Cultivating a Culture of Sustainability
Birgit Valmüür
18 years: Sustainability leadership
If you want to broaden the practice of sustainability in a business, you need to look at creating a sustainability culture. Join Birgit Valmüür as she explores how to, from the top-down and bottom-up as an individual, team and business unit.
If you want to broaden the practice of sustainability in a business, you need to look at creating a sustainability culture. Join Birgit Valmüür as she explores how to, from the top-down and bottom-up as an individual, team and business unit.
Cultivating a Culture of Sustainability
15 mins 59 secs
Key learning objectives:
Define sustainability culture
Outline how you can create a sustainability culture top-down
Identify how you can create a sustainability culture bottom-up
Overview:
Sustainability culture can be defined as doing things in a business in a way that positively impacts sustainability. You can create a sustainability culture from many angles - top-down and bottom-up from an individual, team and business-wide perspective. This will involve lots of talks and discussions with your colleagues, listening to concerns, teaching the hesitant and misunderstood and collaborating.
What is sustainability culture?
Sustainability culture can be defined as doing things in a business in a way that positively impacts sustainability.
How can you create a sustainability culture top-down?
An effective top-down approach needs to consider the historic nature of the business, its recent changes, and current challenges. Companies should tap into their internal resources as it can be much more cost efficient than using external consultants.
1. Create a sustainability-focused statement
2. Select a few of the UN SDGs to contribute towards goals that are aligned with the business processes
3. Make a climate pledge to set a long term greenhouse gas target
4. Monitor key metrics with targets linked with remuneration of employees to motivate
5. Distribute surveys among employees to collate ideas on sustainability improvements
How can you create a sustainability culture bottom-up as an individual?
1. Leverage your role
Reflect on how you can best do your job while incorporating sustainability.
2. Learn
Become informed about the sustainability-related aspects of the specific work you do.
3. Listen
Notice the sustainability concerns and ideas others are expressing. It is not unusual for people to underestimate the sustainability concerns of the people around them.
4. Lead
Suggest improvements when you need permissions to implement changes, or immediately build sustainability considerations into your work, if it is at your discretion.
How can you create a sustainability culture as a team?
1. Talk
Talk to people about the sustainability opportunities you have noticed and sustainability subjects you are interested in contributing to.
2. Teach
Share with others the sustainability insights that you have learned and tell them about the ways you have found to incorporate sustainability improvements into your own work.
3. Team up
It can be beneficial to jointly pursue causes - not necessarily everyone in organisations shares a passion for sustainability so teaming up can also be helpful to win over those who are still hesitant.
How can you create a sustainability culture across business units?
1. Converse
Engage in two-way conversations with other teams, functions and levels to share your insights and suggestions. And enquire about their views, objections, questions, and seek to learn about their related challenges or concerns.
2. Collaborate
Sustainability initiatives often get siloed - collaborating between teams and functions, already in the phase of envisioning changes, helps to build rapport as well as foresee and prevent challenges.
3. Co-create
Co-creating or jointly implementing sustainability improvements helps to share the sense of achievement and ownership across businesses and can ease future collaboration. Recurring co-creation helps to establish systematic improvements and solidify them.
How can you create a sustainability culture across the whole business?
1. Own
Decide internally to take responsibility, commit to it publicly, and hold yourself responsible for delivering on that decision.
2. Orchestrate
Organise company-wide solutions to support sustainability innovation. Make sure you enable employees to contribute and permit them to do that.
3. Oversee
Monitor to ensure that your employees are enabled and engaged to contribute. Measure and record progress, reward and praise good examples, and periodically review your practices.
Birgit Valmüür
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