How Novara Helps You Support Your Sustainability Goals
Easily assign and track trainig across your organization. Novara offers several online training programs to support your organization’s commitment to social values.
What is Sustainability?
Sustainability criteria are a set of standards for a company’s operations that investors use to screen potential investments through a socially conscious lens.
And here’s what it’s not.
According to McKinsey, “The magnitude of investment flow suggests that sustainability is much more than a fad or a feel-good exercise.”
EHS professionals are uniquely positioned to take the lead on sustainability initiatives. Developing and reporting on sustainability demonstrates your company’s strong corporate leadership and governance. This focus on measuring and improving sustainability metrics tends to positively impact a company’s brand, legal liability, and financial position.
Key Benefits of Sustainability Initiatives
Streamlined Regulatory Compliance
Companies with established sustainability targets signal to regulators that they’re putting good faith toward following regulatory guidelines. And with this good faith potentially comes a lowered level of regulatory scrutiny and more leniency on the off-chance regulators find areas that are out of compliance.
Improved
Efficiencies
You’ve heard the adage, “What gets measured gets improved.” sustainability strategies tend to find the inefficiencies hiding across an organization. And this improved transparency can impact operating expenses across many parts of the company.
Company
Valuation
Having a focus on sustainability demonstrates that a business is lower risk and has good practices, which increases valuation in the eyes of investors. Public
companies want their brand to be included in sustainability conscious investment
funds. Funds are becoming more selective on sustainability-focused companies. Funds that filter-out companies who have low sustainability performance or no disclosures at all, essentially reduce the number of buyers for their stock, reducing the stock demand, and therefore, reducing their valuation.
Stronger ROI
Given these first two benefits, streamlined compliance and improved
efficiency, it makes sense that sustainability initiatives would also impact your bottom line. The data supports this premise as well. An analysis of over 2,000 studies by McKinsey found that sustainability propositions positively impacted equity returns 63% of the time.
Improved Employee
Engagement
There’s plenty of data to support this benefit as well. Marsh & McLennan found that organizations with the highest employee satisfaction had sustainability
scores 14% higher than the global average. McKinsey also states that ” A strong sustainability proposition can help companies attract and retain quality employees, enhance employee motivation by instilling a sense of purpose,
and increase productivity overall.”
Customer
Loyalty
Reputation is everything – particularly when it comes to customer loyalty. Customers want to be reassured that they’re supporting companies with a commitment to both their people and the environment. One study found that 88% of consumers will be more loyal to a company that supports social or environmental issues.
Focusing on sustainability can have exponential impacts on your organization. sustainability
initiatives help companies identify areas for improvement, increase
efficiency, and develop defensible audit trails.
How Novara Helps Support Your Sustainability Goals
Novara’s here to help by providing consulting, software, and training to align with your sustainability mission.
Environmental
Novara provides software, consulting, and training to
help ensure you’re minimizing your impact on your local environment. This can span ensuring compliance with environmental regulations to helping develop strategies
and best practices for reducing your environmental
waste streams.
Software
With Novara’s software platform, create custom forms and checklists to track your environmental initiatives.
If there is a serious incident or regulatory breach regarding environmental aspects of your organization, Novara helps by providing real-time incident management tools.
Multi-site organizations can track metrics such as fuel and electricity consumption records across the locations. After entering the data, view trends and identify areas where consumption reduction actions can be applied.
Training
Novara’s online training helps educate your employees on critical environmental and sustainability topics including:
Expertise
Novara’s expert environmental consultants help you adhere to regulatory requirements and suggest best practices in key sustainability and EPAmandated areas. Focus areas include:
Novara provides clients with an annual report outline progress in the above areas.
Data
Novara software makes it easy to track your environmental and sustainability initiatives.
This gives you the information you need to make informed decisions and to report the status of your sustainability initiatives to your internal and external stakeholders.
Social
Often called the human side of sustainability, the “Social” components of your sustainability program are essential for enhancing brand
reputation and maintaining employee welfare and morale.
As the world emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, many employers want to foster a workplace culture that is healthy, safe, and productive. Businesses implement programs that prioritize health protection and health promotion and become an integral part of management practices.
In addition, a diverse, inclusive, and harassment-free workplace is key to attracting and retaining top talent and preserving brand reputation.
Novara’s 35 years of health and safety experience are here to help you develop an initiative that shows you put people first. Rely on safety program
data, comprehensive training library, and usage metrics to demonstrate your organization values people both inside and outside the company.
Software
With Novara’s software platform, you can distribute your employee handbook and policies including anti-harassment and discrimination prevention. Every employee provides an e-signature acknowledgement they read and understood each policy.
In addition, with Novara’s powerful, integrated learning management system, you can easily assign and track training across your organization.
Training
Novara offers several online training programs to support your organization’s commitment to social values:
Expertise
Novara provides on-call HR consulting services – giving you access to experts who can answer your HR questions.
Novara’s HR consultants are SHRM and PHR certified experts with over 40 years of experience handling recruiting, onboarding, performance management, leave administration, and termination issues. In addition, they provide investigation support for harassment, theft, discrimination, and retaliation claims.
Data
Track training completions and policy acknowledgments in Novara’s platform. Use the data to follow-up with employees who are not current on training, or need to read and understand your organization’s policies to ensure 100% compliance
Governance
Lean on Novara’s comprehensive policy and training libraries along with in-depth reporting to demonstrate that your organization follows good governance practices. This
governance spans ethical sales practices, adherence to
a comprehensive code of conduct, and audit trails that demonstrate your commitment to good governance.
Software
Access a library of expert-developed policy templates spanning these areas of ethical workplace behavior:
Additionally, Novara consultants audit deal jackets and showroom practices to confirm and report on compliant and ethical sales practices.
Training
A provides Ethics in the Workplace training for all employees and management, covering the benefits of ethical behavior in the workplace and specific ways to demonstrate it.
Expertise
Our on-call certified HR experts help you navigate issues related to ethical workplace behavior.
Data
Track training completions and policy acknowledgments in Novara’s platform. Use the data to follow-up with employees who are not current on training, or need to read and understand your organization’s policies to ensure 100% compliance
Novara’s technology and expertise can help you make successful strides toward fulfilling your sustainability mission.
How Can Safety Leaders Take the Lead on Sustainability Initiatives?
EHS professionals are in a unique position to take the lead on sustainability initiatives. You’re already managing several programs that fall under the sustainability umbrella. You have a great deal of data at your fingertips, and understand the value engaged employees people bring to the programs under your purview. In short, you’re in a perfect position to drive performance improvements across the organization and help maintain a competitive edge.
Given that you’re a key player in any sustainability initiative, how do you get one off the ground?
5 Steps to Developing Your Sustainability Strategy
Step 1:
Develop the Mission
Here’s where you ask the important question, “How do environmental, social, and governance concepts relate to our corporate mission?” Not all aspects of sustainability will relate to your organization, but many will. Keep in mind, this is an activity that can’t be done in a vacuum. You’ll want to establish a cross-departmental team of stakeholders to answer this question as well as tackle the remaining steps. This is the point in the process where you will establish your sustainability goals.
Step 2:
Determine Objectives & Strategies for Measurement
Objectives naturally flow from the goals you set in your previous step. From here your sustainability framework starts to take shape. This is where you’ll ask questions like, “What does success look like when we achieve our goals?” Clearly defined objectives inform key data points to monitor in order to demonstrate progress against these goals. From here you’ll determine your reporting frequency and start setting baselines.
Step 3:
Identify Risks &Opportunities
As you start developing objectives and establish measurement strategies, the risks and opportunities become more apparent across your business. Which areas are you lacking data? Which parts of the organization will be more challenging to get buy-in. On the flip side, where are your quick wins? Identifying your risks and opportunities helps prioritize your initiatives to ensure you’re focusing on the most impactful ones first.
Step 4:
Get Buy-In
Sustainability initiatives fall flat without buy-in from two key groups: your senior leadership and your employees.
Critical to the success or failure of most initiatives, senior leaders need to be both aligned and supportive of your sustainability initiative. They have the ability to reinforce that sustainability is an organizational priority as well as ensure proper funding and staffing.
With employees, sharing the company’s sustainability initiative is a great culture-building opportunity. Much like building a culture of safety, building a culture that supports sustainability principles goes a long way toward employee satisfaction and retention.
Step 5:
Reporting & Transparency
Many organizations have a lot of this data at their fingertips – now, it’s a matter of organizing it. The process of collecting and analyzing this critical data helps you identify areas for improvement, increase efficiencies and overcome roadblocks.
You’ll want to determine not only what you’re going to measure, but how often as well. Perhaps you produce an annual sustainability report, with quarterly updates and monthly stakeholder reviews.
Reporting is the first step towards transparency. Transparency involves clearly articulating your sustainability goals to all of your stakeholders – be they workers, management, customers, or investors. Then follow up consistently, demonstrating your progress towards those goals.
Reach Your Sustainability Goals with Novara
Novara provides EHS and Workforce Compliance software and consulting services that help clients identify, remedy, and prevent problems across their enterprise.
The combination of Novara’s software, consulting services, and award-winning training helps organizations minimize risk so they can focus on what’s important—their core business.
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5 Steps to Developing Your Sustainability Strategy
Developing a strong sustainability strategy doesn't have to be overwhelming — follow these five actionable steps to build a framework that strengthens your company's brand, reduces risk, and demonstrates meaningful corporate leadership.
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