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Most sustainability leaders are asking the same questions when it comes to building sustainability knowledge and confidence across their organisation:
• Who do I need to train?
• What do they need to know?
• How do I use this to drive positive change across the organisation?
• Should/could I make this learning mandatory?
• How do I deliver this at scale?
Sustainability has moved up the corporate agenda rapidly in recent years. Many companies have invested in dedicated teams of professionals who are responsible for environment and sustainability issues, from net zero and decarbonisation, to scope 3 supply chain management and biodiversity.
With this responsibility, however, also comes the expectation that the rest of the business can rest on its laurels, knowing that “it’s the sustainability team’s job”.
However, the IEMA and Deloitte report A Blueprint for a Green Workforce Transformation paints a different picture – one that identifies that by 2050 every job will be a green job. Two years on from its publication, how are organisations responding to these challenges?
One of the first considerations for sustainability leaders is whether to build professional capacity or whether to engage key stakeholders in a variety of job families across other parts of the business. Many would like to support both but, invariably, growing the professional capacity is the natural first step to engaging more broadly.
For organisations that have already built the capacity, the focus now is on growing the capability of their professional teams – ensuring that professional recognition from institutes such as IEMA is embedded as part of personal development for their people.
The biggest barrier here is not appetite, budgets or acceptance – it’s time, as professionals strive to balance delivering the day job and engaging multiple stakeholders, while investing time in their own personal development.
This leaves a significant gap when it comes to the questions at the very start of this article. If sustainability leaders are still investing in building and developing their professional capacity, how can they engage the rest of the business?
For the rest of the business, much of the knowledge needed leads to behaviour and culture change for the organisation – something that should start at the very top. Many IEMA corporate partners are investing in training their executive and operational leadership teams – equipping them with the context and light-touch training that will support organisation-wide change. Once the leadership team are engaged – understanding the importance, scale and opportunity that sustainability presents – this often unlocks the door to delivering training on a wider scale.
For some, that wider training will be formal, classroom-based learning. For others, a bite-size, little-and-often approach is best. And some are still working with their internal learning and development teams to find the best fit.
In my experience, organisations will benefit from doing the following:
1. Identify the key stakeholders in the business who you need to engage
2. Develop a sustainability training plan for these teams
3. Test, trial, iterate and test again. The first delivery is rarely the final approach – don’t wait for perfection before you start.
As with many things in the sustainability world, there is no definitive ‘right answer’, but the organisations leading the way are those taking decisive action to empower their employees – both professional and non-professional – to make sustainability something that everyone understands and actively supports.
Alan Darby is senior corporate partnerships manager, IEMA
