Your company has more reasons than ever to invest in your green thumb. According to 360MatchPro, 89% of investors use ESG (environmental, social, governance) issues to inform their investment approach. Plus, you can leverage environmentalism as a corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiative, boosting employee engagement and boosting your reputation.
However, improving your company’s environmental impact requires more than just planting trees on a whim and calling it a day. The most effective environmental programs require intensive strategizing and effort to execute well.
That doesn’t mean it has to be challenging, though! In this guide, we’ll review some essential parts strategies to help you enhance your environmental impact (and, by extension, your community). Let’s dive in!
1. Conduct an Environmental Impact Assessment
You likely aren’t an environmental expert, so understanding where your company’s environmental impact currently stands will help you craft the most effective plan to move forward. Start on the right foot by conducting an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), an internal audit that holistically gauges your business’s various activities and how they affect sustainability. Here are some aspects of sustainability your EIA should assess:
- Energy consumption
- Waste production and management
- Carbon emissions
- Material usage
- Transportation and logistics
- Adherence to environmental regulations
Research all of these factors and how to measure their impact on both your business and the external community. You might have to invest in more robust tools, ask employees for input, or work with a consultant to conduct the assessment.
Also, as you conduct your EIA, consider how different operations could be conducted digitally to limit physical waste. For instance, let’s say your employee holiday gift is a physical gift or gift card. Unwrapit recommends switching to a digital model where employees can choose and claim their gift online, eliminating the waste from a physical gift.
2. Establish a Sustainability Improvement Plan
Once you’ve specified your baseline with your EIA, use it to set a concrete sustainability plan for your business. This stage of the process encompasses both overarching goals and the specific actions you’ll take to achieve them.
Here are some elements of a comprehensive environmental improvement plan:
- An overview of your current state. Share the insights from your EIA in an easily comprehensible way, such as with charts or tables. Also, provide context about overarching sustainability best practices for your niche and how your procedures compare.
- Mitigation initiatives. For each main point of improvement, you identified in your EIA, recommend a few feasible fixes. For instance, if you have an issue with your in-office energy consumption, one of your mitigation initiatives might be to add motion-activated or timed lights.
- Implementation plan. Add details to your mitigation initiatives, such as a planned timeline and an early-stage budget. You might not have every piece of the puzzle yet, so do the best you can—it’ll make bringing your plans to life much easier.
- Monitoring and reporting framework. Establish your key performance indicators (KPIs) and your goals. Some of these metrics will probably carry over from your EIA and some will be unique to this plan. For example, you might have already determined a KPI of kilowatts of energy consumed in the EIA and set a new KPI to measure employee participation in your efforts.
As you set these goals, strengthen them with framing strategies. You might already know the SMART framework (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound) and the SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats)—use these and others to contextualize your plans fully.
3. Implement Your Initiatives
Every company’s initiatives will vary based on your baseline, budget, existing infrastructure, and target results. However, there are some effective ideas that businesses of any size can feasibly achieve. Let’s take a look at ideas for the aforementioned parts of your EIA:
- Energy consumption: Conserve energy from the office by migrating to a hybrid work model.
- Waste production and management: Implement intensive recycling and composting programs.
- Carbon emissions: Purchase carbon offsets as a corporate social responsibility initiative.
- Material usage: Implement a buy-back or recycling program so customers’ products don’t go to waste after they’re done with them.
- Transportation and logistics: Reduce business travel by holding virtual meetings with out-of-town clients and stakeholders.
- Adherence to environmental regulations: Work with experts, such as consultants or lawyers, to ensure you comply with any new rules.
No matter your specific initiatives, your company needs to prove your genuine commitment to environmentalism by working with partners that share your values. For instance, a company actively working to minimize pollution in its production processes should partner with a corporate gifting company that focuses on reducing carbon emissions through gifting—otherwise, you might inadvertently undermine your mission.
4. Empower Employees to Participate
For your programs to really take hold, you need to get your entire company excited about environmentalism. This also helps boost your impact, make your program feel more genuine, and improve your return on investment (ROI). You can encourage employee participation by:
- Promote wellness initiatives that get employees outside and allow them to contribute to the environment.
- Organize environmental company-wide volunteer days like tree-planting and litter clean-ups.
- Create sustainability challenges between departments, such as water bottle recycling and energy conservation.
- Matching donations to environmental organizations at a higher rate.
- Donating on behalf of employees to environmental organizations as a gift.
When you promote your initiative to employees, make it as simple as possible to get involved. For instance, accompany each email with a highly visible button calling them to action.
As your environmental improvement programs get into full swing, ensure you show gratitude to everyone who made it possible, from your employees to your implementation team to your partners. Also, remember to continually track data so you know how your efforts are progressing—it’ll help you stay ahead of the curve, correct mistakes faster, and cement your status as a sustainable business.
