Where It All Started

Coming out of the covid years and looking at how we run our business to recruit and retain the best people the directors spent a lot of time looking at what was happening across the agency landscape. What could we learn from bigger companies with large budgets or smaller start-ups that didn’t have any pre-existing restraints on how they managed their workload, teams and clients? The key to running a mid-sized agency is to keep moving forward, keep learning and keep improving.

As a team, we are people pleasers so when considering how sustainable our business was, we started by looking at how we could keep our team happy and continue to recruit the best people. You mention sustainability and everyone immediately thinks of the planet and tree planting but it is so much more than that. One of the key elements of sustainability as an agency is our people and being able to retain the best people. Through a collaborative process, the leadership team devised a set of policies, processes and benefits that the team were able to vote on, to include in our total rewards offering.

This still didn’t feel quite enough and our finance manager came to a management meeting with a NetZero proposal. She felt passionate that she wanted to work for a business that left as little imprint on the environment as possible, but a big imprint on the lives of its people, stakeholders, partners, clients and suppliers. She delivered an excellent presentation and it was agreed that we should set some ambitious goals and agreed to get the business to a NetZero position by 2030. Deborah was willing to be the internal champion for this proposal and was the instrumental force in driving this forward initially, spending time looking for how we could calculate our emissions and how we would achieve our goal.

A Range of Benefits

Whilst there are many benefits to achieving NetZero for the planet and the environment, you can’t get away from the fact that achieving NetZero will cost the business money, but, if you approach it correctly, it can also lead to increased revenues, better retention, better recruitment, more inclusive policies and a better, more sustainable business for the future. Businesses around the globe will start realising they need to act now as more policies are pushed down from the top. As Businesses strive to understand their scope 3 emissions fully, they will begin to question their suppliers, so if you have already made a start on your NetZero journey then you are going to be ahead of the game. We are already starting to see more questions around governance, community and inclusion in tender documents. Being able to answer these questions and identifying the business’s position on these issues early on will help you drive and adapt your policies moving forward. Even this early into our journey, our sustainable goals, policies and processes are helping to bring in new business and retain staff.