Welcome to the Sustainability Lens
The goal of these exercises is to help you develop a unified company-wide lens of sustainability and understand how it applies to the business.
Week 1: Identify Team Members
Identify Team Members
Identify Team MembersYou will want to select a diverse group of staff from across the organization to ensure a diversity of opinions. You can facilitate the session as either a small group of senior staff (5-8 individuals) or a larger company-wide session including all staff. You should make your determination based off of your company culture and goals for sustainability. You may also want to look at conducting an employee survey to gather ideas and challenges related to sustainability prior to conducting the Sustainability Prioritization. This can help include valuable insight and perspectives to your slide deck. To learn more take a look at the employee survey.
Week 2: Schedule a Meeting and Send out an Agenda
Schedule a Meeting and Send out an Agenda
Once you have identified team members, be sure to get the meeting on everyone’s calendar by sending out the agenda. This will help ensure everyone knows what to expect and hopefully comes prepared with great input.
Week 3: Prepare your Presentation
Prepare your Presentation
Prepare your PresentationThis will be the most time-consuming part of the process. We suggest you leave about two weeks before the meeting to ensure you have a great and well-rehearsed presentation. The “Sustainability Prioritization” slide deck has a lot of the work already done for you but will need some customization based on your company and employees.
Week 4: Facilitate
Facilitate
FacilitateGet ready for the presentation and facilitation by ensuring you have the list of needed materials (listed below) all lined up and the room ready to go. You will need a big wall with a blank space to allow everyone to put up their post-it notes and allow for discussion, so plan ahead and make sure you have all you need. Materials You Will Need to Provide:
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- 5 stacks of different colored post-it notes
- Sheets of large poster paper for brainstorm
- Pens / Projector / Computer
Ahead of the session, you should list the five sustainability areas on the wall. This way the participants can easily place their percentages accordingly. It is useful to have large post-it note paper to capture additional ideas as well as goals from the second exercise. Additionally, download and save the Prioritization Table for use during the meeting.
Week 5: Next Steps
Next Steps
Next StepsSince you will be busy facilitating the meeting, be sure to have someone taking notes during the meeting capturing questions asked and next steps. Once the meeting is over and you have had a chance to review the team’s input, go ahead and send out a recap to all attendees being sure to include the final “averaged” percentages for the five sustainability areas.
Next Steps: FAQs
Does everyone need to allocate all of their 100%?
Yes, it is important that everyone allocates all of their 100 percent across the buckets in order to ensure all the buckets are appropriately weighted.
Can someone put 100% into one bucket?
Technically yes you can, though we recommend you encourage them to distribute across all buckets. To a certain extent, each bucket relies on the other bucket. You can’t entirely remove one without impacting the others.
Am I answering this from my own individual perspective or the perspective of the company?
You can facilitate this either way, though we recommend participants respond from their own individual perspective rather than what they think the company wants to see. What if someone doesn’t want to participate? This is fine. Though be sure to let them know that their lack of participation will result in their opinions not being included in the weighting of the sustainability prioritization.
What if our group doesn’t agree on the averages we calculated for each bucket?
To a certain extent, each group will have a bit of disagreement on exactly what the percentages should be in each bucket. As a facilitator, you need to bring up those areas of conflicting ideas for the group to discuss, and then be willing to shift the calculated average for each bucket based on the agreement reached from the group.
Can I do this with some of my group remotely and some in-person?
Yes. We just recommend that those individuals that are remote are able to at least call or web conference in as well as having a representative in-person who can post on their behalf.
