Dr. Joel Carboni, President and Founder of GPM Global/President asapm – IPMA-USA, picks ten key elements of the Chartered Global Management Accountant® (CGMA®) designation’s recently released Top Ten Key Elements to Sustainable Business Practices in SMEs.
- Take a broad view of sustainability. Engage outside expertise to ensure that your company considers every aspect of sustainability, not just environmental issues. You can achieve this by having open discussions with all stakeholders, including customers and suppliers. Also, be willing to share information to come up with innovative solutions to reduce emissions and increase efficiency.
- Define in detail what sustainability means to your company. Embrace industry-wide initiatives by engaging with peer organisations to achieve sustainable goals and sharing best practices with organisations that face the same challenges. However, don’t limit it to peers; consider engaging all stakeholders in your drive to improve sustainability, including suppliers and customers, to get everyone on board.
- Engage all stakeholders. Give employees ownership in the company and a direct role in defining sustainable activities like charitable giving. Keep a long-term perspective on the balance between sustainability and profitability. Trust that sustainable business practices are bringing benefit to the company — even if those benefits are intangible and hard to measure.
- Remember that you are not alone. While that’s often difficult, getting involved in community or industry initiatives to kick-start a sustainability drive can help. Consider codifying practical measures for sustainability in a document that everyone in the organisation can access and understand. Creating metrics to measure the effect on sustainability of employee and organisational performance as a whole can do the trick.
- Establish responsibility and communicate widely. Look at industry-wide initiatives that build on the knowledge of other companies and industry associations. You can achieve this by mapping official accreditation for environmental management and sustainable process quality to your own business processes. However, you can go even further by considering sustainability not only within your own company, but across your network of suppliers as well.
- Take it step by step. Identify and build on the elements of your existing business model that promote sustainable activities and practices. Make clear links between sustainability and efficiency, between efficiency and cost savings. You can do this by keeping up with the latest research on how to improve sustainability in key business areas, such as fuel efficiency and reduction of packaging materials – and then apply those lessons in practical ways in your own organisation.
- Walk the talk. Assess the benefits of sustainability projects from a long-term perspective. Then engage senior management in defining a sustainability strategy that looks beyond the next quarter’s financial results. Walking the talk means leading by example and engaging customers, partners and suppliers in your journey toward becoming a more sustainable business.
- Tie sustainability to profit. Identify how everything you use or create in your business, even waste, might be turned into a value-added product. Consider how sustainable business practices can increase efficiency and differentiate your company from competitors. Then network with local organisations that share sustainable goals so that you can pool that knowledge and can coordinate efforts.
- Measure, monitor and review. Keep in step with ecological initiatives your customers and/or suppliers may undertake. Look at innovative interpretations of the term ‘recycling’, including the use of material as a source of biomass fuel. Consider calling in external consultants for an objective view on how your company can adopt more sustainable practices.
- Invest in the future. Embrace industry-wide initiatives. Engage with peer organisations to achieve sustainable goals. Share best practices with organisations that face the same sustainability challenges. Above all, engage all stakeholders in your drive to sustainability.
