Vision and Strategy for Sustainability

Moving towards sustainability

Click here to enlarge

In 2000, reflecting the growing understanding of sustainability in industry, the Carillion Environment Committee broadened its scope and responsibilities to become a Sustainability Committee. Jonathon Porritt (Forum for the Future) and David Cowans (Places for People) provided external expertise to assist our Board members develop a vision for a sustainable company. We recognised that whilst we had an environmental policy and a suite of employment and social policies, the full sustainability impacts of a construction to services company were much broader. Using the Government’s four key objectives for sustainable development as a guideline we have been able to understand our wider impacts, both positive and negative, on the environment and society. From these foundations we have developed our sustainability policy to bring together the vision, values and objectives of Carillion’s business under the guiding principle of ‘sustainable solutions for the way we live’. Our “sun” diagram (left) allows us to portray the linkage between our policy, impacts and the Government’s objectives.

A strategy model for sustainability

Click here to enlarge

To achieve our sustainable development goals a strategy model for sustainability was developed. In 2001 the Company’s Sustainability Operations Group reviewed and updated our key performance indicators (KPIs), which were taken from a number of industry and international sources. The strategy model (left) was developed with senior team involvement, including our Chief Executive, as a tool to understand how KPIs could be used to improve sustainability performance whilst demonstrating how they deliver business benefit and contribute to the achievement our business objectives.

In developing the strategy model a review of each KPI was undertaken to help identify the business benefits to be gained from measuring sustainability performance. Specifically, four questions were asked:
• How do we collect data?
• How do we use the data?
• Does the indicator add value?
• Does the indicator help us to deliver business and

Following this process, it was realized that some indicators required much effort, but added no value, whilst others could be seen to be of strategic or business level significance. Using this approach to review the value of each KPI helped to demonstrate the business benefit and showed how KPIs contribute to the delivery of company objectives. We also needed to ensure that this was beneficial to the environment and communities, not only business – in other words, delivery of the KPIs would contribute to the delivery of sustainable development. For example, by managing the diversity of the workforce, in particular for health and safety issues, a clear link could be made with delivering fairer treatment of people and communities. It is pleasing to note that our model is currently being used and copied by other organizations in the construction and other UK industry sectors.

Our sustainability strategy and journey towards becoming more sustainable is described in more detail in the paper “A strategy for sustainability” published by The Institution of Civil Engineers in the first issue of their new journal Engineering Sustainability.

Our strategy is constantly evolving, as we better understand the business case for sustainability. In 2003 we further developed our strategy model to link our strategic objectives for 2010 and our targets for 2004 to the delivery of hard business targets business targets. Please see our next steps section, which explains the way we will be tackling the challenge of sustainable business in 2004 and onwards.