How Does A Business Become Sustainable?

Throughout the series, we have discussed what ‘business sustainability’ is, its different concepts, and why Nigerian businesses, in particular, should bother with it. Our last article was a form of checklist you can use to identify a sustainable business. This time, we take it further and share how you can become a sustainable business.

Business sustainability really is a choice, but more and more organizations are making this choice because of the benefits we outlined earlier, and because consumers are becoming more aware. The road to sustainability is really a journey though, and because sustainability is defined by the business, how you see sustainability, and what you want to achieve, will guide the process that you use. Still, we can have a general and logical framework, and we discuss this below:

Define what is material to you
Every business is different, and depends on a different set of inputs and raw materials, different value chains, different processes and procedures. As such, when each is looking to see how they can be more sustainable, they would look at different issues. This definition on what is relevant to you is the first thing you should do! And this will frame your sustainability journey going forward.

These issues that you pick should have a significant (this threshold needs to be defined as well) economic, social and environmental impact on the ability of the business to meet both its current and future needs. For example, conservation of water resources and management of waste may be material to a company like Coca Cola because they will not be able to operate in the face of water scarcity and their reputation may be tarnished in the face of bad waste practices. On the other hand, these issues may not be material to a company like Google. Instead, Google may focus on energy efficiency and clean energy for their datacenters. Similarly, Access Bank has focused on access to finance, compliance and ethics, and responsible consumption as part of the issues material to them. Ultimately, in the long run, these material issues will still have a financial impact on your business.

Collect relevant baseline data so you can measure
After you’ve defined what is material to the business’ long term success, you need to start collecting data so that you can monitor these issues. You can’t do without this, because you need to know what the current status is. This baseline will help you define what your target should be, help you make comparisons so that you can accurately measure your progress, and define the indicators for measurements.

Unfortunately, data collection has typically presented a challenge in Nigeria, whether due to inadequate skills and equipment, inaccessibility of study findings, and we believe, a general relaxed culture to ensuring the accuracy of data. But a business that is serious about sustainability will need to be serious about data capture and analysis, and be able to commit personnel and financial resources to acquire this. You can do this in-house, but you’re likely to get more value by sub-contracting this data collection, e.g. using companies like these found on Business List.

Analyze your data and priorities, and document your sustainability strategy
Now that you’ve defined what issues are relevant to your business and the current status of those issues, you can now start to analyze these issues and formulate an appropriate strategy to tackle them. The strategy simply documents where you want to be (your target), how you want to get there (your initiatives and projects), the order in which you will carry out these initiatives, when you want to get there, how exactly you will measure progress, who your stakeholders are and how you will deal with them, etc.

During the strategy development, it is important to understand the internal (e.g. your vision) and external (e.g. new regulations) factors that affect your business. Another key element is to understand the needs of all your key stakeholders, how each of them interact, and what’s in it for them. Involvement/ engagement of these persons is necessary for the successful implementation of the sustainability strategy. Essentially, this strategy should be a roadmap and will guide your sustainability activities going forward.

Execute, while monitoring and evaluating
With your sustainability strategy guiding you, you can now start to execute. Just do it. What is probably most key while you’re implementing your strategy is to have an integrated approach. For a truly sustainable business, all stakeholders have to be involved in some form or the other, whether they are actively carrying out tasks or simply being informed of progress.

Needless to say, you’ve got to have someone in charge of project management while you execute, to ensure that each initiative is on track according to a specified work plan (with schedule, personnel, budget, etc.), issues are communicated and escalated quickly, progress is measured and communicated, intended benefits are evaluated periodically, lessons are learned and used as feedback for continuous improvement, etc. Using a defined methodology, such as PMP or Prince2 will go a long way towards facilitating the success of implementation.

It’s still important to keep an ear out for changes in those internal and external factors that affect you so that you can adjust the strategy as you go if necessary.

Meanwhile, make organizational changes to facilitate the execution of your sustainability strategy
None of the above will be successful if you don’t have the enabling infrastructure within your organization to support and drive the process! This means that the leadership must champion sustainability themselves. According to a Harvard Business School study, sustainable business leaders must appreciate and prefer long-term gains, be willing to tolerate risks, be knowledgeable (or at least have a basic understanding of) about sustainability issues, and ultimately be able to integrate sustainability considerations into every business decision!

There should also be a leader in the organization who is in charge of sustainability, and has the authority and influence to discuss at top management level, make decisions and be in a good position within the organizational hierarchy to coordinate efforts across the organization.

If you don’t have this already, you’ve got to create it early on in the process. Else, continuity of these initiatives will not be assured, and you may have disjoint CSR projects on your hands.

In all this, engage with your stakeholders
As we have already mentioned, engaging both internal and external stakeholders is extremely important during the design and execution of a sustainability strategy. Whether it’s making sure you consider what your investors and customers are saying, ensuring that your suppliers and vendors in your value chain are not contravening your sustainability vision, working with government to ensure compliance and taking advantage of opportunities targeted at sustainable businesses, working with the communities within which you operate, collaborating with other interested organizations and partners, to taking care of, and building up your current and potential employees.

It is also important that this engagement be clear and consistent, and for the business to aim at having no trade-offs between or amongst these stakeholders; instead, the strategy should benefit all of them.

Start reporting your sustainability efforts
When you make (or even attempt to) all these positive changes, you need to let your stakeholders know about them! That’s a big benefit of sustainability reporting. There are now several reporting standards, the two most common being GRI and SASB. This reporting, much like your financial reporting, lets your customers, investors, governments, and other stakeholders know what your unique goal is and how far you’ve come in achieving it. It also gives assurances to the growing green investment sector that you are not greenwashing.

If you want to adhere to the standards mentioned above, you may need to get someone who has been trained to carry out such reporting. Otherwise, reporting on sustainability initiatives is increasingly being included in company annual reports (undoubtedly good for mainstreaming sustainability).

Embed a culture of sustainability
This is arguably the most difficult and most long-term hurdle you will need to cross on your journey to business sustainability. Part of why we say so is because culture is so hard to define and pin down, something that has continued to baffle business scholars. It’s one of those words that could mean just about anything and still depicts “the way things are done around here”. But we do know that people, processes, and time make up culture. And what’s more, we do now that it’s very hard to change culture. Therein lies the challenge, because many companies have not adopted sustainability right from their humble beginnings.

But the business as a whole, not just the leadership as discussed previously, needs to consider sustainability issues when making decisions. For this to happen, you have to cultivate a culture of sustainability and have sustainability evident in the internal processes, relations with stakeholders, people, products and services, etc.

In conclusion, the truly hardest part is that you have to do all these together (and perhaps even more), using an integrated approach, as opposed to sequentially. In this way, becoming sustainable requires small, but integrated wins, instead of one big bang! We talked about the most difficult task being incorporating a sustainability culture, so we’ll dedicate the next article to this in particular.

More and more businesses (corporations leading the way) are taking this approach to become more sustainable. The ones who get it right first will undoubtedly have an advantage in the marketplace.

About the Authors:

Adiya Atuluku is passionate about helping businesses be more sustainable, and she uses her experiences in both environmental and management consulting to achieve this. She is also a believer in the role of technology and good project management in helping achieve sustainability strategies.

Jennifer Uchendu is the founder of SustyVibes and a sustainability analyst with experience working on and pioneering projects for sustainability in indigenous and multi-national organisations in Nigeria, she has a passion for helping businesses practice sustainability in the ways that best fit their size, operations and budget.