It’s an exciting time for the sustainability movement. Previously, many sustainability experts operated on the periphery, but now there’s a real shift to embed sustainability across the entire business and take a more systems-wide approach to delivering sustainability targets.
Exciting times indeed and yet we see an underlying common tension around delivering on ESG initiatives – the root cause to these frustrations is often that the organisation hasn’t yet fully defined its sustainability ambition as a transformational change programme. While the focus to date has been on reporting metrics, the emphasis now is all about gearing the organisation to deliver – moving from ‘ambition’ to ‘action’ with ‘accountability’.
In our experience, this new focus on implementation requires HR to help address:
- Establishing a change architecture to ensure the ESG plan is clear and integrated within the business plan
- Ensuring senior leaders actively supporting the sustainability goals and visibly tackling the big trade-offs needed to make progress
- Getting the organisation to be culturally ready and wanting to deliver on its ambitions
- Acquiring and developing people to have the necessary capabilities and capacity to deliver all that needs to be done.
Critical to success will be cross-functional collaboration with teams working to a common objective and an ability for leaders to think and act across the short, medium and long-term at the same time. It requires a bias for action. To be bold, to make critical trade-off decisions between sustainability and business as usual goals, thinking in agile ways and a culture that supports working with complexity, uncertainty and potentially conflicting objectives.
As plans get underway, it will be important for leaders to quickly and continuously assess the progress made against a set of key sustainability indicators and identify and address the enablers and blockers for success. Within that context, we have found that applying a ‘Realising your Sustainability Ambitions’ framework helps firms assess and improve, starting with establishing the degree of change required for your organisation to achieve its sustainability ambitions. Are you embarking on a transformational change that fundamentally shifts the way in which the organisation operates, or is the plan for more incremental improvements?
HR teams can use such a framework to help understand the interconnected elements for making sustainability part of how the firm operates. This is particularly important for building cross-functional collaboration as it provides a common language with which teams can address the enablers and blockers in delivering your ambitious sustainability goals.
To read the article in full, please visit People Management or email gary.ashton@oecam.com for more information.
“HR teams can use such a framework to help understand the interconnected elements for making sustainability part of how the firm operates. This is particularly important for building cross-functional collaboration as it provides a common language with which teams can address the enablers and blockers in delivering your ambitious sustainability goals.”
This is an excerpt. Read the article in full by clicking on the link below.
First published in the People Management magazine on 26th January 2024
For more information about how OE Cam can support your organisation to realise its sustainability ambitions
please contact Gary Ashton at gary.ashton@oecam.com
