Creating a Corporate Culture to Support Sustainability

Leaders across manufacturers are being prompted to take sustainability seriously. It’s not just regulators that want to see action; investors, employees and customers all have higher expectations regarding the contribution businesses should make to their communities and environments.

Building a corporate culture is more than just a disparate set of policies and initiatives. It’s a core commitment to how the company will act and make decisions, giving precedence to the people and communities that are impacted by the everyday activities of businesses.

As the industry looks ahead to a more prescriptive regulatory landscape and more stringent global standards, now is the time to act on sustainability.

Rockwell Automation’s Sustainability Commitment

To help our customers raise their sustainability benchmarks, it’s important that we hold ourselves to a higher standard. As a manufacturing business, we are acutely aware of the myriad aspects of our operations. From the control systems we produce, our logistics operations and day-to-day business processes, everything needs to be directed and policed to maintain high sustainability standards in areas such as energy consumption, operational efficiency, waste, and recycling.

We have therefore made an organisation-wide commitment to becoming more sustainable in our work and operations. This commitment is built on three pillars: environmental impact, social impact and governance.

Based on input from our broad stakeholder base, our sustainability approach extends across all areas of our operations, spanning environmental safety, responsible supply chains and occupational health. It’s also about how we act over and above our day-to-day work, such as by helping communities with education, maintaining high ethical and compliance standards and encouraging diversity. It’s about making a positive impact through every aspect of what we do.

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Key Considerations for Supporting a Sustainable Culture

From our own journey, there are several things we’ve learned that we believe will help manufacturers in defining and supporting their own corporate culture around sustainability.

1. You’re only as green as the company you keep

It’s not just your organisation that needs to be sustainable. It’s about making a commitment that runs end to end on production processes and working with the right suppliers and service providers to solidify that commitment. It only takes one bad link to taint the sustainability of the entire value chain.

Taking a holistic approach helps to build a network effect around sustainability. Companies want to work with sustainable partners and end users want to know that ethics have been applied from origin to destination. It’s therefore vitally important that you align with sustainable partners in order to support your credentials and show you’re taking it seriously.

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2. Find the link between sustainability and commercial value

In the current economy, revenue growth and profitability remain as important as ever. One of the most damaging falsehoods that perforates discussions around sustainability is that being green comes at the detriment to the business’ performance goals. When viewed through that lens, it will never become an organisational priority.

Sustainability not only drives cost reduction through greater efficiency and lower waste but is valuable in its own right. It becomes part of your identity and supports everything from generating new business to talent acquisition and product marketing. It can become a commercial edge and integral part of your brand story that customers can buy into.

3. Putting the measurement to keep yourself accountable

Setting ambitious targets as a North Star for sustainability initiatives is one part, but you also need measurement in place to make sure that you’re moving in the right direction. The more granular metrics you attach to areas such as energy usage, machine performance and recycling targets, the easier it will be to spot areas of significant waste or inconsistencies between different areas of company operations.

We’re doing this internally with our goal of NetZero carbon by 2030. We announced this in 2020 as a means of driving improvements across efficiency, reducing energy usage, improving worker safety, and ensuring regulatory compliance. This commitment will help to drive our efforts for the next decade and inform how we support our customers, suppliers, and partners to do the same.

4. Consider the lifetime value of sustainability measures

If you’re looking for instant cost benefits from installing sustainability measures, they might not be immediately apparent. In some cases, you might even have a higher upfront cost. Sustainability is a process, not a once-and-done activity, so the priority should be to set the direction, allocate resources and look for iterative improvements in cost benefits.

As with any major organisational initiative, it’s important the executive team is aligned on expectations. These are the decisions that require a commitment to a vision and a longer-term perspective to stick with it through to realised value.

5. Small gains can have an outsized effect

Manufacturing organisations typically span multiple geographies, sites, and production lines. Tackling sustainability across these operations may be more successful on a smaller scale with a plan to roll out based on the programme’s success. What may on the surface be a smaller gain can have an outsized impact when applied at scale.

Start with the big goal and work back through the various ways that you can arrive at the goal. Be careful to celebrate the small wins that can help you build momentum to the bigger target.

Expanding Human Possibility

We’ve reached an important turning point in the long history of manufacturing where the ambitions of the manufacturer can no longer run counter to the wellbeing of broader society. The goal for today’s manufacturers is to make sustainability integral to how you operate to create a more positive impact on your employees and communities.

This is a commitment that’s better made sooner, not later. As the social and regulatory environment around your business shifts towards one with little tolerance for complacency on environmental matters, it’s important to be looking at different parts of your business through the lens of sustainability. Getting ahead on sustainability initiatives now helps in meeting the commitments you’ve set for yourself and your partner organisations.

If you’re still early in the journey it’s not too late to set some ambitious targets and elevate sustainability to a core priority.

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You can learn more about the value of sustainability in manufacturing at the Management Perspectives hub, where you’ll find blogs, podcasts, webinars and more to help executive decision makers take the next steps on their digital journey.

Published June 8, 2021

Mark Bottomley

Regional Vice President, Strategic Accounts and Sales Specialists EMEA, Rockwell Automation

Mark Bottomley is Regional Vice President, Strategic Accounts and Sales Specialists EMEA for Rockwell Automation. In his role, Mark is dedicated to delivering the company’s strategy to bring the Connected Enterprise to life. Under his leadership, Rockwell Automation integrates control and information to help make industrial companies and their people more productive and the world more sustainable. Mark accelerates the company’s approach in his region by focusing on understanding customer needs and their best opportunities for productivity, combining our technology and domain expertise to deliver positive business outcomes.

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