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We all have a hugely important part to play in this Decade of Action. With 193 governments agreeing to deliver the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030, great change lies ahead and we need everyone to take action.

In order to successfully contribute towards the SDGs businesses must address them in tandem with one another and understand where goals intersect. As a society we must work together in less fragmented approaches if we are to create meaningful change.

The latest SDG report indicates that despite some progress being made over the past four years across most goals’ efforts slowed down or even reversed. ​It’s time to shift our efforts up a gear by working together and collaborating with our industries and peers.

At a quick glance the 17 goals, 169 targets and 247 indicators can seem rather daunting, but no matter the type or size of business, everyone can contribute to the SDGs in meaningful ways.

Here are our 4 simple steps to SDG success:

1. Get to grips with the goals:

Take time to acquaint yourself with the goals and understand the meaning behind each one of them and where they work powerfully together. Talk to your people, investors and communities about them to understand their opinions, hear their perspectives and gather their expectations. Investing time and resource in this stage will help you create a strong strategic plan later.

2. Prioritize, prioritize, prioritize:

It is crucial to understand the goals that are most material to you so that you can concentrate your efforts and resources to create the most impact. Although the goals have been made so that any business in any sector can adopt them, you might find that some of the goals do not actively correlate with your business.

3. Proactively plan:

How will you reach your goals if you don’t have a map to get there? From ideas to action, this is the step where you can create positive impact. Our robust and holistic approach to strategy development involves integrating the SDGs at every stage of the process. It is critical that we set long term goals that align with the SDGs alongside yearly, trackable targets and appropriate KPIs.

4. Communicate your progress:

Regular communication builds trust, ensures knowledge building within your industry and enables you to openly celebrate your achievements with the world. Develop a communications plan that transparently reports on both your successes and challenges faced. Understand who your priority audiences are when communicating on the SDGs and use this opportunity to get creative.

To address systematic problems, change the status quo and sustain positive impacts we must choose collaboration over competition. Discover how you and your business can help solve some of the world’s biggest problems by getting in touch with us at hello@justone.uk

Lindsey Matejczyk is a Senior Sustainability Consultant at JustOne.

Image downloadable from https://www.globalgoals.org/resources/

This first letter in our series of employee letters, Associate Consultant, Rhea, discusses becoming a sustainability professional, and her answers to three common questions she’s been asked a lot while pursuing this career path.

Why did you choose sustainability as a career?

What exactly do you do?

Why do you do what you do?

The first memory of knowing what I wanted to do for my career came when I was maybe five. I decided that I wanted to grow up to be a Pole Vaulter… but then quickly realised heights weren’t my cup of tea at all and that it was unlikely work out. During the next 20 years, my dreams swung from neurosurgeon to engineer to architect, settling at ‘something that helped people and the world’ shortly before I failed my A-Levels.

The truth is, becoming a sustainability consultant wasn’t my ‘dream’ – not because my passions for helping people and the planet weren’t there, but simply because I had no idea you could be a sustainability consultant until I reached university.

So, why sustainability as a career?

To me, sustainability is very much a blanket term for a whole host of material issues that together form this big beast that tends to be blanketed as ‘ESG’ or ‘environmental stuff’. So when people ask me why I chose a career in sustainability, I tend to freeze, as usually everyone’s idea of sustainability is different; which is an issue and challenge in itself.

It’s undeniable that there are plenty of issues in the world, but to me three stand out more than most; the climate crisis, global social injustices, and water poverty. These issues are all interlinked; a more just society will ensure that everyone has access to resources, and when people have better access to essential resources, we’ll be better suited to tackling the climate crisis as there’ll be less disparity between people and countries. However, to implement the solutions, it’s required that people act, do something together, and are lead to a common goal.

Working as a sustainability consultant allows me to work with any industry, and support businesses I might never have known existed otherwise. Work is diverse, challenging, and you continually learn new things. There’s never a dull moment due to constant research and innovation, and there’s always a creative element to helping businesses find their own solutions. The ability to impact and make a difference is huge.

This collaborative approach to working is something I love and something I thrive on.

What exactly do you do?

Work can be very varied depending on who we’re supporting, and what we’re supporting with.

On a daily basis a lot of what I currently do is analysis and reviews; I spend a lot of time in excel looking at, adding in and collating data. I have also been lucky enough to lead on taking our business through its own sustainability strategy process, developing my skillset to take on my own accounts in the future!

I also support on our workshops, help to run client interviews, contribute to a lot of phases across our services, manage our social media content, and have recently started looking after employee mental health in the business!

Why do you do what you do?

In wanting to do ‘something that helped people and the world’, working in sustainability seemed like a tangible solution to do something I enjoy, make a living from it, and solve some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Everything that I do supports the business’ purpose to Spark Positive Change and our shared vision that by 2025, we will be an exemplar business by continually pushing the boundaries of sustainability; empowering others to learn, transform, and thrive.

Working for a business that has a clear purpose, which also aligns with my own personal purpose – to help people and the world – is the best thing. What makes this even better is that this drive seems to be a common thread I’ve seen in people in this ‘industry’. I think that everyone I’ve met wants to help. We all want to do something to make a difference. And luckily that’s what I get to do, in my own little way, every single day. My job is to enable and help people embrace the changes they can make in their careers and businesses to support a sustainable future.

The truth is that sustainability in itself isn’t a career. Sustainability is in everything. No matter what job you do, ensuring that there’s a sustainable future is intrinsic. Social justice in sports, supply of precious metals in computing, access to medicine in hospitals. Whether you work in finance, education, deliver post, or answer phones, the job you do and the business you work for will have vast opportunities to make a world of difference.

If you’d like to know more about working in sustainability, or are interested in how your own purpose can work on a greater scale, feel free to email rhea.campbell-smith@justone.uk

Rhea Campbell-Smith is an Associate Consultant at JustOne.

As a business and as individuals, we are led by our values.

Our personal values guide our decision making and shape our actions. Business values are no different. Defining and embedding your company values is crucial to ensure you achieve your purpose, differentiate your business from competitors, and create an attractive work culture. They are your business’ moral compass and guide every single action and behaviour.

For many companies, understanding and defining their values can be a tricky task. Your values represent a list of collective feelings and desired norms, and they aren’t always easy to capture or articulate. Our Values Creation & Implementation Workshops help businesses understand and define their values, and take these values from words into action. Our Values Implementation Workshop will help you identify where you should embed, measure and report on your values. Discover more by emailing lindsey.matejczyk@justone.uk

At JustOne, we believe it is essential for all businesses to adopt a collaborative people-focused approached to developing your values. By bringing your people together you will be able to make decisions quicker, stay true to your purpose, nurture healthy work cultures and attract new talent. And because your values are felt and owned by your people, they will be lived out in everything they do.

What are JustOne’s values?

In a world where there are constant pressures to be more productive, make more money, and achieve more success we want our values to reflect how we are putting humanity back into business. We want our values to celebrate who we are as individuals and authentically reflect JustOne’s purpose; spark positive change.

We are REAL

• What you see is what you get. We are unapologetically authentic because it brings happiness, promotes humility, and lets us focus on what matters most.

We are EMPATHETIC

• We believe empathy breeds effective collaboration. The ability to understand what others feel allows us to be open, honest, and act with compassion.

We are CHALLENGING

• Big ambitions require constant evolution. We challenge everything to continually do better and we do it with the utmost respect for each other.

We are CREATIVE

• Creativity has the power to connect everyone. It helps us see the big picture, find innovative solutions, and communicate with passion.

We are JOYFUL

• Sparking positive change is fun! We’re a friendly bunch who laugh a lot together. We actively cultivate joy because joy makes life worth living.

How do values guide us?

Our commitment is to uphold, celebrate and live out these values in everything we do as a business.

We share these values as a community of people and will continually refer to them through our approach to work, partnerships and life beyond work. Our values are integrated into our business processes, and, importantly, personal development plans in meaningful ways. We also use them to guide discussions in internal meetings. We are committed to engaging our suppliers through our values, and ensure we bring them into conversations with our clients.

This is how our values will guide us at JustOne, and we can support you in understanding how your values will guide your business and people too.

Embedding values is how they become meaningful. Living out our values will enable them to have impact; to give structure to how we measure the success of our relationships, frame our decision making, influence our actions, and inform our responses to external influences on the business.

To take steps in creating and implementing values into your business, email Lindsey at lindsey.matejczyk@justone.uk

Lindsey Matejczyk is a Senior Sustainability Consultant at JustOne.

Image by Freepik

Why does JustOne exist? We are here to spark positive change with every person and business we encounter. That’s our purpose; plain and simple. So every business decision we make is put through this lens.

We believe business holds the answer to not only solving the world’s biggest problems but to realise human potential. Business has the reach, influence, structure, agility, resources, will, and longevity to achieve this where other structures and organisations, such as governments, do not. Together we can create systems that don’t create solely profit, but also wellness and prosperity for all.

We at JustOne have the opportunity to showcase what a a purpose-led company, run on empathy and creativity, that puts people and planet at the heart of everything we do, can do. We know we have the power to do this, and more importantly, to empower other businesses to do the same.

A sustainable business does not separate sustainability from the rest of the business. At JustOne we will adopt one core strategy that will address environmental, social, and economic considerations as a whole and enable us to achieve consistent progress for people, planet, and prosperity for all.

We embarked on this strategic journey earlier this year and now we want you to join us. We are overjoyed to introduce Empower 2025.

We have a collective vision: by 2025, we will be an exemplar business by continually pushing the boundaries of sustainability; empowering others to learn, transform, and thrive.

We will test any feasible idea if it will take us closer to this vision and, whether they work or not, we will communicate our progress so others can build on what we have done.

Through our robust strategy development process that we take our clients through, we identified key issues that are most important to the business, and that we have the greatest ability to impact. These are represented by four core focus areas:

Enriching Lives:

We recognise that every person is different, with unique circumstances and lived experiences. We will enrich the lives of our people by addressing the needs of each individual in a bespoke way, while nurturing an inclusive, purpose-led culture where they can thrive.

Encouraging Collaboration:

We encourage collaboration over competition by establishing relationships based on empathy, trust, and honest communication so that together we can solve some of the world’s biggest problems.

Improving Our Impact:

We are improving our impact by remaining accountable to our goals. We will report transparently on actions we’ve taken, the challenges we’ve faced, and the achievements we’ve made.

Empowering Our Changemakers:

We empower changemakers by innovating our services and how we do business, evolving as the world and companies need us to.

At the heart of Empower 2025 lies our purpose: to spark positive change. In every decision that we make and every story we tell through this strategy, our purpose will always remain to spark positive change. This way of doing business will never change. Through embedding agility into the development of our strategy, enabling freedom within the framework, we will have the ability to pivot and transform whilst staying true to our vision and purpose, whatever comes our way.

So, what’s next? In the New Year we will be setting ourselves ambitious goals for each of the sustainability issues we have identified as being important to the business. These goals will turn our sustainability ambitions into tangible actions, and together we will strive to achieve them by 2025.

We are also committed to transparently reporting on our progress for others to see and learn from. Early next year we will share more on the strategy development process we went through to get to reach this important moment. We are truly excited about the power within Empower 2025 and we hope you are too.

We know we aren’t perfect by any means, and we will face challenges as we strive to achieve our goals. But from challenges arise new opportunities and our commitment to you is to remain real by sharing both our victories and learnings with everyone. We will be unapologetically authentic because it brings happiness, promotes humility, and lets us focus on what matters most.

And we want to hear from you! We welcome the opportunity for anyone to talk and share their ideas with us. If you’ve got questions or thoughts on anything we have shared in this blog, we’d love to hear them. Please email rhea.campbell-smith@justone.uk (but please be aware you may hear back from us in early 2022 as the holidays are fast approaching!).

Rhea, Associate Consultant at JustOne, recently had a discussion with her father regarding the COP26 Climate Change Conference; answering some of the questions that he had around the event.

Do you have climate action or sustainability related questions that you want answers to? Send them in to rhea.campbell-smith@justone.uk

COP26…It feels like a while go, right?

Almost a month after COP26 finished, we’ve already seen a drop off of it mentioned in the news. We’re not linking relevant speeches that empower us anymore, and family talks have turned to Christmas, and New Year plans. But COP26 is still very, very relevant.

At the beginning of the COP26 talks, we published a post on our LinkedIn here asking for your questions and comments on the subject. At the same time, I was having discussions with my family around how ‘unexpected’ COP26 was to them, and how my retired dad felt out of the loop and uncertain about its purpose.

He had a few questions which inspired me to write this blog. I’ve tried to answer these as honestly, and with as much research as I can; and included my own personal responses and opinions to his questions below.

1. What does ‘COP26’ mean when everything is referred to is the Climate Change Conference? What’s the purpose and what are the goals?

COP26 stands for ‘26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties’. COP26 is an abbreviation, but it is a climate change conference. The purpose of the conference was to unite the world to tackle climate change, with there being four main goals. These were:

• Secure global net zero by mid-century and keep 1.5 degrees within reach
• Adapt to protect communities and natural habitats
• Mobilise finance
• Work together to deliver

These goals include bringing Net Zero goals forward, supporting countries worst affected by climate change, collaborating together to raise funds to help secure a global net zero, accelerate action and finalise details from the Paris Agreement.

2. From my perspective there is nothing compelling governments to create the change that is needed. Is this a fair comment? What can be done?

In 2015, at the 21st Climate Conference, the Paris Agreement was made, and in April 2016, 175 countries signed the agreement, legally binding them to limit global warming and holding signed countries accountable to meet goals every five years. As a result, more businesses are aiming to become Net Zero in their operations, better reporting of emissions through TCFD, and more people are passionate about getting their local communities to take action. At home you could try:

• Changing your car to be electric
• Eating less meat
• Switching energy tariffs to renewable sources
• Buying produce locally
• Swapping out unnecessarily wrapped goods

More tips can be found here: The Lazy Person’s Guide to Saving the World – United Nations Sustainable Development

3. I don’t understand ‘carbon offsetting’, it doesn’t make sense to me to pay another country to have your pollution.

Carbon offsetting is the process of investing in projects which helps to bring your carbon footprint to zero. Businesses, and countries, aiming to become Net Zero can use offsetting as a way of balancing out the carbon left over after they have reduced as much of their emissions as possible. This needs to be strictly managed to avoid greenwashing. Take a read of Rio’s blog on key considerations for due diligence.

Think of it as a cup of tea when you’re in the garden, you might drink 90% when it’s hot, and 6% when it’s cooler, but you’ve still got 4% left over in your cup that you need to get rid of. Carbon offsetting in this scenario would be you pouring the rest into a flower bed. It’s still been made, but it’s being absorbed by something else, not just tipped down the sink.

Carbon credits are a bit like offsetting, except each country has an allocated number of credits they can use. It doesn’t matter where in the world you are, carbon emissions are carbon emissions. As a world total the IPCC recommends a concentration under 430 parts per million of carbon. But if you, as a country project that you will emit under your designated amount, and I as a country say ‘ I think I need a few more credits this year’, you could then sell me some of your credits.

You can’t sell more than you’re designated and so we’d still achieve the maximum permissible amount. I’d not be paying you to ‘take’ my pollution, I’m paying you for some of your permissible pollution that you’re not going to use.

4. What does net zero mean? How realistic is the 2050 goal? Is it achievable? Can businesses change by then?

Net Zero means that the amount of greenhouse gases going into the atmosphere equals the amount of greenhouse gases being absorbed out of the atmosphere. The act of going Net Zero is to first reduce your emissions, and then ensure the rest are offset to get to zero. Like I said before, this needs to be strictly managed to avoid greenwashing. Discover 10 practical steps organisations of any size or sector can take to begin or progress their net zero journey from our partners at Rio.

The 2050 goal comes from the IPCC’s research Global Warming of 1.5 ºC — (ipcc.ch) into avoiding a global temperature increase of 1.5 degrees over pre industrial levels. If we can reach net zero emissions by then, we may be able to keep global temperate increase below this. I think that Net Zero is achievable, but it will mean a lot of rapid change across many sectors of industry, and by many people, in not that long of a time.

Business are changing, more and more are developing strategies, and making pledges to go Net Zero by 2050, or even sooner, like Sainsbury’s with their 2040 aim. There are people changing, and there are companies who can help them on their journeys too. Please email rhea.campbell-smith@justone.uk if you’d like to learn mroe.

5. What do you hope COP26 achieves? And beyond COP26, what is your advice to people or businesses that want to take climate action now?’

I hope that COP26 has inspired our world leaders to take action and make the necessary changes to enable people and business to reduce their carbon. Beyond COP26, I would urge businesses to create sustainability strategies and consider the impact that their business has on the environment and society, focusing on the areas that they can influence the most.

My advice to you would be similar to what I said earlier, ask your questions. Ask them to me, people in my field, and to companies who make the products you use. Use your voice to inspire positive action. If enough people are asking companies challenging and thought provoking questions then it’s more likely that they’ll respond with positive action.

Rhea is an Associate Consultant at JustOne. If you have any questions that you would like answers to please email at rhea.campbell-smith@justone.uk

Sources of interest:

• HOME – UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) at the SEC – Glasgow 2021 (ukcop26.org)
• The Paris Agreement | UNFCCC
• IPCC — Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
• Carbon offsetting: reviewing the evidence – Creating a better place (blog.gov.uk)
• Home – Net Zero Climate
• The Lazy Person’s Guide to Saving the World – United Nations Sustainable Development

Click for image source.

Respect.

Integrity.

Communication.

Excellence.

Do these values look familiar? Maybe they are similar to your company values; the ones your business has somewhere on your website. Maybe they help frame a company e-mail every now and again.

Actually those were Enron’s values.

We could play the same game with Purpose, Vision, and Mission statements that are equally likely to live on a website and in reports, but not really lived as part of work culture.

…so can work culture be defined by organisational principles such as these, or is something else needed?

Trick question. The answer, as we see it, is yes and yes.

It is imperative that an organisation has these principles to act as guiding lights. Call them North Star statements for behaviour. However, the way they are arrived at and articulated is crucial to them being authentic and truly felt by employees.

In addition, it is not enough to simply have them, they need to be embedded in the day-to-day. As we go through our working day we need principles to help our decision making, inform our interactions, guide our behaviour, and appeal to our sense of intent and meaning.

If you’re reading this, you likely don’t need to be convinced of the business benefits of a positive work culture. You don’t need me to reel off stats relating to positive effects on productivity, customer satisfaction, innovation, retention, talent attraction, and endless others. You understand that a good work culture can help put you on the path to creating a favourable operating environment in which you, your colleagues, and your business can flourish.

At JustOne, we believe a good work culture is an ongoing exercise in active curation.

Aligned to our purpose ‘to spark positive change’, we believe that good work culture should be owned by the business by:

• embedding it into processes,
• ensuring the leadership team steward it,
• and that each individual employee is empowered to live, curate, and help evolve it.

In defining the North Star statements and principles; whether purpose, vision, mission or values, we must challenge ourselves to get to the core of the needs and priorities of our stakeholders (both current and future) and understand how our business contributes to the world.

We must bring stakeholder voices into the decision making process, even those that have no organised voice such as local communities, customers, and even the environment. Much like a sustainability materiality process, finding the appropriate data and information to base decisions from is key to ensuring a relevant and holistic approach.

If a business has used this approach to creating its statements, it’s already ahead of most…… but as discussed we need to go one step further in order for this exercise to be truly valuable. We need to embed and implement. I doubt you came here for a list of business functions and processes into which you can embed these things, so instead here are some insights you may find useful that we at JustOne have come across through our work in this area:

• Forces for change. Understanding the forces for, and the forces against, embedding and implementing. This can take the form of people and personalities, power dynamics, existing relationships, external stakeholders, or just processes which are complicated and tricky to change. Mapping the way forward and understanding challenges for implementation is a key step in any business transformation and this should be treated no differently.
• Safety in numbers. Employees should have been bought along this journey from the beginning. Regardless, it is important that they are able to discuss the work culture which is being created and curated and that they feel safe in never being alone or unheard on this journey.
• Empowerment. It would be unfair to expect employees to simply understand and implement the North Star statements from the get-go. This will take time and resource to equip them with the right language and tools, support them in changing any processes in their day-to-day, take on board any ideas they have, and upskill them appropriately.

JustOne offers the following workshops and services for our clients. These complement our sustainability strategy process but also work well as stand-alone set pieces for organisations that want to focus on specific areas in developing a good work culture.

· Purpose Creation

· Embedding Purpose

· Values Creation

· Values Implementation

· Forces for Change

· Executive Training

· Staff Surveys

If you would like to know more or discuss this blog with us please email matt.sal@justone.uk

Matt is Associate Director at JustOne.

Image source: Image by Freepik