Exploring the Basics of Business Sustainability Consulting

While many organizations may have a corporate desire to integrate sustainability concepts into their existing business processes, companies often have to build a strong business case to justify the time and resources. Many factors weigh heavily in this “sustainability” justification and having a sustainability consultant can help. But what does a sustainability consultant do?

To answer this frequently asked question, we leverage the GreenBiz article, The Evolution of the Sustainability Professional, which does a good job in defining the steps of a traditional strategic sustainability consulting engagement. While not an all-encompassing view of the field, GreenBiz details several major action steps.

Figure out the lay of the land: Learn about initiatives under way, figure out among the influencers who were the “supporters”, “nay-sayers”, and "indifferents."

Pull together a unified view: Figure out what the most material issues were, understand broad expectations for the companies in the industry and identify the critical gaps in current operations.

The galvanize stage: Create action to fill the gaps. This is where we really started to focus on education, advocacy, and employee engagement by developing on-line training, engaging using social media, and finding "Green Champions" to carry the cause.

Create a commitment to raising performance: Have sustainability seen as an attribute of what we do rather than an initiative driven by a few people of passion.

Building on step three in this post, our sustainability consulting spends much of its time in the communication and stakeholder engagement processes. Beyond the simple propagation of information for adoptive purposes, our sustainability consulting advocates more continuous stakeholder engagement strategy.

By creating purposeful discussion, a company can facilitate meaningful and value-adding engagement. These interactive conversations can increase productivity, stimulate product innovation, or even drive sales growth through brand loyalties. If you are interested in learning more, we invite you to visit us at Taiga Company for more information; or, better yet, join us in the sustainability and CSR conversation on Twitter.