Sustainability as a Strategy

I've just finished reading "Strategy for Sustainability" by Adam Werbach. Werbach's book left me feeling optimistic - I greatly identified with his ideas. Sustainabilty isn't just a community relations or employee engagement tactic - and Werbach lays out how sustainability actually ensures your company grows and thrives in the future.

Use a more traditional definition of sustainability, Werbach says, "It's about survival." He describes how companies should think about how your company's actions are impacted by everything from the environment to local communities to societal trends. When a company doesn't take all these factors into account, it is potentially missing something that will seriously inhibit the company's growth or survival in the future.

He gave the example of Nike being called out for using sweatshops to fabricate its shoes in the 90s. When it had made the decision to move its factories to Asia, it had neglected to realize that the world was becoming more aware of the impact of globalization on local communities. And, it meant they had to deal with a PR disaster that threatened the company's success.

And so, Werbach's book left me questioning what sustainability can bring to our business? The short-term often rules in our business - making the numbers for the street. In that environment, what is our blind spot? What are we missing that could come back to haunt us later? What could we do that would make our business all-around more sustainable?

Collaboration Creates Carbon?

Recently my company has been trying to promote more collaboration - small teams working on focused projects. I'm definitely supportive of the philosophy. The problem is that it seems to be coming in conflict with our sustainability efforts.

Living in the Bay Area, most of our employees' commutes are relatively long (either in distance or time stuck in traffic). In addition to supporting a number of public transportation options, the company has allowed working from home - for a day or two a week - both to reduce the number of commuters on the roads and to help reduce employees stress.

Unfortunately, in trying to promote more collaboration, one of the tactics has been enforcing a "no work from home" policy. The thought is that if you are in the office you'll have no barriers to collaboration.

The result of this policy may be more collaboration but it sets us back on our carbon footprint reduction goals- commuting is a major contributor to our company's footprint. And it will probably have secondary impacts - increasing employee absenteeism, for instance.

As with most organizational problems, I don't think there is an easy answer to encourage collaboration - and so I wonder if there is a more innovative way to make collaboration happen while not increasing the days we commute.

Could we restructure our days in the office so that we have more quality dedicated collaboration time? E-mail, presentation creation, and other individual work could be done on the work from home days.

Could make better use of the technology to collaborate more effectively? Maybe we could require everyone to be on instant messenger and engage on our brainstorming website regularly.

I'd love to hear from other organizations that have struggled with these same issues and found creative solutions....

I'm back...musings on sustainability...

Many things have kept me away from my blog for awhile, but I'm back writing about my experiences trying to make everything a little more green at work and at home.

To start out, I wanted to talk about how sustainability has fared during this recession. I've seen a lot written on all sides. I attended the Corporate Eco Forum a few months ago and it seemed that many big companies were continuing to invest as they had before in sustainability. And, more generally, it seems to make sense (or at least I hope) that the recession will encourage people to consume less and adopt more green behaviors (recycling and reusing).

My company has continued to support our sustainability department which - in the face of multiple rounds of layoffs - I definitely see as a positive sign. But, I have seen a different type of negative impact on our green efforts.

As many are concerned the debate over health care will overshadow the ability to get any meaningful legislation on climate change on the books, the recession has also distracted many people in our company. Participation in our Green Team events has dropped off dramatically. Even the random suggestions we often get e-mailed to our Green Team e-mail address are few and far between.

Why? We don't have a lot of data but we've come up with some theories. Maybe people are keeping their heads down. They might think that participating in Green Team events will give their manager the impression that they are neglecting their work and give them a reason to lay them off. Or, maybe they just have a lot more work now and any green activities have just fallen by the wayside.

These are all understandable feelings but I believe that participatin in green is an opportunity for the company and for employees to be more innovative and relieve stress. So, how can reinvigorate our Green Teams?

Should we create some very easy, low impact way for people to be engaged in the Green Team to start getting employees engage in some small way? Should we re-focus our efforts mainly on product innovation related to green so that it is part of everyone's job? Or both?

We'll talk more about this....