Before thinking thoroughly about your action, make sure you have first answered those questions.
1. Define your Green Team vision and missions and align them with your business direction and vision.
2. Define your mission statement, what you want to focus on and why it matters.
... would you like to achieve
1. Define a roadmap with your goals, priorities and actions. Assess where the company stand and accordingly, set a mid-long term vision with strong commitments and then break it down by achievable staggered goals. If the leadership team engages in these, your will get more traction. Your goals are aligned with your overarching mission? See some ideas to get you started on Step 3.
2. Define clear and understandable KPIs. Provide regular reporting. Communicate progresses and results. Reporting is essential and will help to monitor the progress of the action plan defined.
... to define the support you need
1. Find the Executive sponsor of your team. You need this for visibility & increased engagement across the board.
2. How will you communicate? While defining your roadmap, it’s important to think how you will update all collaborators & which channel to use (see more details on Step 2).
3. Budget. How much do you need, for which projects? If there is no budget, how do you manage?
...will be the actors of your Green Team
1. Start with a small motivated taskforce, willing to spend extra time on those topics. There is no magical number but a team of 7 to 12 motivated people works well.
2. Define participants roles (it can evolve): topic leader, executive sponsor, contributors, consultants, project managers, influencers, etc. based on strengths, interests and bandwidth.
3. Various profiles as well as engaged participants from different parts of the organization increase your chances of success and your visibility: Technologists, Creatives, Finance, HR, Comm, Office Manager, Sales...
...does everyone participate
1. Agree on time commitment and cadence. Spread the load amongst participants in a fair way. Recognize the effort.
2. Try to have 1 person officially dedicating some of their time to the Green team. It helps to move projects forward. For others, you will need a commitment of 1-2 hours per week in average, depending on your scope.
Be visible & consistent in your communication / visibility.
1- How will you communicate - Think all levels of communication
- Use executive team to provide them with roadmap updates
- Create internal comm channels (Teams, Slack, Workplace, etc…) for regular comms, and/or newsletters, for regular and identifiable updates
- Organize internal events to increase awareness and engage your employees. Browse the Sustainability Week Kit for ideas.
2- Define a few “signature events” that your company / staff can relate to & widely participate
- Earth day (22 April)
- Ocean Day (8 June)
- Anything linked to your industry…
3- Define a few categories of actions for wider engagement (more details in Step 3)
- Green Harvard - 10 tips for successful green team
Members of Harvard Green Team Leaders Network provide their top 10 tips, advice, and tricks on running successful Green Teams.
- B Corp - impact asssessment
B Corp has some very good resources and help to structure your action plan. It’s very helpful to also prioritize your actions according to your industry. It’s a free assessment and does not imply a certification afterwards. There are 5 pillars assessed: governance, workers, community, environment, customers.
- The Matcha Initiative - Sustainability Week Kit
several useful tools to train yourselves & your colleagues / teams on sustainability topics. For each topic there are videos & articles to better grasp the problem, workshops & activities to engage your colleagues, quick-win Actions to implement in your company.
