Making Sustainability a Priority in Your Organization

Alicia Pandimos Maurer, CRB
Jim Nicolow, Lord Aeck Sargent

Whether in a large or small institution, a start-up or mature organization, sustainability can seem like an ominous program to instill into your company's corporate culture. Step one is addressing where you lack sustainability in your organization at the company level (office, campus, etc.). This can be as simple as recycling or failing to print on both sides of the paper, to larger organizational issues like travel versus teleconferencing. Step two is looking deeper into how your company actually works. Whether you are an institution, design firm, or research/advanced technology entity, implementing a sustainability program will entail looking at actual workflow. How do you implement sustainability within your company's everyday work practice? Do you have design checklists and standard specifications for energy efficient equipment? Are you working within the realm of green chemistry? The answers to these questions can help you in your next step. Step three: Establish your goals, your steps for achieving them, and a reasonable time period for implementation. A sensible timeline, mission statement, and a blueprint for reaching those goals is a powerful tool. Remember that prudent implementation will be key. If you are on the campus level, involve your facilities group from day one -- these are the people that will be instrumental in executing these initiatives. If you are in a larger organization or a design firm, recruit people from varying groups to be involved: administration, management, designers (or in the case or research and advanced technology, researchers and floor staff). These people are the driving force for sustainability in any company. Step four: Get your major stakeholders' buy-in. For sustainability to get a foothold in an organization, it must have approval from the top echelon of the company, and those decision makers must feel a part of the process. Who those stakeholders are varies, but how to get them on board is the same no matter their position. If the decision makers understand the effect of sustainability on overall maintenance, ROI costs, increased marketability / market share and environmental stewardship; getting approval for changes to corporate culture can be simplified. Step five: Education. Education does not have to be boring. Education can be in the form of fun office competitions, daily email quiz contests, and lunch and learns where sustainability is explained so all feel a sense of involvement. Employees cannot embrace an idea that they don't fully understand. Training will have to be general at first, and then specific to distinct goals.

Learning Objectives

  • How to get upper level buy in for sustainability measures in your office/organization and how to get that same buy in for work flow, design and beyond. How do you sell this idea to a board, to principals, to your management and force that top-down push for sustainability?
  • To identify sustainability gaps in your organization and make clear concise goals to address them. A gap example might be that your organization does not currently recycle cans, glass and paper in every office. The goals would be to do and the steps would need to clear to reach that goal.
  • To identify sustainability gaps in your organization's work flow, and again, make clear concise goals and steps to address them. An example might be that you do not currently mechanical sustainability checklists for your design and /or facility use. You need to get clear cut ways to implement these into your work flow

Biographies:

Alicia Pandimos Maurer is a Project Architect, Lab Planner and Sustainability Specialist at the Colorado office of CRB. She has written articles spoken iprfoessionall. Alicia was the co-leader of the CRB Sustainable Design Expert Team She was the co-founder of the Raleigh Chapter of the IBPSA. She was a founding member and Co-Chair of the AIA Triangle COTE and most recently she was a founding board member and Membership chair of the Colorado Chapter of I2SL

Jim Nicolow, a nationally recognized expert on sustainable design, is a principal at architecture firm Lord Aeck Sargent and Director of Sustainability.  He was recognized as a LEED Fellow in 2012. In 2007, Nicolow was named one of Building Design + Construction (BD+C) magazine's “40 Under 40” up-and-comers.  He was profiled in the magazine, which described its group of winners as “'hotshots' in the built environment.”

 

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