SMEs and the business case for sustainability
By adopting sustainable practices, SMEs can find efficiencies, reduce costs, innovate, attract and retain talented employees, gain competitive advantage and improve financial performance.
By Joe Boultby-Ward | Published on 10 February 2021
Categories: Business;
The business case for sustainability is clear for all sectors. By adopting sustainable practices, SMEs can find efficiencies, reduce costs, innovate, attract and retain talented employees, gain competitive advantage and improve financial performance. It is vital that businesses of all sizes understand the climate and social impact of their activities in order to contribute effectively to a recovery from COVID-19 and the ongoing climate crisis.
How do SMEs with limited resources begin to approach sustainability?
Stage 1: Understand your current situation
- Agree a sustainability definition for the business
- Where does your company stand on sustainability and is it impacted by social or environmental issues?
- How does your company impact society and the environment?
- What kind of company culture do you have?
- What issues are important to your customers and stakeholders?
- What regulations affect you and your industry/ sector?
- How is the rest of the industry addressing sustainability and what is best practice?
- What is the business case?
Stage 2: Plan Set out your strategic goals and objectives and ‘why’
- What frameworks such and tools best suit the business?
- Conduct baseline audits
- How will you start and at what scale?
- What budget is available?
Stage 3: Engage others and galvanise support
- Access leadership and management support
- Build internal cooperation and make sustainability everybody’s responsibility
- Run workshops to train staff in sustainability and carbon literacy
- Consider external training such as the NTU ‘SAIL’ course.
- Link sustainability to diversity and inclusion Identify and engage customers, stakeholders, business partners and external business networks
Stage 4: Build capacity
- Identify and assign sustainability champions, and appoint a sustainability coordinator and task force
- Set stretch projects: include sustainability targets and objectives in performance appraisals
- Consider a graduate internship role or a student project. To find out more about how a graduate internship could support your sustainability project and how you can access a £1,000 talent grant, visit the GRADS for D2N2 website.
Sustainability roundtable events at NTU
Our forthcoming series of co-design workshops are an opportunity to discuss and communicate your sustainability needs and access bespoke support in the form of toolkits. Each Round Table has two sessions:
- The first session is an opportunity for you to network and share your business needs around sustainability and where there might be gaps in knowledge.
- The second session is for us to present a series of Bespoke Toolkits that contain knowledge and resources to assist you such as the looking at how CEOs and business leaders view the importance of sustainability.
Round Table 1: Sustainability in HR and Employee Engagement – Tuesday 23 February 2021 – will focus on the strong positive links between sustainability, employee engagement and health and wellbeing and how that contributes to business growth.
Round Table 2: Sustainability Leadership and Culture – Tuesday 9 March 2021 –will focus on how leadership and culture can help businesses approach sustainability in an effective way that creates long term value.
Round Table 3: Sustainability and Circular Economy Principles  – Tuesday 23 March 2021 – will explore how the concepts behind different economic models can help businesses implement sustainability.
Our Sustainability Round Table events are delivered through the GRADS for D2N2 project, which is part-funded by the European Social Fund (ESF).