Green has never been a hotter topic in corporate culture, and has become an aspect of business that can not be ignored nor neglected. With this post I thought it would be valuable to lay out a vision for a best practice green business program within the technology sector. It delineates four major components of that program, corporate operations, customers, external communications and thought leadership.
Before I delve into this post, I want to stress that Avaya already has an existing overarching vision and program for sustainability, with three pillars of operations, products and solutions, and I am so pleased to have come into a company that has a robust governance structure in place and so many smart and dedicated people working on and within the sustainability program. This program has been driving sustainability within the organization for several years and there are many successes and ongoing projects to share going forward. Sharing this work and the ongoing journey is on of the primary purposes of this blog. A personal goal is to emphasize the journey aspect of our sustainability work and visions, the yardstick is always moving in this area of business, which is one reason that it is so exciting to work within.
Considering a Best in Class Green Program
There are four main areas where companies must engage and maximize to achieve a competitive green/sustainability program.
- Corporate Operations: greening the actions/policies of the company in its business; ex: carbon management, facility energy efficiency, transportation, and employee engagement
- Customers: value proposition from making customers greener; managing products throughout the full life cycle, design, shipping, operation, disposal, and solutions that make customers greener; ex. teleworking and telepresence.
- External Communications: the public face of the green program; marketing; white papers/case studies and webinars, and reporting; CSR report, external website, social media.
- Thought Leadership: simply put, but hard to achieve, this means being perceived as a leader in the space. This reputation will only occur after sustained success on the first three pillars.
It must be noted that there are many components of a best practice green/sustainability program, my vision below has 27 and this is far from an exhaustive list. Achieving best-in-class performance across all these modalities is extremely difficult and probably impossible in practice, making sensible resource allocation absolutely essential for achieving success, growth and evolution of a holistic sustainability program.
Key issues for ongoing consideration
• Consistency: one major challenge for a large corporation in the green space is achieving consistency of voice and message. With so many areas of the company impactful and involved in the program, it is difficult to keep a single voice across all communication platforms.
• Interoperability: integrating across the diverse and disparate areas of a green program is critical, partly for obvious reasons, such the natural correlation between facility management and telecommuting policy, and partly because there are unintended benefits to be realized via collaboration. Therefore, the green ecosystem within a company must be able to function across and within the various specialties that combine to form the program.
In outline form, here is my current vision of the elements for corporate sustainability program, a vision that is evolving all the time.
Corporate Operations
Carbon Management System
CDP reporting
Carbon reduction goal
Energy Efficiency
Other EHS metrics: water and waste
Renewable energy sourcing
Transportation
Fleet
Travel
Employee Engagement
Intra Green website
Green Teams
Customers
Products: throughout the full life cycle
R&D/Design for Environment
Future product life cycle
Product Compliance such as RoHS and WEEE
Logistics/Shipping
Packaging
Efficiency in action/downstream: must be measurable and consistent
Power management software
End of life/e waste
Solutions: enabling customers to be more efficient
Teleworking
Video conferencing/telepresence: abating travel
External Communications
Marketing
White Papers
Case studies
Multimedia- webinars and podcasts
Reporting
Report
Website
Blog/Twitter: by the way, follow me on twitter @greenavaya
Thought leadership
Partnerships
Lobbying/Government relations
Social Media
Marketing
Philanthropy- a subset of the larger corporate efforts
What do you think? What am I missing?
Posted 11 Feb 2010 at 01:19 PM