How to Educate Your Sustainability Team
Are you looking for new sustainable resources and practices for your workplace? Try these 6 tips on how to educate your eco-team.
Across industries, the market is experiencing a surge in so-called sustainability professionals. Various new heads of sustainability have popped up within small to large organizations. In a way, this is a good sign - it means the market is responding to a rise in demand for sustainability expertise.
This shows that there is a higher awareness of the need to tackle environmental and social issues which affect companies both from within and beyond their operations. However, sustainability encompasses a wide variety of issues and it’s almost impossible to have one person encompassing expertise on all grounds. Moreover, it seems that many can get away with a short online course to call themselves sustainability experts, leading to competence greenwashing. But first, let’s start with the basics:
Why Is It Important to Educate Your Sustainability Team?
By definition, sustainability means to create something that lasts through time. So, putting aside pictures of turtles and kids in poor communities, sustainability is really about taking care of the risks and harnessing the opportunities to create long-lasting systems. Hence, every business, no matter which products or services your company sells, should care about this.
Sustainability has dual lenses. Firstly, it means to take care of how your business operates from within, to ensure that your product and people-related processes are efficient. Secondly, it means to care about how your company affects nature and communities beyond its internal systems, which would ultimately pose a threat to the business itself.
Let there be no mistake: Sustainability offers ample opportunity for profit.
Of course, there are some industries that are by nature more exposed to certain sustainability threats than others. That’s exactly why it is so important to understand what is material to your business to set sustainability targets and shape the direction of your sustainability strategy.
The way in which we implement sustainability at work and start to understand such issues is through education! It’s paramount to ensure that whoever is leading your sustainability strategy actually has the right credentials, coupled with education and personal experience, to make a difference - unfortunately, passion is just a starting point.
However, such a background is hard to come by, and in a talent pool of candidates to choose from when hiring a sustainability professional, you might have to end up taking care of their knowledge development yourself.
So, what can you do to ensure your sustainability team has access to the right resources?
Culture
Culture is where this journey begins. Without leadership that actively believes in sustainability as one of its core business strategies, little will be achieved by any, even the greatest, sustainability team. Time and time again, politics and ignorance at the top trickle down. The first step to building a successful sustainability team within your organization is to believe in and prioritize sustainability at the top. This will allow the company to foster a culture that welcomes systemic change and bold ideas in order to achieve sustainability targets.
What does a culture that supports sustainability look like? It all revolves around the concept of ownership and employee engagement in sustainability; where the company identifies which sustainability topics are relevant, then launches a plan that involves multiple stakeholders to own different sustainability processes, entrenching these feelings of ownership within a routine.
2. Diversity
As mentioned in previous articles (link), diversity is key to ensuring a variety of sustainability facets can be tackled effectively. Sustainable ways of working in business mean everything from directing internal employees' policy developments to greening the supply chain, from thinking about innovative materials to cutting costs, from engineering greener products to setting sustainability targets across operations.
You can probably tell that one person cannot possibly be great at all these tasks, instead, you may need someone with a background in logistics, management, law, engineering, biochemistry, etc. The more diverse the better your team will be at tackling a wide range of sustainability problems and identifying opportunities, as well as educating each other.
3. Courses & Certification Sponsorships
Coming back to the actual sustainability training bit, there are so many educational resources out there - how do you choose the right ones for your team? There are two valid options: industry-specific or generic. You might want to start covering your bases with relevant industry qualifications, here are some examples:
Real Estate / Building Design: LEED
Finance: CFA ESG Investing
Fashion: Central Saint Marting Sustainable Fashion Short Course
Marketing: Sustainability Marketing by Harvard
Of course, this is a non-exhaustive list, but that hopefully gives you relevant examples of certifications that you could look for within your industry. If you instead wish to start with a broader approach, building the team’s foundational knowledge, here are some valuable courses:
Attention! None of these courses will make you an expert! You should think of these as a starting point for your team’s sustainability education journey. Taking education a step further would mean sponsoring relevant academic degrees such as:
Blended Professional Certificate by MIT: Chief Sustainability Officer
Master’s in Sustainability Leadership by Cambridge University
Executive Education in Business Sustainability Programme by INSEAD
Imperial College Business School MSc in Climate Change, Management & Finance
All of this is complemented obviously also by hiring individuals with invaluable knowledge and experience in scientific fields if relevant to your industry.
4. Volunteering
This may come off as a bit odd, but volunteering can become a great educational tool for all teams to be able to connect with a greater sense of purpose and impact. There’s a huge range of volunteering opportunities that are both people and environment-focused. Finding projects and NGOs to support can be a great initiative to get all levels of the business involved in meaningful activities that not only spur motivation to act but also teach valuable lessons about different ecosystems (e.g. coral restoration projects).
An example of a self-started volunteering initiative is by Marks & Spencer’s, where they pair employees with unemployed young people looking to develop skills and confidence. The company also empowers local stores to come up with campaigns tied to their communities’ needs so that shop floor employees take ownership of sustainability.
5. Partnerships & Events
One of the biggest challenges the world faces when it comes to building sustainability strategies and finding effective solutions to environmental and social issues is the lack of collaboration. More often than not, sustainability challenges require a multi-stakeholder approach in order to be tackled successfully. But building partnerships is also an amazing tool to learn from each other’s failures and success stories.
This could look like creating a space for sustainability professionals across the same industries to organize workshops and exchange ideas. It could also mean partnering up with NGOs, regulatory bodies, and industry-led sustainability initiatives to access events, resources, and other educational opportunities.
Setting up collaborations with external parties and even rival companies in the same industry allows sustainability teams to share the feeling of ownership when facing huge systemic changes.
This is something that already happens across major companies like Nestlé, Coca-Cola, and Pepsi, who came together to form the Consumer Goods Forum. Among other agreements, these companies pledged to work together to achieve zero deforestation by 2020 through the responsible sourcing of key commodities like soy, palm oil, beef, and paper and pulp.
6. Incentives
Lastly, you want to ensure that whichever sustainability strategy you choose to go for to educate your eco-team is not just a tick-boxing exercise, but that the employee is truly engaged and striving for high performance. There’s no better way to do so than by setting an incentive scheme. This can take many shapes according to your business needs. An example could be setting a bonus and/or promotion scheme to achieve certain sustainability targets for the company.
As you want this to be a collaborative effort, you may want to look into team-based based rewards, whereby the entire team is recognized for the successful achievements of targets based on interdependent tasks.
In Conclusion…
Sustainability education is undoubtedly difficult to nail down as it’s trying to cover so many aspects of environmental and social topics which may be more or less relevant according to the nature of your industry. That’s why it’s important to first understand the basis of why sustainability is important to your business before delving into the nitty gritty of how to integrate this into your business strategy.
Nonetheless, building a culture that promotes these values and a diverse team bringing different experiences and knowledge to the table is already incredibly valuable. This can then be supplemented with short courses, certifications, academic programs, volunteering, collaborative partnerships, and incentive schemes.
This sustainable educational journey is not as simple as a one-time off exercise, but rather, a company's life-long effort to build a resilient and far-sighted business strategy.
Key Takeaways
Educating your sustainability team is important to ensure you avoid greenwashing and actually build strategies that positively affect your business’ resilience and environmental and social impacts.
The first step is to create a company culture that believes in the value of sustainability from the top.
The second step is to build a diverse team to bring various experiences and knowledge to the table to effectively deal with sustainability’s multifaceted nature.
There are various educational resources available, ranging from industry-specific to generic, short, and long academic programs and certifications.
Another option is to actively engage in educational activities like volunteering, events, and collaborative partnerships.
Incentive schemes ensure you avoid the employees feeling like this is just a tick-box exercise.
Be clear, be confident, and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.
