Today’s environmental and sustainability challenges are complex. The challenges for footprint reduction and doing good have one fact in common. There is no one-size fits all solution. It is going to take more of us taking actions on multiple fronts to address the myriad of opportunities and risks which are part of a sustainable business. That means individual actions are important not only for the small benefit they make but also because individual actions can influence a collective action theme or trend. Individual actions are also important because they can have positive impacts that are not initially identified in a proposed project.

Small, consistent, individual actions over time can snowball into bigger results. The idea of the compound effect – reaping bigger rewards from repeated smaller actions is not new. It is the basis of personal investing, self-help, microfinancing and other initiatives. It can also be applied to environmental, health, safety and energy and sustainability. While sometimes an individual action, idea, or suggestion can be substantial, most times these individual actions, ideas, or suggestions have a limited impact to a specific location or activity. These smaller ideas and associated benefits should not be discounted as they have the potential to add up and create the snowball effect.   When one person takes an action, they can set an example. Others may follow or create their own action and sometimes the benefits extend beyond the organization. Each time an action is taken, the snowball gets bigger.   When you embrace this change be prepared to capture its benefits. Organizations will need to think, and act differently related to gathering and calculating savings from the more numerous individual/small actions over the traditional “big” projects.

Perhaps more importantly, organizations will need to think about the communicating the value of individual actions – why they are important and what it means to the organization. Individuals may not take an action just to be rewarded, but positive recognition is important. Rewards, monetary, tokens, or a “pat on the back” motivate and promote more involvement so that the culture to take action consistently takes hold.

 

Improvement actions often have additional hidden results.  Often because project teams are focused on achieving a specific intended result, they do not see there are other benefits. Also, some environmental, health and safety benefits are hard to measure and some impacts, such as the consequence of reducing greenhouse gas emissions on environmental and human health, are just beginning to be understood.

While calculating hidden savings can be difficult, it is necessary to either “sell” the project or show the total benefits to the organization and its sustainability initiatives. Developing robust tools to prompt collection of comprehensive information about individual or collective actions will help ensure all impacts are identified even if not all can be initially quantified. As organizations move forward developing saving calculators will also be useful. Standard formulas and conversion factors make quantifying benefits systematic with dependable results.

Posted in Sustainability