with Wendy om the links below.
Twitter: @EngageIntl https://twitter.com/EngageIntl
LinkedIn: Wendy Firlotte https://uk.linkedin.com/in/wendyfirlotte
Wendy is a Corporate Sustainability Employee Engagement Strategist. She specializes in translating high-level strategy and purpose into aligned and embedded employee action.
Used cups are not only a challenge for recycle depending on materials and waste management, but also a big waste of space when binned and thrown away and into trash bins.
Too often we walk along streets and see trash cans quite exploding or worst we have to deal with this problem in our offices near coffee break areas or vending machines.
This is my personal experience and honestly, watching this garbage obscenity and the number of wasting bags used for waste management, I couldn’t take it anymore to see all that space wasted.
So I tried to find a solution to this problem, and too bad I found only big machines which are awesome to collect and/or destroy used cups managing big numbers, but too big and too expensive to install in my office or my home.
So here came the idea: realize a device to be inserted into the bin that let me collect and stack my used cups easily instead of trying every time to stack one into another one and often failing.
The solution should be low cost, small size and possibly affordable to everyone and most important could be applied to almost every type of existing trash bins around the world.
After a lot of modifications and tests finally a brand new tool was born to satisfy my needs: Daizyp. And using it for the first times gives me knowledge to use it even for other type of waste, or for example I found it great when using it in my office desk bin to collect coffee plastic cups into Daizyp and paper into the bin. A smart and eco-friendly solution all-in-one!
Daizyp helps people to collect used cups stacking them nicely avoiding waste of space and at the same time improving recycle collecting cups all together easily.
Daizyp transforms your trash bin into a smart one and can be installed in almost every type of trash bin.
Install and using it is very simple, all you have to do is inserting it into your bin (or outside the bin) and begin to throw inside it your used cups.
All the cups will stack together and when full emptying Daizyp is a simple and fast operation: you release the pin on the bottom and let the stacked cups fall into waste bag and you’re done.
Daizyp benefits are many and helps you:
Daizyp comes in 2 sizes version: normal size (84mm diameter) for plastic cups and glasses, and XL size (95mm diameter ) for fast food or big cups.
Daizyp project is young but promising: these days we are performing tests at our friend’s offices and small business and they are enthusiastics about it!
We are working for crowdfunding campaign scheduled for the first quarter 2017 and in the meantime trying to let people know Daizyp, the benefits it will bring and join the Daizyp recycle revolution.
Discover more on www.daizyp.com or follow Daizyp @thedaizyp
Some of you have already listened to @rwscarter on VoiceFm recently, some of you are so dedicated that you have heard both of his appearance so far. Credit where it is due, that cannot have been as easy as listening to Adam from Green Hampshire or Denise from ‘Eco Hair and Beauty‘. Both the earlier show and the now regular slot. On that occasion (my first VoiceFm appearance) I was with the wonderful Denise Baden from Southampton University who was discussing the great initiative ‘Eco Hair and Beauty’ which have written for us here at @CrowdLeaf before. She also discussed the sustainability agenda in Cuba- which she tied in rather nicely with her musical ‘Fidel’. More of that can be found here along with a link to that guest appearance below.
Like wise the new green show on VoiceFM – hosted by Xan Philips and the green agenda taken forward by @rwscarter on Xan’s ‘The Business show’ every first Thursday of the month from 8pm- 9pm.
The December the 1st episode can be found above – With the inside scoop on all things Christmas ,Autumn Statement, local green campaigns, national crowdfunding news and the green agenda and insights, from £5 notes to electric vans.
As @rwscarter is now a regular guest- the first in the sequence of Green issues radio appearances os merely the start, we want your green news, campaigns and insights to share live on air. At the moment this scheduled be broadcast every first Thursday of each month from 8 PM however we are both human and sometime this may change, so keep an eye on our twitter and on here. You can tune in on 103.9FM or find us online at : http://www.voicefmradio.co.uk . If you happen to miss the show but still want to listen, perhaps you want to take us for a train journey, or on a long walk – there is both a listen live and as you’ve probably noticed from the links above a ‘listen again’ option. Thanks as always for being here with us – keep your green news, campaigns, opportunities and more coming our way. Equally there is room for suggested sustainability/green/conservation songs – please do share your suggestions.
Following on from the Deep Impact Conference this November just gone, I managed to talk to some really cool people. People like Ian Tracey from Innovate UK and The Knowledge Transfer Network, Bill Morrow, Helen Farmer, a speaker from Indigogo, Jon Terry from PWC , and more.
I got to talk, to the experts, to the people in the room and the people making the alternative finance industry grow. So obviously I asked them about sustainability I asked them about the future of green issues. Below is a video of what they had to say with regard to using crowdfunding in the green, sustainability and conservation communities which we here at CrowdLeaf all make up.
Do you know what they said?
Have a listen.
They agreed, the future of the planet belongs to us, it is our time, it is our time, it is our time… our time to take the bull by its horns to take the money from the industries that destroy the planet and put the money into industries that create the future. Save today and preserve yesterdays species and planet today ready for tomorrow.
People seemed to enjoy the day, the world was put to rights and issues such as the ‘Grey Suit Factor’ in the Women Unbound report which highlights some really interesting work showing women doing as well as and better than men in crowdfunding campaigns. Some of the best crowdfunding practices and views from both the UK, the US and across europe surrounding the future of alternative finance. Which has been done with Barry James, who as CEO, co-founder and instigator of the Crowdfunding Center and the Deep Impact Conference worked with PwC and many more ( including me over a few pints) to create a report that may yet change the way we see the ‘glass ceiling’ and most importantly how we get past it.
Distinguished speakers such as Sarah Warman who is the Commander in Chief of the task force for the crowdfunding success BrewDog , Bill Morrow CEO and founder of Angels Den, Kathleen Monigue from Crowdfund Better USA, Tim Wright from Twingables, Julian Swan from The Imagination Factory, Michelle Rodger from Tartan Cat Communications, Jon Terry from PwC, Clive Lewis from ICAEW Chartered Accountants, Jamie Veitch who coordinated the first ‘Community share issue’ into media in 2014 and many more.
It was a great day, I really enjoyed the day and found out some really interesting things going on in the world of Alternative finance, fin-tech and some really interesting and cool products such as FormCard which I think might go someway to giving a better name to plastic. I am still opposed to plastic, but the thing that gets me most is the single use plastic, the plastic bags and the broken bits of plastic our grandkids, grandkids will be digging up, so any sort of reusable plastic will go a long way to cutting the level of waste both now and in the future.
View more about FormCard here from their crowdfunding campaign information video.
CrowdLeaf is a proud sponsor for Thursday the 24th of November’s Crowdfunding: Deep Impact Conference.
@rwscarter did an interview with Barry James the brain child and man in charge for the conference. Barry is CEO of the Crowdfunding Center and Secretary of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Crowdfunding among many other positions, ventures and successes. This week Barry found time to talk about how crowdfunding can help the green, sustainability and conservation community and much more. Listen below as we discuss the speakers, the concepts, the change that Acts of Parliment such as the Social Value Act can and will make a difference to the causes we care about.
Here’s a list of some of the fantastic sponsors for the event. Click on the video or the link to see/ hear about the speakers and schedule for the day.
