Fahmida Nisa (Right) with Mayor Tracy Brabin (Left)

Welcome to the UKREiiF opinion series! We’ve gained exclusive access to the opinions of leaders from across our industry. Stay tuned to find out thoughts on the important issues that affect the UK Built Environment.

By Fahmida Nisa, Project Manager at UKREiiF

In our rapidly evolving business landscape, ESG values are becoming integral for both large corporations and SMEs. Whether it’s winning work, attracting talent, improving productivity, or reducing overhead, ESG goes much further than being just a buzzword.

We’re an SME at UKREiiF with around 25 members of the team, and when we started out on our journey, information was difficult to find, so I thought I’d delve further into what we’ve done and what support is out there to help you create a roadmap to embrace and kickstart your own journey.

  1. Understanding ESG and the benefits to your business

There’s a real benefit to starting to truly understand ESG and the benefits to you, your business, and your employees before you kickstart anything else. It makes good business sense to have an ESG focus: reducing your energy use will save costs, brand reputation will be enhanced, which should boost commercial opportunities, focusing on people will increase morale and productivity to accelerate output, and more.

There are some really good webinars out there. A few of my starting points that will spark ideas for your business can be found here:

  1. Developing Your ESG Strategy

This doesn’t need to be too complex, but this will enable you to begin accessing your operational and day-to-day impacts and understand where you have knowledge gaps. The above resources and many others out there on the internet will give you ideas and spark opportunities that maybe you hadn’t thought of before.

We keep it quite simple by having 5 key pillars that we work to: one, for example, looks at our day-to-day operations and improvements we can make; another, looks at the onsite elements of UKREiiF; and one, looks solely at our ‘Social’ activity to create a positive working environment for employees but also deliver social value back to the local community.

Make sure you set objectives that can be measured and are time-bound.

  1. Imbedding Your Culture and Company Values

The strategy will need to be delivered, and at UKREiiF, we’ve created a committee that meets every three weeks for 30 minutes to work through our objectives and goals. We have ensured that we have a diverse mix of individuals, from senior management and directors to those who’re early career professionals, while we also ensure we have representation from operations, sales, marketing, and finance; this enables us to have buy-in across the business.

You can also integrate it through personal development reviews and updates with your team.

  1. Tools for Measurement and Ideas

There are many ways of measuring; some come with a cost, but some tools are free. Here are a few that we use at UKREiiF to enable us to measure our performance.

This is a great tool to help businesses begin their journey to reducing emissions. It allows you to enter basic information on your company’s head count, energy use, water use, etc. within the business and gives you a true starting point to measure from. There are also a number of other tools here that give new ideas and prompts on how to make your business more sustainable.

We measure the social value of our event, UKREiiF, and this puts a monetary value on how much local economic social value we’ve created. The tool is paid for, but this is something that, if tendering, especially with local authorities, can set you apart as you can showcase in the bidding process your commitment to the ‘S’ within ESG.

We utilise a local waste to energy network to ensure 100% of the waste we generate never sees the landfill site. We’ve selected a waste collection at the offices we use from Veolia which sends our waste to a local RERF (Recycling and Energy Recovery Facility) which creates heat and hot water that is transferred to the city and into homes through an extensive 19km underground pipe network. These are conscious decisions we can all make.

  1. Engage Externally

It’s really important when you’re focused on ESG to shout about it—on social media, in bidding documents, to clients… This will boost your brand’s reputation and credibility. It’s also important to engage with other stakeholders you use; for example, we ensure all sponsors, partners, and exhibitors are aware of our ESG and ISO agendas, which are incorporated into our contracts. It will also lead to them being more thoughtful of their own ESG credentials.

  1. Invest in Employee Wellbeing

Sometimes the ‘S’ can be forgotten about as it’s more difficult to measure than the E and the G in terms of wellbeing, but there are definitely some easy starting points that we’ve done at UKREiiF.

One of those would be to become a Living Wage Employer and you can find out more about that here: https://www.livingwage.org.uk/accredited-living-wage-employers

We are also partners with CIC Wellbeing, meaning all of our staff have anonymous support whenever they need it 24/7. Whether it be mental health troubles, addiction, or money troubles, they can always utilise our support network, which you can find out more about here: https://www.cicwellbeing.com/

These are just a few ideas on how to focus on the S, but other options include staff social events, offering more flexible arrangements around work, wellness programmes, flexible paternity and maternity arrangements, support for the menopause—there’s so much you can be looking to implement.