Sustainability is a word that's been getting thrown around a lot lately, but what does it mean?
When you hear the word sustainability, the first thing you may think of is recycling or environmental protection, but sustainability is about so much more than that – it entails holistic thinking. That integrates social, environmental, and economic goals. In a business context, it denotes to the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) dimensions of a company’s operations and performance. It involves activities that maintain or boost the ability of the company to produce value over the long term.
For us, Reiz Tech, sustainability entails taking responsibility of our key impacts while staying resilient when times get tough. We aim to capitalise on ourselves to continue sustainable growth as a company.
We want you to be thinking about sustainability too! It may seem like a vast topic, but our IT Sustainability Manager Eglė Dobilaitė shares things you can do right now to start moving beyond business as usual toward sustainable business practice.
Understand your current impacts throughout your entire value chain. Determine where negative impacts can be reduced and where there are opportunities for positive impacts.
Define and prioritize your sustainability goals and KPIs. Know what you want to achieve and how you will measure your progress. Highlight sustainability targets by pondering which will have the biggest impact in terms of risk or opportunity and which the company can contribute to.
Establish an official mission statement. Integrating sustainability aspects into your mission, vision and values guarantee that future decision-making takes society and the environment into account. That will hold your organization liable to a standard and set of priorities.
Embed sustainability at the core of your business strategy. Incorporating sustainability objectives with strategic business goals is essential for businesses to both grow and protect their business performance. Alignment of sustainability objectives to business strategy starts with minor changes as you familiarize new tools, concepts, and approaches to existing business processes.
Engage the whole organization. Ensuring sustainability requires meaningful culture change across the organization. Engaging with your employees will make them inspired and keen to contribute - and the need to do things differently can drive innovation, too.
Sustainability is a journey, not a destination. It is not about purely hoping to become 100% sustainable someday either - you must be continuously improving and steadfast to the cause. Most essentially, we need to emphasise how business activities can have a positive impact and contribute to regenerating the world.
After all, if you are not thinking about how your business will affect the environment long-term, then how can you expect to make sure that you continue to grow and succeed?