Sustainability services help companies plan, benchmark, communicate, assess, train, and possibly certify their efforts to maintain the Earth’s well-being. Consultants review a company’s sustainability efforts, assess how it incorporates sustainability into its processes, and help create a strategic sustainability plan. Communication, training, and certification are also important steps.
Sustainability services are those that provide planning and benchmarking, communications and reporting, assessment, training and possibly certification for companies. These services focus on how that business can maximize its potential for maintaining the Earth’s long-term well-being, which has environmental, economic and social dimensions. These services might focus on specific areas of climate change, carbon usage, building standards, water and renewable energy resource management, and opportunities across the company or product by product.
When a company begins using sustainability services, the consultant providing those services will look at the company in two or more ways. The first review will be a general look at the company’s sustainability efforts. This will consider how the company uses energy or petroleum-based products, builds or maintains its facilities, and uses other natural resources such as water or specific minerals. If you can break this usage down by product line for a more detailed analysis, chances are your consultant will too.
The assessment initiates the process for each company in order to determine how the company is incorporating sustainability into its business processes. It is imperative that society takes an honest look at what it is doing right regarding stewardship of the Earth and what could use improvement. With accurate information, the business can determine which areas need to be addressed.
Planning is the next step in the sustainability services process. During this phase, the company presents a corporate strategic sustainability plan. This plan documents the company’s environmental impact, establishes goals and costs associated with improving corporate sustainability, and outlines principles and practices to facilitate improved sustainability. Benchmarking of the company against similar companies is also completed in this phase.
Communicating the corporate sustainability plan, the benchmarks the company is seeking to meet and the processes to be used to achieve these goals is the next step of sustainability services. During this phase, the company must communicate with its employees in order to educate them on how the implementation of these objectives will better manage the environment in an economically and socially responsible way. The company may also need to report to government agencies and its shareholders the actions it is taking to improve its sustainability.
Training is an integral part of sustainability services. It is important that employees learn the reason for implementing each change initiated by the corporate sustainability plan. Employees will take ownership of the company’s sustainability plan if they are properly educated about why it is being implemented and the benefits of each change.
Certification is another part of sustainability services. Companies in some industries can benefit from a certification process. The certification provides an objective designation of how a company measures up in terms of sustainability. These certificate programs will vary by business industry and location.
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