By Mel Horton, Managing Partner.
This award is given to suppliers for their Environmental, Social and Governance policies and credentials.
Sustainability Assessment – threat or opportunity?
When we were invited by our biggest client to take a Sustainability Assessment with Ecovadis, our first reaction was why? Closely followed by whats the value for us,our suppliers and most importantly our clients of doing this? As a small company we already had a great reputation in the industry, trusted suppliers and sound values and ethics. We’d documented some of our ways of working into formal policies and procedures and taken a big company approach to doing small company business. Yet we were curious to know how we would rate against other businesses and competitors in the Ecovadis landscape. Would the result affect our ability to win new work and how would our client perceive us once the scores were in?
Embracing change and leaning in
As change management experts it didn’t take us long to realise this was an exciting and valuable opportunity. If we engaged, we would get valuable feedback on where we had robust policy and process and great insight on what we needed to improve. Yes it would be a big investment of time and resource, but in a growing company it’s important to develop infrastructure and ways of working in step with expansion.
Building our ESG and burning the midnight oil
We signed up and started working towards completing the assessment by our deadline. Used to working on complex transformation programmes, we developed a plan for all the areas of the assessment to make sure we could cover the whole scope. A gap analysis highlighted where we would just need to review existing policies and where more work would be needed to develop new ones. As Partners we connected frequently to review progress and content, thinking about how we work with both Customers and Suppliers to ensure we built an approach that supported our business aims and ways of working. As part of our membership of the Federation of Small Businesses we also did a lot of research via their guides and advice on policies and processes. We were also able to access training through both the FSB and the Ecovardis platform. For a few months, our own business and how we workbecame the focus and we worked late into the night to make sure everything we documented truly reflected our business activities, culture, ways of working, policies and training. This didn’t feel like a chore any more – it was exciting to spend time recognising our achievements and making improvements to areas that perhaps hadn’t had much attention in the past.
An anxious wait
We pressed submit button knowing we had done as much as we could by the deadline. Sustainability is a key focus for all of our clients so we knew the result we got could have a bearing on future work with our Customer. As this was our first measurement we had no idea how we would perform. We waited. Then a few weeks later ping – an email with the verdict on our assessment. James and Carmichael have been awarded a Silver Ecovadis Medal, placing our company in the 83rd percentile and in the top 25% of Companies assessed by Ecovadis. Added to that we also learned Ecovadis planted a tree on our behalf. A nice touch that shows the importance of small differences in Sustainability! We didn’t expect a tree and we certainly didn’t expect a medal! After all the hard work it was great to know we were on the right track and doing a lot of things well – and in a way that supports sustainability.
James and Carmichael have been awarded a Silver Ecovadis Medal, placing our company in the 83rd percentile and in the top 25% of Companies assessed by Ecovadis.
Sustainability is a journey, not a destination
Now that we have a strong foundation for our ESG, we are excited to continue the journey and build on our sustainability credentials. We held a Sustainability Event with our suppliers a few months after the assessment result came back. This created a rich discussion on sustainability and how we can all do more in this space, something we all feel is fundamental to our future success. For anyone out there who has not yet engaged with a rigorous assessment of their ESG we would say go for it. Take a structured approach, make sure you have capacity to resource it and see it as a valuable learning exercise. Sustainability is a journey not a destination
James and Carmichael – About us
James and Carmichael are a Consultancy specialising in Change Management and other services in the Transformation landscape. We hold ourselves accountable to being proactive and solution-oriented in the effort to advance sustainable, long-term security and growth for our own organisation and that of our clients and suppliers as well as the wider communities in which we live and work. We are uniquely placed as a consultancy specializing in Change Management and Communications to play our part to improve today’s environmental and societal challenges and we believe that building these considerations into our work will help us to continue to grow sustainably with our clients. As an organisation we believe people are at the heart of change. Our work with clients centres on building ownership and energizing people to work better together, making insight driven decisions, embracing new behaviours and delivering results.
