Saturday, October 10, 2015 by Cheryl Baldwin
One of the most stubborn barriers to embedding sustainability throughout an organization is that the connection to everyone’s job isn’t clear in the way that optimizing profit is. Business-relevant goals tackle this challenge by linking sustainability efforts to the core of the business: revenue, innovation, or product improvements across the product portfolio. This approach engages teams throughout the organization and makes sustainability meaningful for employees from procurement specialists and product developers to sales managers and marketing teams.
Structured Goals Deliver Value
Our new research examined companies with product sustainability efforts to reveal that since 2013 companies have advanced their programs in meaningful ways. Notably, all surveyed businesses have product sustainability goals (up from 81 percent in 2013) that address the improvement of product social and environmental impacts across the lifecycle stages.
However, having goals doesn’t necessarily drive success. Companies that have embraced structured goals that include business-relevant goals are getting farther ahead, including gaining important business benefits from greater employee engagement and productivity to increased sales and risk reduction.
In the past, firms sought progress toward sustainability through issue-focused targets, such as reducing manufacturing greenhouse gas emissions. These serve an important purpose of focusing on key priorities such as ingredients, raw material impacts, packaging attributes, resource efficiency, or other issues. A growing number of companies are also articulating a motivating direction with a high-level aspiration. Neither of these approaches by themselves provides the needed link to the business to drive organizational action.