3 ways to integrate the SDGs into your business

Safety, Health, & Wellbeing Live 2023

In late September, Peter Jenkins (Lead Facilitator at Simple Foundry) was invited to speak at the Safety, Health, & Wellbeing Live 2023 conference.

In this conference, Peter was invited to the panel of the session: IOSH Q&A Session - Mapping your SDGs. Discovering how organisations, no matter how big or small, can contribute to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through good OSH.

Diving deep into the world of social sustainability and exploring how leaders can shape policies, practices and initiatives to create a sustainable future for all, this session provided a key platform for attendees to ask the burning questions about the SDGs.

For the session, Peter joined:

• Stuart Hughes - IOSH President Elect
• Ruth Wilkinson - Head of Policy at IOSH

What were the key takeaways?

It's surprising how quickly 30 minutes can go! Overall there were a few questions raised, with the following outcomes:

Construction & Sustainability

If you are a professional involved with the management of sustainability, you could:

• Focus on your PQQs - Create a dedicated sustainability bolt-on to your PQQ, aligned to the Sustainability Development Goals
• Create an internal audit - Canvas the senior leadership team(s) and understand what SDG's they would like to focus on, and complete a live contractor and subcontractor audit on these, with tracked actions
• Engage third parties (e.g. Sedex) - Engaging with an established third party provider, might be a quick-win way to kickstart your SDG journey, focusing on human capital

Supply Chain Sustainability

These aren't necessarily the easiest, but could be very value-adding for your business:

• Create an end-to-end supply chain map - From primary producer to customer, mapping out your supply chain and the relationship between suppliers (i.e. how does it move from one supplier in the chain to the next) might be a sure-fire way of understanding the reach, footprint, and impact of your sustainability at a macro level
• Consider your scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions now - Understanding the environmental impact of your operations will be a critical activity going forward. Getting used to scope 1, 2, and 3 now might make the 'run-in' to completing them a lot easier when the time comes
• Think closer to home - Primary producers in the Netherlands may be a consideration if you work in Food & Drink and you're conscious of '(2) Zero hunger' in the SDG's. But actually, improving nutrition might be an easier way of aligning to this SDG in your workplace! For example, you could create an automatic email campaign that gets employees thinking about eating healthier (and cost effective) meals, or potentially organising cooking lessons on-site to help staff with the basics.

Leadership Engagement in Sustainability

How clued up are your leaders in their Sustainability journey?

• Link up with Safety, HR & Procurement - Without a doubt, these three functions are critical to engaging in the SDG's, with many of their focus areas crossing over. Potentially scoping out initial knowledge through an SLT self-assessment questionnaire
• Consider your business culture - External SDG focus areas are incredibly noble and conscientious. That said, change can often start at home. Reviewing your own internal culture can go a long way to securing your journey on achieving the SDGs.

How can Simple Foundry help?

Before we get into how Simple Foundry can systematically help you, your team, and your business. It's key to remember that successfully integrating the SDGs into any organisation is an ongoing process that requires commitment, adaptability, and alignment with your values, beliefs, and wider objectives. Ensuring that any strategic or tactical plan is 'live' (i.e. reviewed and adapted regularly) in keeping with changing circumstances, emerging opportunities, and sweeping customer perception changes, is key to success.

There are a number of areas where Simple Foundry could help:

Executive Commitment and Leadership:

• Digital Dashboards: Create real-time dashboards using Power BI, to provide leadership teams with instant access to sustainability performance metrics, based on data submitted manually (through Forms), or automatically from APIs.
• Automated Reporting: Use triggers to automatically generate sustainability reports. This could be through Power BI, emails with extracted Excel content, or updates on SharePoint lists of actions. It might also include wordcloud sentiment analysis of tweets associated with your business and keywords such as 'sustainable' or 'environmental'.

Stakeholder Engagement:

• Surveys and Feedback Tools: Implement automated surveys using Microsoft Forms, with customised feedback mechanisms that provided tailored and structured responses, to better engage stakeholders more effectively. These surveys could be everything from PQQ bolt-ons, through to a formative Leadership Team quiz on what their baseline knowledge of the SDGs is.

Human Resources:

• Training management: Use Microsoft Teams to store a handcrafted e-learning module, with a multiple-choice questionnaire at the end that can automatically provide the user with a certificate of completion once read.
• Enhanced onboarding: Set automatic or manual triggers for managers to send out information on sustainability to new starters when they reach a certain point in their onboarding journey.

Supply Chain Management:

• Supplier Portals: Implement portals for tier 1 and tier 2 suppliers to submit documentation (e.g. through a form that creates a dedicated folder for each supplier once completed).
• Supplier messaging: Automatically contact suppliers in real-time with pushed messages across Microsoft Teams, reminding them of upcoming optional events or on-site initiatives about sustainability.

Operations and Efficiency:

• Leverage IoT and Sensor APIs: Using custom APIs, engage with Internet of Things (IoT) sensors to monitor on-site resource consumption and efficiency in real time. This could be linked with Power BI dashboards that refresh on in-house communication (digital) screens to provide live updates to staff.

Health and Safety:

• Safety Incident/Event Reporting Tools: Automate accident, hazard, near miss, and incident reporting using Microsoft Forms. Providing email (or Teams) notifications of events in real time, whilst saving form attachments (e.g. pictures of the injury or area) in a dedicated GDPR-compliant folder, and details in a dedicated Excel tracker, which can automatically update a PowerBI dashboard for instant visualisation.
• Health and Safety Training Modules: Combine event occurrences with videos saved on YouTube or Microsoft Stream. Automatically delivering training modules to specific individuals if they have been identified in an automated form. Proactively engage with your teams in this way before hazard trends become more negative impacts.

Quality:

• Collaborative Tools: Send notifications to dedicated working groups whenever a slack channel mentions (or Teams post includes) buzzwords around sustainability or innovation. Launch a social media strategy on Instagram for crowdsourced ideas in the comments, and use sentiment analysis to see how favourable certain options could be.

Procurement:

• Sustainability Scoring: Use a Microsoft Form or Quiz to act as a scoring process for supplier sustainability performance or credentials, saving information for each supplier on SharePoint or Excel, as it comes in.

Community Engagement:

• Online (Social Media) Community Engagement: Use social media campaigns over Instagram to collect user sentiment, follow-up with a Microsoft Form that can link to a MailChimp marketing campaign to further engage individuals, promoting organisational events, activities, and initiatives across one or more SDGs.

Reach out to us through our contact form for further information, we'd be more than happy to help where we can!