Transcript
00:00:00:00 – 00:00:32:23
Thank you for coming or choosing to come to our session today. I’m Andy from Daggerwing Group. We’re a global change consultancy and we’re going to talk today around how businesses can better operationalize their sustainability ambitions and strategies. I’ve got two lovely panelists with me, Andrew Shelley and Dr. Phillipa Ross. I’ll give them a full introduction in a little bit.
00:00:32:24 – 00:00:58:02
I just want to say thank you for being here and hopefully we can make this an interactive and enjoyable session for everyone. But before we get into it, I just wanted to lay the groundwork for why this is important. Philanthropy organizations really can be at the forefront of resolving a lot of the issues that the UK and the world faces today.
00:00:58:04 – 00:01:36:22
You’ve got inflation, the cost of living crisis, you’ve got the threat to the environment, all of these things. By the sheer scale and size of businesses, there’s 5.5 million business private businesses in the UK today. They can make a huge impact whether to the negative or to the positive on all of these issues. And as the next slide says, if we’re able to work together to figure out how large, medium, and small organizations can get better at operationalizing the great strategies and ambitions that they have, you can make a real difference to some of these key issues.
00:01:36:24 – 00:02:08:09
Imagine if, en masse, organizations were changing their talent acquisition strategy and the impact that might have on social inequality in different areas of the UK, or that they were successfully able to partner with their supply chain to minimize the impact on local environments. All of these things together en masse, not just the start ups. The other, is how do we really focus on helping businesses, small businesses, medium businesses, transform themselves over the long term?
00:02:08:11 – 00:02:35:07
And that’s really what we want to do today, to explore that. So a lot of energy, and I think we found in October last year that in all the work we’ve been doing over the last few years, that a lot of businesses have been focused, focusing like a laser on the why and the what of their sustainability strategy, what they want to transform to, what targets
00:02:35:07 – 00:03:00:16
they want to meet, why they’re doing that and reaffirming what their purpose is. Yet over there on the right-hand side is probably the most important word of all three of them, which is how are you going to do it? How do we unpick that gray area around the “how”. These can be transformation programs that can potentially be multiple decades in length.
00:03:00:18 – 00:03:31:00
What can organizations do to build on that change journey and be effective around that? And really, we’re going to use a report that we’ve commissioned, which I’ll go into in a little moment, and the experiences of Pip and Andrew and their businesses to unpick that. So, we really wanted to put some data or some real facts around how these small and medium businesses are operationalizing their sustainability strategy.
00:03:31:02 – 00:03:48:16
And we’ve put our money where our mouth was and went to PR and commissioned a report upon this and I will give you the details to download that report to the end. What we were pretty sure was happening anecdotally, we now have the facts to back it up around how organizations are doing on this transformation journey.
00:03:48:18 – 00:04:19:08
I will use some of the data points from this study as a jumping off point for discussion. We tried to make the study as universally applicable as possible. Large, medium, and small businesses, if you look, you can see the split there. Trying to get as much as we could out of the executive and senior management and get to the employee base that can speak to those as well and really try to make it global.
00:04:19:10 – 00:04:47:20
The big takeaway, so if you don’t want to bother reading the report, I can just tell you the main outcomes in a few seconds, is that companies are struggling to bring this to light, which is not necessarily something that you might have thought. But why? I think a couple of things that came out, which we’ll explore that, is that this requires a fundamentally different approach to any other transformation that people are undertaking.
00:04:47:22 – 00:05:22:03
There are commonalities with other types of transformation, but really this is a special case. The complexity of it has been greatly underestimated. It uniquely impacts each part of the business and it requires a holistic, systemic approach to change. And these are some of the nuggets that we’re going to dig into now. One of the key facts that the report brought out was that only one in four could be defined as leaders in operationalizing sustainability.
00:05:22:05 – 00:05:48:16
Now, you think that would be great? But these are the companies that say they’re making significant progress and they’re on track. “I’m going to hit this”. It’s the converse side that makes you think “hang on, there’s three quarters who aren’t on the on the next slide”. The vast majority are struggling and they don’t think they’re necessarily going to hit the targets that they’ve outlined, which is actually quite a scary thought if you if you think about it.
00:05:48:18 – 00:06:17:24
So that brings us up to what we want to talk about with Andrew and Pip. But let me do a readout, a little bit of an introduction to them both before we get into it. We’ve got a really interesting discussion potentially on our hands here. So, Pip works for AtkinsRealis. That’s a 36,000 employee business working on huge infrastructure projects sort of all around the world.
00:06:18:01 – 00:06:46:13
And Andrew works for Simply Washrooms, which is a small business that is 50 persons strong. So how do how are these two businesses approaching this and what difference in what they’re doing? I think they’re both leading the way in how they’re approaching some of these things. But let me introduce Doctor Dr. Pip Ross first. She’s a service line director for the Valuing a Sustainable Future Service Line.
00:06:46:13 – 00:07:25:18
At AtkinsRealis, a design, engineering, and project management organization that connects people with data and technology to transform the world’s infrastructure and energy systems. Pip’s got over 20 years’ experience across sustainability, environment, and international development sectors. She’s a chartered engineer, and in 2020 she was awarded the accolade of being in the top 50 women in Sustainability in the UK by Wise. She’s worked on projects all over the globe, UK, Africa, Asia and the Middle East. And Andrew Shelley who is Director of Operations at Simply Washrooms, Simply became B Corp certified in February this year.
00:07:25:20 – 00:07:51:17
It’s the first company in the world in workplace hygiene and washroom services to receive that accreditation, so no mean feat. They provide a range of premium quality, sustainable products and services from ecofriendly air purification and air freshening to sanitary hygiene units, hand dryers, dispensing services and waste management. So, Andrew’s there as Operations Director. He’s really got a passion for driving sustainable change.
00:07:51:19 – 00:08:20:02
He is a staunch advocate of the B Corp principles, and really his role is about not just managing operational efficiency in the business but instilling that culture of a sustainable team and bringing it to life. So, there’s the introductions over. Our first topic that I’d like us to talk about is 63% of all respondents agreed that implementing sustainability requires a fundamentally different approach.
00:08:20:04 – 00:08:56:00
And I’ll come to Pip first. Did your organization take a radically different approach when considering this challenge?
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: So I think the difference for us with sustainable attitude was really the breadth and depth of the challenge is not implementing one single change program, but it’s really fundamentally changing the way we do business, but also the way we work with clients, how we design things for clients and what that meant was we had to look at a different type of approach.
00:08:56:02 – 00:09:20:13
We had to change the way we made decisions. So traditionally return on investment, we had to look a lot longer time horizons. And actually one of the things we found was we had to influence our clients to be taking the same approach. How their procurement systems valued things like sustainability within the valuation process and how we could take them along with that.
00:09:20:15 – 00:09:53:02
The Dasgupta report for the Economics of Biodiversity concludes that we need to have a different way of valuing some of our natural resources. How can we support our work and our clients, to build that into our processes on a daily basis until it’s business as usual? And one of the things we have done that’s quite different and a bit shock and horror, is we’re working with some of our competitors. So, in collaboration with McDonald’s and Jacobs.
00:09:53:02 – 00:10:32:19
So it’s two of our big competitors, we’re working with Balfour Beatty, who’s a big client of ours, to just have a baseline, different KPIs, different sustainability objectives. Create guides will we agree to build into all our projects and programs that we do with them. So that is quite a challenge for us. And I think collaboration is really key here. We need to think outside the box and without working in different ways with different people, whether that’s within our organization or outside of our organization, we’re not going to achieve the kind of think-change that we need to address this problem throughout such a huge organization.
00:10:32:21 – 00:10:59:14
ANDY RUGERONI: I think that’s super interesting, the fact that you’ve almost kind of gone outside your business for allies that you would normally be competing with because the objective is so large that it’s probably quite uncomfortable for leadership in the first instance.
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: So, quite uncomfortable in theory, but actually what we found was that the people, or rather competitors, are having the same issues, they’re having the same challenges.
00:10:59:16 – 00:11:27:15
They want to build things where they want to build sustainability from system with into bits of programs. But actually the confines of the procurement processes sometimes wouldn’t allow that. Things such as purely on cost of inputs and not really on the outcomes. And we really want to change the narrative. So we’re thinking about how our projects and programs can be changing outcomes as opposed to measuring how much time we can bill.
00:11:27:17 – 00:11:51:21
ANDY RUGERONI: And what about you Andrew? How does Simply project approach it?
ANDREW SHELLY: I think challenges at Simply are quite significantly different. I think depending on the size of your business, you’re just going to come at this from a slightly different angle. In a way, I think we were lucky because from our kind of inception we had this kind of almost DNA and hope that kind of running through the business of that we wanted to be a sustainable business.
00:11:51:21 – 00:12:23:09
We wanted to do things slightly differently, and I think we wanted to try and differentiate ourselves from the market. But then I think we also got to a point where it became a very clear thing for us from a- commercial point of view that our clients were demanding this. And actually, in terms of our background, we work in that kind of commercial real estate world and we are looking after, you know, something like 4000 business buildings in central London, for example, and lots of people sort of owners of those buildings are looking down the supply chain
00:12:23:09 – 00:12:39:07
Now at companies like us to try to understand actually what impacts we’re having in terms of the service lines we are delivering. So it was so it was we kind of it was something that we was it was on the horizon and it was something that’s been driven from a client perspective. So actually that was kind of a great incentive for us.
00:12:39:07 – 00:12:55:12
It wasn’t something that we just woke up one morning thinking this would be a great thing for us to kind of embark on. So that gave us real focus, I think, from again, when you were trying to I think, you know, sometimes running sort of smaller businesses, you’re juggling lots of spinning lots of plates at the same time.
00:12:55:14 – 00:13:21:05
And actually there are some fundamental things that you want to get right every single month of the year because you’ve got teams of people relying with you and you’ve got kind of quite diverse roles. So for us, I think it’s structure and it’s focus. So we, B Corp suited us really nicely because actually it gave us the a very clear kind of parameter and some kind of key metrics to work towards and actually some operational processes to follow.
00:13:21:06 – 00:13:39:06
I think that was the hardest thing. Like we know where we want to be but actually how we get there is the challenge and actually, well, from day to day from department to department, what did we need to change to kind of get there? So I think the structure thing was a big thing. And also looking outside of the business that we brought external support to do this.
00:13:39:06 – 00:14:08:17
So we employed a B leader, we got some other external support. So actually we identified very quickly this was not an area of expertise of ours, although we had a great passion for it operationally, we were all up for making those changes, actually being guided on some of those changes was kind of super helpful for us because it meant that we knew we were pointing in the right direction.
ANDY RUGERONI: And when you say you put in place a structure, was that was that just roles or just a way of a way of thinking or approaching it?
00:14:08:19 – 00:14:30:12
ANDREW SHELLY: I think it was a bit of both. So we, I think getting a baseline is, is was was very important for us to understand actually where we are as a business. And it was an interesting process of sort of understanding, you know, breaking the key elements down in the business that we have from sustainability, the environment, we had government, we kind of work as clients, those sorts of things.
00:14:30:12 – 00:15:01:17
So where are these kind of key areas that we knew we wanted to look at, we had, I guess, our own expectations of how we would score and how we were doing in those areas. Interestingly, some of them came back, we were completely wrong. So actually, where we thought we were excelling, maybe we could be doing more things. So actually having that type of structure and then being able to drill down significantly into the detail to say that actually if we want to move the needle on kind of our worker’s and our workforce and how they feel about working in a company, actually, what does that mean?
00:15:01:17 – 00:15:18:06
What do we need to do on the ground to actually make those changes? So actually people feel that it’s a great place to work, feel valued, our staff retention’s good, we’re attracting great staff, all those sorts of things and actually, from a detailed perspective, how are we going to do that? So it was about having that structure then
00:15:18:08 – 00:15:45:21
And kind of getting that out to the teams.
ANDY RUGERONI: Yea, that’s fantastic. I think I think that that moves us nicely onto our second finding, which is around that those wanting for leading organizations were more way more likely than the others to have approached sustainability in a holistic manner and to integrated into their purpose and their strategy. Pip, is that something that AtkinRealis have focused on?
00:15:45:23 – 00:16:09:11
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: So, I think it’s a bit of a mixed bag for us. We did change our purpose this year from “plan, design, enable” to “engineering a better future for our planet and its people”. So, that really set the intent for the company for the highest level of leadership. But we have had to prioritize. There’s so much to be done in this space.
00:16:09:11 – 00:16:39:18
There’s so many topics that we have set up workstreams for different things. So we have an engineering net zero team and we have an EDI team that’s run by HR. We have people looking at nature, materials. We’re looking at our full scope 1 to 3 emissions. And to be honest, I’m not sure how much all those different workstreams talk to each other and really investigate commonalities.
00:16:39:20 – 00:17:05:09
I think when we walked in here it isa “leave behind your silos”, and I’m not sure we’re quite there yet, but we have really recognized that it needs to be done and I’m definitely a big advocate of it. What we’ve done is we’ve developed some of what we call integrator roles. And I think that if you can take an analogy from digital disruptors, I would be a bit more sustainable as an integrator.
00:17:05:11 – 00:17:36:18
And so, my new role is doing just that, trying to bring people together on a project level so that we’re, right from the start, bringing in climate, carbon, environment and engineering into the design and the planning of our projects. So, sustainability and environmentally led design work. But what we found is that really creates opportunities to maximize the outcome and impacts of our projects.
00:17:36:20 – 00:18:19:16
So, one we’re quite proud of if you want to have a look. It’s very glamorously named M 25 Junction 10 and there’s a nice video online as well. But part of that sort of developing a motorway junction, we have incorporated into that is the world’s first heath land bridge and what that does, it connects to areas of biodiversity across each side of the motorway, but it also provides recreational facilities for bikes, for walkers, and also biodiversity.
00:18:19:16 – 00:18:51:18
It’s a passageway for bugs and bees to pass across the road. And also there’s a lot of research to show that nature has huge impacts on mental health and wellbeing. So by doing something as simple as that can really create multiple benefits and so in a holistic way. I think this is a really important point, not sure we’re quite there at a corporate level but we know it’s important.
00:18:51:20 – 00:19:27:21
ANDY RUGERONI: Thank you for changing my view of the M25, because I generally view it as the place that hopes, dreams and time goes to die. But Andrew, how about you? Is anything from this one that resonates with what Simply’s doing?
ANDREW SHELLEY: Yeah, I think so. I think, in order to kind of embed that into the business, it’s important that the teams feel part of that process and they feel that there is this benefit in there for everyone because actually what people would like to see is these changes have a positive impact on them.
00:19:27:23 – 00:19:50:07
And one of the things that we focused on very quickly was the team perspective. So, kind of internally in our own teams of what can we do differently and what impacts? Because I think, as soon as people start to see that positive impact that these changes are happening, because having a big masthead above the door that we’re sustainable, we behave in a certain way is fantastic.
00:19:50:09 – 00:20:11:11
However, you know, the proof is always in the eating. And actually for teams, if you are enhancing their packages. We did some simple things, I say simple things, we were looking at what drives the employees and what actually will drive them. Not only kind of growth of the business, but also kind of set behaviors.
00:20:11:13 – 00:20:29:12
And we linked a number of all kind of internal targets around a property asking how we would make that offer decision. We decided the profit share scheme will be equitable, it will be the same for every member of the teams at whatever level. If you’re a driver getting out in the middle of the night, going to deliver services into a building
00:20:29:18 – 00:20:52:03
Or a senior manager in the office. That would be the same. You will get the same level of profit share on a quarterly basis. And those kind of changes that you can make in a business quite quickly do make a huge difference. Suddenly it feels as though there’s a level playing field and actually feels like those teams will start to move together towards a particular purpose.
00:20:52:05 – 00:21:14:12
ANDY RUGERONI: So you are looking at sort of hardwiring into kind of the performance objectives and the reward of what people were doing to help you bring the strategy to life. Is that right?
ANDREW SHELLEY: Yeah, we were and at the same time, you know, I think our approach has been trying to complete things as teams and as units and not as individuals.
00:21:14:12 – 00:21:29:07
So we it was kind of loosely based on that. So it wasn’t, you know, a particular person’s performance would gauge their renumeration on something. But it meant that if as a unit we moved together in the right direction, and we were doing things that we felt was positive, then everyone would benefit from that.
00:21:29:07 – 00:22:09:03
And that’s made a huge difference. And there’s engagement, people are interested in what we’re doing as a business. So that’s, you know, that’s been interesting.
ANDY RUGERONI: That’s fantastic. I’m sure for both of you it’s necessarily been plain sailing. And our next topic I want us to dig in to that is the obstacles and kind of the most popular obstacles that people reported was that they were really struggling in measuring the impact or the results of their transformation and really sort of in understanding how the different functions, the change needed to be to be handled differently and have it to have taken into plan.
00:22:09:05 – 00:22:32:17
And then specifically for the actual, which was a really interesting finding for that leadership quarter, the leaders in operationalizing sustainability, they were flagging technology as something that they were really struggling with. So maybe that they were slightly more advanced in their implementation and they were now looking for tools to make it easier, but were struggling to adopt them.
00:22:32:19 – 00:23:04:12
So Pip, coming to you first again. What were some of the top obstacles that you faced?
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: So, I think changing mindsets, getting people to really believe the system as a sustainability to the to their thinking was not a constraint, but actually it was an opportunity and it could be added to the work that they were doing. And then I think it’s a bit of a two-pronged approach also of processes. With such a big organization,
00:23:04:14 – 00:23:33:02
We also needed systems to prompt people to be thinking more broadly, to be really challenging the norm and thinking outside the box. So building some of that into our project and when you’ve got a big company, there are a million systems and processes and risk approval processes you have to go through. So how we built that into our systems and I’m still working on that has been a real challenge.
00:23:33:04 – 00:23:59:17
It’s also been an opportunity for organization systems all over the place, and we’re using that to try and harmonize them as well. And so, all our global offices are working from one system that has KPIs built in so we can report easily on what we’re doing with our practices and processes. Because there’s a lot of new reporting requirements coming i,n in different geographies as well.
00:23:59:17 – 00:24:34:12
We need to have systems that are robust enough to be able to do that easily. So we’re not just sticking our fingers in the air. Don’t do that by the way.
Andy Rugeroni: I think that some of that, or all of that, was super interesting. I think the point around the “just in time” prompts in the systems I think that’s you know super clever to be able to you know you’re at the point of need rather than relying on the training or influence people are being prompted just when they’re about to perform the action that can have a real impact.
00:24:34:14 – 00:24:56:22
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: Yeah, this is a huge new area and it’s actually really uncomfortable for a lot of people because it’s not their core technical knowledge base. They’re doing this in addition to what they’ve done for 20 years. So having that support system there as well means that hopefully we can build that in and it will become business as usual in the next few years.
00:24:56:22 – 00:25:27:08
Andy Rugeroni: Thanks, and Andrew, how about some of the obstacles that you’re facing?
ANDREW SHELLEY: I think some similar ones. First and foremost, I think from a smaller business it was about sharing the responsibility. So we found that when we started out on the journey, I was the sustainability lead and have other senior members of the team works with you on not some external support, but actually fundamentally you don’t really make the great changes that you want or the steps forward unless you’ve got a broader team.
00:25:27:08 – 00:25:48:17
And that broader team have different roles, responsibility, working patterns, and, even in a small company, locations of work, a lot of them don’t sit at a desk all day and actually how do you influence those people and bring them along with you? One of the things we did was kind of as already mentioned, we looked to group metrics and group objectives.
00:25:48:17 – 00:26:16:13
So we said, you know, as an operational team, as a field service team, these are the things that we want you to really focus on. And that could be really simple things. It could be if you’ve got a fleet of drivers, well, if you can get metrics and data from them around idling vehicles and all these sorts of things, it’s really simple things that actually as a group you can report back on and set some objectives and actually then as a team there are things that not individually but as a group they can sort of work towards.
00:26:16:13 – 00:26:39:09
So I think kind of group sharing of responsibility has been something that’s been good for us. Technology’s still a challenge. When we started on the price of this process. I thought we would gather all these data points. We’ll put everything into the system, we’ll have the carbon footprint sort of metrics and data, and you forget that you’ve just got to keep doing that.
00:26:39:09 – 00:27:00:18
So that pain that goes the first time is an ongoing thing of making sure that for us it’s like quarterly data drops for the whole business where we understand what our purchasing is, what the impact of those different purchasing decisions we’re making, but we also work with suppliers. So we kind of push some of the responsibility. Where we’ve got kind of big enough and strong enough relationships.
00:27:00:18 – 00:27:16:21
We push some of the responsibility to our supply chain and said, Could you supply us the data in this format on a quarterly basis? And we plug it into our system. So, you know, I’m kind of a great believer of trying to do this as little as possible on some of these things.
00:27:16:23 – 00:27:39:09
We’re trying to be we’re busy doing all these other things. So actually, if we can share some of that load, that’s really useful to do. So the supplier suppliers have be great on that. And I think also probably the obvious one which you have mentioned is cost. And when you when you look at the different options available, be it through if you’re making purchasing decisions in your business.
00:27:39:11 – 00:28:01:05
So you know, for us, one of our big obstacles and our impacts was around the use of virgin plastics and actually buying non virgin plastic feedstocks was much more expensive, up to 30% more expensive than the Virgin stuff. So it was trying to understand if that’s actually one of our key metrics that we want to move, what’s the impact of that?
00:28:01:05 – 00:28:24:09
And, you know, do we feel confident as a business that we can do that and take our customers on with us? And I think so. There are there are costs, you know, considerations, time considerations as well. For us, we very much see this as an investment the same way you would invest in IT infrastructure or fleet infrastructure or whatever that you might need as a business to kind of grow and develop.
00:28:24:11 – 00:28:45:15
We’ve seen this in the same way. And actually for us, you know, over time, I think it’s definitely ahead of time where, you know, we’re in a net positive position as a result of the investments we’ve done because we’ve actually seen, you know, great feedback from clients, clients giving us a bigger share of their business, those sorts of things, which were not, you know, the primary goal of these things, but that just kind of sort of spilled out from it.
00:28:45:17 – 00:29:07:06
Andy Rugeroni: And did you did you have to spend a lot of sort of time and effort convincing leaders or senior managers around, you know, making that trade off between raising, you know, going to something that’s slightly more expensive or something more costly for your clients in the short term. And then the risk to that might you know, you might not win that contract because you’re more expensive going to the competitor.
00:29:07:12 – 00:29:40:16
Was that a mindset you had to get over?
ANDREW SHELLEY: I think we definitely had to get over that. I think probably this is applicable to lots of industries, but it was pretty obvious to us and it has been for a number of years now. These changes are happening and we would go into meetings with either existing clients or potentially new clients and you’d be in sort of a tender situation and they used to be this historic part where a large part of that tend to be you be talking about actually the products and services you deliver and they’ll be weighting towards that.
00:29:40:16 – 00:30:09:03
And now that’s a given, you know, for us that’s the part of the conversation which is almost shelved. The thing that’s more important is what’s happening around our sustainability initiatives. And we’re now in what we hope is a really strong position to talk on the assumptions. Before we had thought we were doing a lot of these things but now we’ve put that structure in place and were we feel we’re in a better position as a business.
00:30:09:03 – 00:30:42:01
We’re doing better things, we’ve got staff that want to work here, but also, we’re now in a commercially competitive point as well. So that’s nice.
Andy Rugeroni: Yes, fantastic. That’s like a win win. Going on to the next topic, another one of the findings that came out and says this gap probably again unsurprising, but we now have the actual kind of factual data kind of around this which is there’s this big gap in engagement which widens as you go further down the organization.
00:30:42:03 – 00:31:05:10
So up at the top with the directors and the executives that there was between the kind of the leading cohorts and the rest, that the gap wasn’t that large. But as you went through middle management and into that the employee base that gap widened. And so Pip, my question to you, at AtkinsRealis what have they been doing to try and bridge this gap?
00:31:05:10 – 00:31:27:22
And do you recognize that the gap?
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: I think you’re right that leadership sets the tone, they set the targets. But actually for that to trickle down, they also have to be seen to be walking the walk, to be making difficult business decisions that are linked to our sustainability objectives. So, a couple of things that we put in place to try and do that.
00:31:27:22 – 00:31:52:20
The incentive plans are linked to sustainability targets and to goals for all the senior management. And I think one thing that also sends a good message to the rest of the business was a couple of years ago we sold our oil and gas business and that had a really big impact on, I guess, employee morale and employee feeling about the company.
00:31:52:22 – 00:32:15:04
And our senior management are always happy to be challenged and discuss some of the markets and some of the challenges we have with working in different areas. The other thing we’ve done, at a lower level is in I think taking the analogy to the journey with health and safety. I mean we look at health and safety in the engineering business
00:32:15:04 – 00:32:42:05
say 50 years ago and it is probably a bit harsh to say it was so nice to have, but now it’s definitely a non-negotiable. And some of the things that have been done so talked about linking incentivization plans to health and safety, that the stuff we’ve done that was sustainability. Another thing we’ve done that sounds quite subtle is we have at the start every meeting with over four people,
00:32:42:10 – 00:33:03:06
we have a moment and they used to always be health and safety moments so they can talk about what’s happening within the company and how we should manage that. We now have a whole suite of that sustainability and values moments and we found that a real trigger to be able to discuss some of the issues and to really get engagement with them, with the workforce.
00:33:03:08 – 00:33:25:15
And I think a lot of our employees, particularly at junior levels that they’re passionate about this, they’ve joined the company because they want to make a difference. They want to be embedded in this, so, I think what we need to do is create that environment where they are heard and seen and that that filters up and down.
00:33:25:17 – 00:33:50:00
Andy Rugeroni: Yeah, no, that’s a that’s a very interesting I think, is there an element of where your education or awareness need to meet to come into it? You just I’m just thinking that you know in such a large business how did you kind of get people sort of the mindset and awareness around it?
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: Yeah I think it’s a good point.
00:33:50:01 – 00:34:13:00
I think there’s a fear of the unknown. I spoke a little bit before that this isn’t part of their day-to-day business of their usual job, but now it has to be. So we’ve got a whole program of training courses, people who to do the bits and different amounts of training and some an optional where they can learn a lot more about some of the sustainable topics.
00:34:13:02 – 00:34:39:23
And that has been really important to give people the confidence to be able to advocate for that within their own circles.
Andy Rugeroni: That’s great. Thanks Pip. And Andrew, how about how about Simply?
Andrew Shelley: I think we’ve seen, you know, we’ve got teams where there would be some real successes. I think those successes have kind of pulled other members of, you know, departments along with them.
00:34:40:00 – 00:35:01:00
And I think the, you know, an example for, you know, that we use quite often is that, I mentioned that we have this kind of ongoing challenge around virgin plastic consumption within the business. And we delegate to one of the teams who looked and spoke about reaching into the supply chain and one of our main kind of manufacturers.
00:35:01:00 – 00:35:23:01
So they use a lot of plastic manufacturing and forming and you get surprises, right? We spoke to them and they just haven’t considered using recycled plastics in their manufacturing for us. And you sort of ask them the question of why that is. And they said, well, people are really cost focused at the moment. They’re not particularly interested in increasing base unit costs and these sorts of things.
00:35:23:03 – 00:35:54:05
And we said, well, how about we go out and we source and find some recycled plastic agragate from We Recycling and we ship that into you and you test it for us and come back to us. And the result was we’ve got the same outcome in terms of the kind of products and the performance of the products, and you know, that very, very small change for us and in the first year we were doing that reduced our virgin plastic consumption by 47%.
00:35:54:07 – 00:36:09:05
And that team that was involved could see that and thought, holy, you know, that’s been a real significant change that we’ve seen. We had all sorts of feedback from all kinds of external sources that we set too soft of targets.
00:36:09:05 – 00:36:34:16
No, it’s just that we just perform really well against those targets. So, you know, we things like that. I think what you see there is real progress. And now that manufacturer has, you know, very recently come to us and said, by the way, we’re now offering that as a bespoke range to all of our customer base. So, you know, we’ve of the air that now is available to our competitors, which is kind of great because actually now, you know, it won’t just be us using kind of a bespoke recycled products.
00:36:34:16 – 00:36:55:23
It’s now the entire market can use those sorts of products. So those sorts of changes we’ve seen actually where people see the changes makes a real difference because nothing still you know that given it’s been adopted by competitors and it’s out there, is that is that kind of be still real pride in your team Roy’s it is and this is something you kind of commented upon.
00:36:56:00 – 00:37:11:23
I think so you know I think you first see it and you think, wow, you know, that’s kind of a change that we’ve made. And I didn’t you know, the manufacturer came to us and kind of said, look, you know, we’re doing this, I think kind of through courtesy that kind of we do pop up process or that kind of journey with them.
00:37:12:00 – 00:37:34:01
Yeah, it makes a difference. And I think the other examples are, you know, this whole process for us has enabled us to do things from a commercial perspective. So we’ve made the decision that we were, you know, we spent a lot of time looking at this kind of supply chain and what impact we could make there. We’ve taken a lot of the data that we’ve been gathering and thought, well, how else can we make use of this?
00:37:34:03 – 00:38:02:22
And we’re now sort of offering to a client side. So from a client perspective, if if a client is working with us, we’re looking after, you know, a portfolio of buildings for them. In Bristol, for example, we can go to them and say, actually, we can give you some bespoke environmental reporting because we’re capturing all that data anyway, why not offer now to, you know, our client base don’t just hold it as are they to say, you know, this is the impact of the services that you know you are hearing from us.
00:38:02:24 – 00:38:20:14
No one else seems to be doing that at the moment in our space. So that’s kind of an interesting thing for us. And from a clients perspective, they really value that because if anyone’s been on this journey, probably one of the most difficult parts is kind of getting into supply chain so that then we’ve kind of done the job for them to some extent.
00:38:20:16 – 00:38:50:12
So I think that’s been that’s been another way. And then, you know, from again internally, the commercial team can see that and actually see actually if we can do that. That’s just a great sales point for talking to our existing client base to make them kind of like stay working with us or kind of attracting new customers. Yeah, it must be super compelling seeing it kind of did it come to fruition, it becoming kind of a real commercial sort of asset or benefit in terms of the outcomes that you’re getting from focusing on sustainability?
00:38:50:18 – 00:39:14:07
Yeah. And it’s also I think it’s kind of stage one for us. So we’re kind of showing people now this is, you know, you’re buying from us this service line and these products and this is the end times. Actually, we would prefer this from you because it’s more sustainable and that’s going to take some time. We see that to kind of move the customers over some of that, some of those there are some, you know, kind of cost considerations on the customer side.
00:39:14:09 – 00:39:40:00
But we’re also in a in kind of, you know, the mood at the moment and we’re moving towards kind of very much looking at making those more polluting lines and service lines slightly more cost. It’s actually tax advice for customers to try and, you know, push the behavior that we want to see. Because for us, you know, being able to achieve that means that, you know, overall our overall impact is going to be much better.
00:39:40:02 – 00:40:13:19
I think it’s fantastic. I think the way a lot of what we’ve been saying kind of speaks to the kind of the cultural change journey that both of your businesses are on. Just it’s kind of as a final question before we open up for some questions from them for everyone in the room And what would be your your you know, if you had a magic wand, your one thing or one piece of advice that you would give to people embarking on that this journey?
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: I think it’s around breaking down silos, working collaboratively and holistically within the organization.
00:40:13:19 – 00:40:43:24
But also with outside organizations, and really thinking deeply about what outcomes you want to have.
Andrew Shelley: I think set yourself up with a really well tested structure in terms of how you’re going to approach this, because, you know, for smaller business, when you do lots of different things, you need to be able to understand where you should focus your time.
00:40:44:01 – 00:41:05:03
There are lots of different companies out there that offer free models around this, this type of thing so you can understand your current impact. But having a structure around it because we’ve seen that we’ve focused on particular areas and you put a lot of effort and energy into them and actually the outcomes that you get might be unexpectedly low.
00:41:05:03 – 00:41:29:17
They didn’t yield the results you wanted where you could make some changes over in a different area that maybe isn’t an area that is as shining for something that looks as interesting and actually has some really impacts in terms of your overall position in terms of sustainability as a business. So for me, for us it was about having a structure in place and from that structure we could actually know what we all need to do operationally.
00:41:29:19 – 00:41:51:07
What does that mean day to day? What do we need to do slightly differently?
Andy Rugeroni: Translating into the habits and the actions in everyone’s role. Well, thank you both for that. I hope that everyone enjoyed that discussion. Then just kicking it open is there any questions you have for our panelists.
Audience Member: I have a couple, mainly thank you both for your insight.
00:41:51:09 – 00:42:16:05
One thing I was hoping you could unpack a bit more, how are you working with competitors? Could you provide more examples specifically on what you’re doing? And the other one, it’s just I was intrigued by these moments you mentioned.
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: So, I‘ll start the first one.
00:42:16:05 – 00:42:50:21
We worked with competitors to form, I guess, a template for what we wanted to be monitored and tracked through, if we are working with them, through the projects we work with them on. So, things like carbon, ED&I, nature, collaboration and we’re setting how we’ll measure them. We’re trying to level the playing field so that we can, we can still be competitive within those areas.
00:42:51:01 – 00:43:21:04
But those areas are something that we agree will be part of our projects and programs. It’s about the measurement and trying to create a baseline of these are the things that should be within projects and programs. So we’re competing on a level playing field, making sure they’re included and not cutting corners. On the moments, they come from both ends.
00:43:21:06 – 00:44:02:16
So we have this stack of moments, people can add to them to them, but they can also be anything; someone’s read about, a podcast that they’ve heard, something that they’ve experienced within work or outside of work. So they can be anything from thinking about the energy from stored emails to something around neurodiversity, some challenges they had or they could be about some of the things they’ve realized have a huge carbon footprint within their life and how they’ve managed that.
00:44:02:16 – 00:44:27:11
So, it can be literally anything around sustainability. And as meant for the start of a meeting to sort of break down some barriers to start discussion and they can be controversial. We talk about and war in Ukraine was something that we’ve had a moment on and you can choose whether you add them to the bank for other people to use or if you want it to be a personal one.
Audience Member: That’s interesting. Has it led any ideas or solutions through that discussion?
00:44:27:13 – 00:44:56:22
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: Definitely, definitely. I’ve been put on the spot for an example. So, I think certainly in terms of the newer diversity stuff actually has been really impactful. We’ve now set up a whole network for neurodiversity because being a big engineering consultancy, it turns out there are a lot of neurodiverse people in our company, myself included, so that’s been a big discussion.
00:44:56:22 – 00:45:23:16
Another big thing around menopause was brought up a part of these moments and we’ve started to realize that that has a huge impact on our business and set up support groups and coffee mornings to discuss that and help people understand more.
Andy Rugeroni: More moments. Anyone else who has a question?
00:45:23:16 – 00:45:52:10
Audience Member: Question for Andrew Shelly. ow far did you go on the supply chain when you were looking at it? Did it change suppliers, products, the way you do things?
Andrew Shelley: Yeah, you’re kind of encouraged to go obviously back as far as you possibly can. And that’s interesting because I think you suddenly unearth things that you weren’t even aware of. For example, that actually you work with a manufacturer and their components are coming from somewhere else, and their components are coming from somewhere else.
00:45:52:10 – 00:46:12:02
So it is a bit of a, you know, like you pulling on a yarn at the bottom of a jumper and unravel something. So, from that perspective, there’s a lot involved. I think what we did, we started off by looking at our first company, it was looking at 80% of spending in the business. We said, first of all
00:46:12:02 – 00:46:31:10
We look at all suppliers that make up 80% of the spend and we’ll start the biggest suppliers. Of those suppliers we then worked with around them, signing up to a kind of ethical code of conduct and an environmental code of conduct. So actually we started to make sure that they were meeting certain criteria with us around their behavior.
00:46:31:12 – 00:47:02:18
You know, if they’re outside of the UK, what particular rates are they paying their staff, etc.. And luckily that didn’t actually for us cut out any suppliers. It didn’t take anyone out of the equation. But the other thing which it did was, that kind of process of being very forensic in your business actually identified that there were multiple suppliers in certain service lines that we actually didn’t need.
00:47:02:18 – 00:47:23:09
And actually it’s harder to manage when you’ve got people buying from lots of different prices and that actually impact of those products, even if on paper they seem pretty similar, they might be slightly different for different reasons to be where they are and the transport road miles to bring them in to you. So yeah, we slimmed down the number of suppliers in certain areas.
00:47:23:11 – 00:47:45:22
That meant that, you know, kind of unintentionally, we also had some benefits there in terms of kind of the scale of buying with certain people. It was all about making order so actually 80% of the current spend let’s make sure we got all of those people covered And then we’ve got into kind of the smaller clients.
00:47:45:24 – 00:48:23:08
Andy Rugeroni: Fantastic. Any other questions for our panelists?
Audience Member: To accelerate and create the level playing field you mentioned, do you think the new standards set by the governing bodies?
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: That’s definitely so and they’re huge drivers for change. For instance, the BNG legislation and standards that are going to come in so all construction will need to have 10% biodiversity net gains which will now come in next year,
00:48:23:10 – 00:48:49:14
That’s going to have a huge impact on how our clients work. Is that the sort of standards you’re referring to?
Audience Member: Yea, I mean, I’m heavily involved in mine and some companies are pushing, but now they take it seriously because this legislation is taking it to a whole new level of being talked about.
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: I think it needs both.
00:48:49:14 – 00:49:28:21
It is such a big challenge and needs investor pressure here. Carbon off the hop has been the one that has been pushed the most and that is because of both investment pressure and so new EU legislation and targets coming in. There’s also voluntary disclosure, so science based targets initiatives where there’s actually the peer pressure for people to sign up to that. I think, certainly for our company, you sign up for that without really fully understanding what that meant to our business and having a really robust plus transition plan in place.
00:49:28:23 – 00:49:55:24
But because we’ve done that, we’ve had to do it, we’ve had to do it quickly and we’ve had to invest in doing so. It’s been a good pressure.
Andy Rugeroni: And what about you Andrew, would you like to jump on that? Would more legislation sort of, you know, help within in your industry or not?
Andrew Shelley: I think from a legislation is very difficult is that when you’re trying to have something which is kind of fair and applicable to different types of business sizes.
00:49:56:01 – 00:50:15:12
I think one of the one of the things which has been very good for us is kind of accountability. So, you know, accountability from, you know, from a pressure from a client’s perspective in the market actually changing. I think that will change. I think most businesses are going to you know, it won’t need legislation for lots of people because they’ll move on this journey themselves, because the market will dictate it.
00:50:15:12 – 00:50:48:20
Actually, you’ll become uncompetitive if you’re not doing that. And so I think that’s one thing that will happen. And I think for us as well, the other thing is being very open and public about the targets you’re setting and how you’re performing against those targets. I think one of the one of the biggest mistakes I think we would have we could have made, which we haven’t, is if you, you know, set those internal targets, they sit there on the shelf and you kind of then you think about them two months before they’re due again and you realize you’re nowhere near them, but you’re not really accountable to any one apart from yourselves.
00:50:48:22 – 00:51:09:18
Is that really going to have meaningful change? So, you know, committing to publicly putting those out every 12 months. For us it’s an impact report where we’re talking about the targets we set, the ones we’ve hit, the ones we haven’t had reason to have any mitigation reasons behind why we’re struggling in some areas, because there are those things.
00:51:09:18 – 00:51:26:04
I think businesses need to understand that it can’t always be perfect when you set yourself these targets and then you get into them operationally. You know, for whatever reason, it could be technology, it could be changes in your business that means you can’t achieve those things. So, you know, if you’re not doing that, how are you going to move something else that you do have control over?
00:51:26:06 – 00:51:44:13
Andry Rugeroni: So, you’re saying kind of that the transparency is a driver, that it needs to have a little bit of flexibility because it’s a bit of a complex journey businesses are trying to navigate. So it can’t be just black and white of the whole time.
Andrew Shelley: Yeah, and simple things, you know, for us, you know, fleet is a big thing.
00:51:44:13 – 00:52:05:13
Our use of vehicles and driving things, delivering things to places and being able to practically do that at the moment, you know, completely electrified is a massive challenge for us in terms the distances weights of vehicles and just that some complex technology, you know, in terms of the limitations of the technology, which means that we just we are struggling to get to that target.
00:52:05:13 – 00:52:21:01
So we’re inching towards where we want to be. But what we have to then focus on as a business world over there is something else which we can influence. We’re going to work very hard for that and are going to tell that story openly to people so they understand where we are in terms ofwhere we want to be.
00:52:21:01 – 00:53:02:10
Andy Rugeroni: Right. Thank you. And any other questions? Anyone else? Yes. (inaudible speech from audience member) So the question was about having a technology system, having a single system in place and how or if that’s working for you.
DR. PHILLIPPA ROSS: Yeah. So we were recently involved in doing our scope three assessment. And what we found is we have a 50 geographies each having a slightly different procurement system.
00:53:02:10 – 00:53:35:12
They report different things and are structured in a different way. And so one of the things that will really help is to be able to report on our work. So procurement, we used to estimate lots of different things within the scope. Scope three emissions. With one system that we’re all working with in the same way and being put into the same system, we really help that reporting. The kind of other side of it is some of business management systems.
00:53:35:16 – 00:54:09:17
So before we were reporting on finance every month on project risk was but trying to incorporate things like carbon into those and nature some of the other sustainability parameters into the reporting systems will really help us understand in such a large organization, what we’re doing and aggregate that up because we have pockets of brilliance. We have a lot of case studies where we’re doing amazing work but is that consistent across the whole organization?
00:54:09:22 – 00:54:35:17
And I’m not quite sure we’re there yet.
Andy Rugeroni: Thank you for that. So I think I’ve been given the given the time warning so I think we’re going to wrap it up. Give our panelists a big hand. Jonny if you could put the report side up on the top of the screen.
00:54:35:19 – 00:54:54:13
And if you’d like to read the report, then the next slide here has a of a QR code I’ll leave up for you. We would love you to read the data, show people the data, talk to them about it and just, you know, maybe we can all tackle some of the problems together. Thank you, everyone. Enjoy the rest of Anthropy and maybe see you around.
