7 Days to Sustainability

Posted on April 22, 2012 by msaxton1

There are 4.5million small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in the UK, that’s 99% of all Britain’s enterprises. But when it comes to sustainability, the benefits of being green – such as resource efficiency and cost saving, new business advice and the ability to answer tenders, PR and marketing differentiation and employee and customer engagement – are often being missed.

So, to help them realise the opportunities, a new national campaign has been launched by Planet Positive to offer all UK SMEs free sustainability advice.

The 7-days to Sustainability campaign is free and provides easy to follow steps to help business become more sustainable. SMEs can register for the 7-day programme online on the campaign website www.7days2sustainability.com. The first SMEs will start their 7-day Sustainability programme on Tuesday May 1st and SMEs will participate weekly thereafter for the remainder of 2012 and beyond.

Energy and Climate Change Minister Greg Barker said: “Saving energy goes straight to the bottom line, helping businesses save money and increase competitiveness as well as cut carbon. Free help and advice, like the Planet Positive campaign is offering, helps to build businesses on sustainable foundations and reap all the benefits that energy efficiency has to offer.”

The campaign brings together expert knowledge from respected business leaders and Planet Positive’s 5-year knowledge of practical steps SMEs can take to be sustainable. Each SME will be sent a Planning Pack and then receive seven, daily activities:

Sustainability Plan; Employee engagement & Behavioural Change
Switch on to switching off – Energy Efficiency
Waste & Recycling
Travel & Transport
Food & Water (+ Health & Well-being)
Procurement & Supply Chain
Success – Marketing and Winning business

Fantastic Four

Posted on April 18, 2012 by msaxton1

The Royal College of Nursing is engaging employees around energy efficiency, cost savings and waste with its Turn It Off Campaign.

A year ago the Royal College of Nursing triumphed in the HR Excellence awards, winning Best HR team, the Health and Wellbeing award and the prestigious Gold award.

The RCN demonstrated that it could turn around a culture of inertia, old fashioned employee practices and depressingly poor staff morale through HR-led leadership and innovation.

It put into place measures that tackled stress and long term absence, re-designed training and careers programmes, and established links between HR’s own operational performance and staff satisfaction that added value to the business.

Fast forward to now and the RCN is refusing to rest on its laurels – it can’t afford to. The government is looking to ﬁnd billions of pounds of efﬁciency savings and its members are among those that are potentially in the firing line. And the latest CIPD survey in February (across a range of industries) revealed that staff satisfaction rates are at their lowest since 2009. It highlighted that staff confidence in job security in particular, is decreasing.

“We are keen to ensure that the RCN keeps moving forward irrespective of the challenges facing our staff,” said David Cooper, Head of HR at the Royal College of Nursing. “And to that end we continue to invest heavily in initiatives that make for a happy and healthy workforce.”

Recently, it set up the Fantastic Four Working Group. The group focuses on four areas: developing career opportunities; encouraging staff participation and involvement in key issues; creating and managing high performance teams; and finding ways to give back to the communities that its members serve through a CSR group. A senior manager and a GMB representative have joint leads in each of the four working groups – a first for the RCN.

The CSR initiatives are driven towards improving the RCN’s procurement process and reducing the carbon dioxide emissions generated by its buildings. To galvanise employees, the RCN created the ‘Turn it Off!’ campaign. Engaging employees around energy efficiency, cost savings and waste, it aims to change behaviour by tackling the simple stuff, like powering down office and kitchen equipment, switching off lights and using less office resources, such as paper and printing.

A secret survey was carried out by volunteers from the RCN before the campaign launched, which not only established some benchmarks, but provided a platform to launch inter-office competitions to cut carbon and energy use.

To give the campaign some additional cohesion, the RCN into the national Climate Week programme, which recognises and rewards individuals and organisations which are doing their bit for the environment.

To the HR Excellence Awards, the RCN can also now add a place on the Sunday Times Best Companies list. Indeed, it was the only trade union and professional association to feature. And the RCN’s employee satisfaction rates buck the national trend with the overwhelming majority (84 per cent) responding in its survey that they were proud to work for the RCN. Highlighting the importance of listening to the workforce – a factor which Mr Cooper believes has been vital to turning the business around – over three quarters of staff (78 per cent) feel that managers share important information with them. A similar number (78 per cent) feel that managers take an interest in their wellbeing.

Shortlisted companies in the HR Excellence Awards 2012 will be announced later this month.

Sustainability Games

Posted on April 17, 2012 by msaxton1

Deloitte is pioneering a business simulation game that aims to help organisations accelerate the implementation of corporate responsibility and sustainability. The game enables companies to experiment with a realistic model of their company and its potential future scenarios.

According to Deloitte, playing the game will enable participants to learn how to balance the qualitative and quantitative dimensions of people, planet and profit within the context of their business enterprise. In lay terms, employees – whether they are at C-Suite level or on the frontline – can use the game to identify, understand and work with corporate responsibility and sustainability activities that add value to the organisation.

During the game, employees make decisions about CR and sustainability and are presented with the impacts. Typically, players go through several business cycles, enabling them to assess the consequences of their actions in short to long term scenarios. Learning and development is focused on gaining insight into the complexities of CR and sustainability, and the competencies required to manage the associated risks. Over time, by playing the game, employees are trained to be more aware of risks and opportunities, and, it’s hoped, be more inclined to transfer insights and knowledge between each other – a goal for any organisation as it seeks to build high performing teams in corporate responsibility and sustainability.

The game deals with the challenges of CR and sustainability strategy, developing and implementing a programme in a coordinated way, managing processes and systems, as well as employee engagement, learning and development.

As many communicators will attest, employees do not change their behaviours overnight. Realising change requires intelligent and persistent employee engagement, and the creation of tools that encourage and facilitate learning and development so that employees continue to behave in responsible ways.

Deloitte has been working with organisations at different stages on their corporate responsibility and sustainability journeys to help them strengthen their activities and build employee awareness and participation.

Within a multinational manufacturing company, Board members and executive vice-presidents of HR, risk management, marketing, corp comms and health safety & environment competed in two groups in a Deloitte-facilitated game, which resulted in a greater understanding about how to reconcile the long term financial, social and environmental performance of the organisation versus short term profit. The game has been used to help integrate CR and sustainability into daily work practices and build commitment for execution among business unit managers.

Another multinational company, which has achieved several international awards in recognition of its sustained CR and sustainability programmes, introduced the game to clarify the strategy of the company. It felt that all senior managers and executives in its organisation needed to develop deeper knowledge, skills and behaviours to translate the CR and sustainability targets of the firm into practice. Here, the game has been played in various facilitated workshops, both face-to-face and through the internet to accommodate employees based in locations across the globe. Feedbacks from the game have helped identify what the company is doing well and where improvements can be made, accelerating its leadership in corporate responsibility and sustainability.

And, at a similarly strategic level, TNT (in The Netherlands) has added the game to its leadership programme – “…proof that the Deloitte Business Simulation Game is more than just a nice amusement for management,” said Peter Bakker, former chief executive of the Dutch international logistics and delivery services company.