Challenges to overcome
Skills
To embed sustainability effectively, part of the action plan will rely on appropriate skills in the organisation. Skills need to be considered from two perspectives:
- The skills of the core sustainability professionals who own delivery of the plan
- The level of knowledge and understanding more generally through the organisation
Some of the sorts of questions that you should be asking yourself will include:
- Should I recruit new joiners specialising in this area?
- What tools or processes will facilitate staff development of new sustainability skills?
- What kind of training should I provide to staff?
- How can I develop staff through methods like mentoring or secondments?
The Forum for the Future has provided guidance on Integrating Sustainable Development into Performance Management Processes.
Skills as a whole subject is considered in further detail in its own module.
Robust data
You will need to ensure that you are gathering sufficient data to monitor your progress and to benchmark your performance against similar organisations. Ideally this information should be gathered once only - and serve for reporting against sustainability targets, as well as other reporting requirements such as annual reports and accounts or for the various sorts of performance regimes that are used across the public sector such as government departments' Public Service Agreements or local government Comprehensive Performance Assessments.
Awareness
Awareness raising should be an integral part of action planning. Staff and external stakeholders (not least your customer base if that is relevant) should have been engaged in the production, revision and delivery of the strategy and action plan. The organisational intranet or other similar systems can be effectively employed to ensure wider understanding of the relevant issues and requirements and can be used to distribute advice to staff. The Department for Work and Pensions has an example of a website that is able to provide practical and relevant information for managing their sustainability impacts.
As a principle, any communications around the strategic approach should focus more on its practical implications for employees rather than generally raising awareness.
Are there key challenges in this area we haven’t discussed? If so, please tell us about them.
Do you have another example of how these challenges can be overcome? If so, please submit a case study.