Documenting outcomes and providing feedback to key personnel and stakeholders

The final stage when developing a sustainability is to monitor its effectiveness. This may be achieved through the collation of appropriate data, i.e. (results should be quantifiable) thus allowing for revision accordingly. “It is critical that a company monitors the changing developments that occur relating to their industry and the regulations. For example, it is of course better to know in advance that water reductions are required, then to find out by facing a significant bill. Keeping up to date on issues is essential to maintaining a usable policy”.

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There is as important interaction between policies and procedures. Feedback from procedures facilitates the policy developers in maintaining realistic expectations for sustainability within the company. Changes made within an organisation that inhibit the implementation of the policy, may require revisions in order to keep expectations realistic. When revisions, are made it is important that this information is passed on to staff and stakeholders regarding rationales and outcome expectations. For each revision it is important to consider the continued appropriateness of the scope and readdress the stages of policy development.

Any new undertaking or change within a business usually involves an element of risk. “Since sustainability policy is such a new area for companies to be focusing on, there may not be much data available for you to use in determining what results your sustainability policy should provide. Nevertheless, you still have your own data from your own center’s experience”.

Gradual, continual improvement, is more desirable than a sudden jump. These results are best illustrated in the form of a graph. This provides more meaningful information to stakeholders than stand- alone statistical data.

“In the process of graphing your data, there are two important points which must be shown, in addition to the data showing your improvement. The first of these is the benchmark, so that everyone can see how far you have come from the start. The second of these is the goal, so that  they can see how much farther you have to go. Knowing how far you’ve come will motivate people to keep trying. The goal will give them a challenge to try and meet.

You want to be sure to make your documents and reports as positive as possible, especially since this is a new area to your company. Applaud every success that your company or some part of your

company has. That will also help motivate people. If all you do is to talk about how much farther you have to go, without ever mentioning the victories that you’ve had, you won’t motivate them; you’ll surgically remove any motivation they have within them”.

ISO 14001 contains guidelines for reviewing an environmental management system. The material gathered during review of the ESP should be documented, and include information about:

• outcomes and results
• the extent to which objectives and targets have been met
• the continuing suitability of your ESP in relation to changing conditions and information
• Details about the concerns of relevant interested

An example of a review plan follows.

Reviews of an environmental sustainability system require audits of the documentation and site visits to check the accuracy of information contained in documentation. During the review process

staff should be asked a range of questions so the reviewer can accurately assess how the system is operating. The questions should focus on answering the following questions.

• Does the system meet the requirements of ISO 14001:2004 and other requirements set up by the organisation?
• Are the operations occurring in an effective and efficient manner in accordance with the documentation that has been developed?
• Are procedures in place and do staff understand the procedures?
• Are the objectives and targets appropriate for the activities being audited? Are the objectives and targets being met?
• Is corrective action taken when needed? Is the system reviewed following any incidents or emergencies?
• What evidence is there that the system is continually improving?

Provide Feedback

Before giving feedback about the outcomes of your sustainability initiatives, you must identify a variety of audiences and tailor information to suit their needs.

Typically, an organisation will need to provide feedback to staff, and internal and external stakeholders.

TABLE 4.1: Example of internal reporting chart

(Adapted from ‘Developing an energy management system’, State Government of Victoria, pg.17)

Investigating successes or otherwise of policy

Once you’ve documented your progress, it’s time to start analyzing that progress. Have your sustainability efforts been successful to date? Are there areas where the company or some department within the company has outdone your expectations? Are there areas where your expectations haven’t been met? What’s going on?

Every success and failure needs to be investigated and analysed to determine why it was or wasn’t a success. There has to be at least one reason, if not several, in each and every case. Look for the following:

• A particular person who has been the impetus behind the success
• People who are ignoring the new policies and procedures
• Equipment that is part of new processes, which either doesn’t work properly or is broken
• Systems that are not running smoothly
• Systems and procedures that are creating extra work for people
• Changes in personnel, placing people in key positions who are not trained on your sustainability procedures
• Problems with vendors
• Outstanding vendors who have helped create a success.

Don’t just accept what people say about these things, look for yourself. Often, the answer you receive from someone reflects their ideas, plans and desires, more than reflecting the true information that you need. Be your own person and seek your own answers to those questions.

Your goal is to see what lessons you can learn from what has happened so far, in order to seek out ways that you can apply those lessons to other parts of your center. If you have a success, and you

can find a way to copy whatever has created that success, you may turn another area, which hasn’t been doing all that good, into a success. At the same time, looking for what has prevented something from succeeding is the first step in being able to correct the problem and turn a failure into a success.

Never be closed minded to what works. Many people are so wedded to their own ideas or ideology that they are unable to accept something that is outside of those limits. You need to be focused on what works, not what you think will work. Results are the only measurement that matters.

As I mentioned earlier, there are times when the best thing to do is change plans. You may have had a great plan, but if it isn’t working, it’s time to look for another answer. Likewise, when something you didn’t expect would work, works, you need to be quick to embrace that thing, even if it goes against your ideas.¹⁰

The degree of success or otherwise of your ESP will be determined by the information you collect following audit of the ESP. This is why it is important to establishing measurable targets; without them, there would be no way to gauge your success.

Where variations between actual performance and the required standard are discovered, managers have three possible courses of action:

• do nothing
• identify and correct the cause of the variation
• revise the

Where performance measures indicate that targets are being met or identify a variation from a target that is within acceptable limits, it is appropriate to do nothing.

Where a variation exists and the target is deemed to be acceptable, it will be necessary to identify the cause of the variation and correct the performance.

If a variation is identified and the target is thought to be unacceptable, it will be necessary to revise the target.

This process, illustrated in Figure 4.1, is a continuous flow with new measurements needed over time.

FIGURE 4.1: Comparing targets with actual performance

If you have studied BSBMGT608B Manage innovation and continuous improvement you may recall the importance of accepting failures and embedding successes into any sort of workplace innovation. The same applies to an ESP – rather than covering up failures, staff should be positively encouraged to report failures and what was learned from them.

Monitoring records to identify trends that may require remedial action and using to promote continuous improvement of performance

It is critical to continually monitor and revise the processes involved and compare results to expected outcomes. Reporting based on data collected should adhere to the construct of TRACE reporting. TRACE reporting incorporates the principles of:

• Transparency: organised documentation that facilitates interpretation of data
• Relevance: reporting serves the needs of the organisation and aids decision making
• Accuracy
• Consistency: consistent measures and procedures must be implemented in order to make comparisons over time
• Entirety: boundaries must be clearly defined and all relevant sources must be included

Procedures need to be monitored and revised in relation to outcome expectations, in order to keep the sustainability policy focused and directed. Changes may need to be made if goals are not being met. Evaluating whether a procedure is effective will help further new initiatives, promote communications, and motivate staff towards continued excellence in sustainability commitment.

There is always room for improvement. A common goal within the business is to have the best possible sustainability policies and procedures in place. This will probably require repeated changes in procedures, seeking out “bugs” in your systems and developing strategies to combat them.

Ideally, areas in the business requiring improvement will be identifiable by looking at trends, instead of waiting until they fail. It may be that a change made previously showed significant initial improvement, but then the improvement slowed down as time went on. Upon investigation, you find that the initial improvement was due to the efforts of one individual, who is highly concerned with sustainability, but the rest of the centre hasn’t adopted the sustainability procedure, because it makes their jobs harder to accomplish.

“In this sort of case, you definitely need to revise the sustainability procedure you have put into place. Any procedure that sacrifices worker efficiency, in order to gain some other desired result is likely to fail. Most workers aren’t willing to put in the extra work necessary to make a more difficult procedure function well, especially when they know an easier way to get the job done

Modifying policy and or procedures as required to ensure improvements are made

Demanding that workers abide by the new policy in cases like this is no guarantee that they will obey the new policy. People can be very inventive, when seeking ways to get around a policy they don’t like. Instead, what you would need to do in a case like this is to find a way of making your sustainability procedure at least as easy as the other one, if not easier.

Sustainability policies and procedures are processes which are continually changing and evolving. As the environment is not “static”, policy and procedure change is necessary to address relevant issues accordingly.

Because the practice of sustainability is relatively recent, new techniques, technologies and theories are constantly being presented. This may in turn trigger new ideas and ways to improve your company’s sustainability policy and procedures. While there is no “one size fits all” approach which suits every organization, there are some which are commonly shared.

When employing new strategies and techniques to improve sustainability, it is important to update documentation accordingly. This ensure that your documentation is actually relevant to what you are doing. There is no point in making positive changes whilst the accompanying documentation remains out of date.

“The authority to ensure that the change is implemented is the policy and procedures. While you may be able to talk somebody into implementing a change, without the documentation being complete, both you and they are wrong. Should something go wrong with the new procedure, there will be no defined way for things to be handled. However, if you change the procedures to match the actual change, the people doing the work will have something to fall back upon Additionally, governmental regulations are constantly changing, becoming more stringent and requiring a constant re-evaluation of the way that we are doing things. What is considered acceptable levels of emissions today may be considered criminal tomorrow”.

A trend refers to the tendency for things or events to move in a particular direction.

In relation to sustainability, trend lines can be drawn to illustrate changes in variables such as resource use, expenditure, savings and energy consumption. Trends can be accurately plotted to show occurrences that may require remedial action, and can also be extended beyond the present  as a way of promoting continuous improvement in performance. Past trends are easy to plot, as this simply requires the utilization of existing data.

Modify policy and or procedures as required to ensure improvements are made

The next step in the cycle of continuous improvement of your ESP is to modify policy and/or procedures as required. This should be done in consultation with relevant stakeholders such as:

• the board of management
• heads of department
• the CEO
• team leaders
• others specialists, such as occupational health and safety experts and risk management consultants.

The types of modifications will depend on the outcomes of your evaluation, but may address the following factors:

• currency – what changes have taken place since the ESP was developed and implemented and are these changes likely to impact upon the ESP?
• relevance, accuracy and completeness – does the plan reflect the priorities of the organisation? Does it help to distinguish the sustainability initiatives likely to have the greatest impact on the organisation’s environmental performance?
• how much the policy is integrated into functional work area processes – is there a flow-down effect of the ESP to the rest of the organisation? Do operational areas know that it exists and refer to it in their goal and objectives planning? Do these areas review sustainability initiatives in their regular meetings or planning and review sessions? Is there a reporting mechanism for reporting sustainability issues?
• changes that have occurred in organisational goals, policies and priorities – a review of the organisation’s strategic planning should be accompanied by a corresponding review of the ESP, in terms of its identification of key sustainability
• areas that the ESP did not address, where sustainability has been an issue – most dynamic organisations will, from time to time, find that sustainability issues arise that that were not previously
• areas or activities that have not met targets – a review of the areas of under performance may point to risks that the organisation should address; for example, constant under performance in relation to legislative requirements may point to a potential law suit and should be

Assuming an evaluation of your ESP identifies a number of issues that need to be addressed in order to improve current sustainability processes, you might consider the following options:

• staff training to improve understanding of sustainability and how to implement the processes
• making changes to processes, procedures