“Sustainable Development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” – UN: Brundtland Report.
We work with our clients to make sense of this definition from their business perspective. We believe that a proactive approach to sustainable development, rather than a reactive compliance based approach, allows your organization to reap the benefits of cost savings, increased productivity and efficiency, strategic alignment throughout the organization and through this, long term sustainable competitive advantage.
True Sustainable Development and real value generation is not on the margin of what companies do but at the center. A successful integration of Sustainability into the core of your organization will allow for Economic Growth, Environmental Stewardship and Social Progress.
Together with our clients we look at these three key areas of strategic sustainability, their business specific interdependence as well as their strategic intersection points:
1) Financial Sustainability
Going green can be profitable – that is the conclusion of multiple studies that have looked at the financial outcomes of corporate efforts to improve their environmental impacts. By reducing emissions, packaging materials, and waste, Walmart, Unilever, Nike and many other companies have been able to reduce their costs and improve their environmental impact.
Enhanced Corporate Responsibility has also proven to improve brand value through strengthening the corporate image, creating stronger customer loyalty, and lowering the cost of finance. Investment in sustainability adds to your strategic position in the market.
2) Social Sustainability
Human and social resources in the workplace are being depleted, impairing the ability of the social system to maintain – let alone regenerate – its productive forces to cope with market demands imposed on work. The effects on organizations not addressing this properly is extensive direct and indirect cost, stemming from sick leave, early retirement, difficulty in retaining staff, knowledge loss, as well as an ineffective workforce. Addressing social sustainability also means understanding and positively contribiuting to the social challenges in society where your organisation operates.
To create sustainable work systems we need to understand what psycho-biological processes are regenerative to human energy and how work in your organisation should be designed, organized and managed in order to promote these processes. Investment in sustainability allows you to retain and increase your competitiveness.
3) Environmental Sustainability
The Brundtland Report helped achieve a global concensus that society, the economy and the environment are inextricably linked.
Environmental Sustainability, approached from a business perspective, means creating competitive alternatives to practices that permanently deplete, either directly or indirectly, environmental resources and leveraging those practices to effectively engage all stakeholders.
Today we live in a world of extended producer responsibility where organizations are, to an ever-larger extent, held responsible for their actions within and across their value chains. Irresponsible behavior, causing harm to the environment, will increasingly be punished by loss in consumer loyalty, loss in brand value, increased costs in the shape of fines and more difficult access to finance.
If environmental sustainability is addressed strategically outcomes such as cost savings and ‘eco savings’ generated from more effective material usage, to take just one example, will be the outcome of a single strategic decision. Not an unexpected coincidence as cost saving strategies overlap environmental procedures.
Risk assessment procedures, based on systems thinking, should be implemented, as well as environmental strategies that connect with, and support, core business strategies. As such, sustainability becomes a tool that allows you to reap real benefits, in terms of organizational success and environmental progress, both today and in the future.