By Michael Arny, President Leonardo Academy
Leonardo Academy is developing an American National Standard Institute (ANSI) standard for sustainable organizations. This new standard will provide guidance and metrics for measuring achievements for sustainable organizations just as LEED© (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) provides guidance and metrics for measuring achievements for sustainable buildings. Expanding the vision from sustainable buildings to the whole organization will help companies further understand and recognize the importance of the work facility managers do. This article discusses how expanding a company’s vision of sustainability from buildings to the whole organization will affect facility managers and how it will benefit them.
The ideas and practices for making new and existing buildings more sustainable has been driven into the building marketplace by the U.S. Green Building Council’s family of LEED© rating systems. We have all observed how more and more government and private organizations are incorporating sustainability into their strategies for new buildings, building upgrades and building operations. Now the growing awareness of how sustainability achievements can affect an organization’s image, brand and bottom line are starting to drive overall sustainable practices for organizations. This progress, of course, raises the question of what constitutes a sustainable organization.
The current lack of a clear and comprehensive definition of what makes an organization sustainable makes it very difficult for investors, companies, organizations, procurement programs, and consumers to evaluate and compare the sustainability of companies and organizations. Currently there is no widely accepted protocol for measuring an organization’s sustainability achievements. Developing a widely accepted, third-party standard for measuring the sustainability of organizations similar to LEED for buildings will solve this problem.
The three major components of sustainability for both buildings and organizations are: environmental stewardship, financial well being and social responsibility. LEED applies these three components of sustainability to buildings, and for organizational sustainability these three components are applied to the whole company or organization. Expanding the scope from sustainable buildings to organizational sustainability will carry many of the same components that facility managers are familiar with because buildings are a big part of the sustainability footprint of most organizations. Buildings and facility managers will play a big role in the overall sustainability achievements of organizations.
So what will organization sustainability look like from a facility manager’s perspective and how can you help your organization get ready to succeed in its organizational sustainability achievements?
The big picture overview is that organizational sustainability addresses how well a company advances environmental stewardship, financial well being and social responsibility in all its activities and impacts on an ongoing basis. This scope includes the company’s supply chain, distribution chain, operations and its waste management.
The first perspective change that organizational sustainability will provide for buildings is a shift in companies’ focus from LEED-NC to LEED-EB because LEED-EB addresses management and measurement of ongoing performance in energy, emissions, purchasing, indoor environmental quality and waste management. This kind of ongoing management and measurement of building operations through LEED-EB will provide key input into the documentation of organization sustainability achievements. LEED-NC will remain important as tool for guiding and documenting the minimization of environmental impacts of new construction. Also, by guiding the incorporation of the potential for high performance into building design it will continue to provide a great ramp to ongoing sustainable building operating performance through LEED-EB implementation and recertification for buildings.
As a facility manager you can help advance your company’s organizational sustainability by helping your company be fully engaged in implementing both LEED-NC and LEED-EB.
The second perspective change will be greater recognition of the importance of advancing from single building implementation of sustainability to portfolio-wide implementation of sustainability to advance the organization’s ongoing sustainability.
As a facility manager you can help advance your company’s organizational sustainability by helping to develop and implement a comprehensive portfolio-wide approach to LEED that includes both new construction and ongoing operations.
The third perspective change will understanding how a company’s organizational sustainability can be a new source of value by increasing in its ability to sell its goods and services to its customers. Many companies, organizations and even individuals are starting to add organizational sustainability achievements of potential suppliers of goods and services to their buying decision-making process. For example, just within the last year Walmart, Procter and Gamble, and the U.S. General Services Administration started asking its suppliers to provide their organizational sustainability information. Even prospective college students are evaluating the sustainability achievements of the colleges and universities they are considering attending.
For facility managers, your company’s customers cannot be far behind in asking about your company’s sustainability achievements. Even if your company’s customers are not interested in sustainability themselves, they will become interested when their customers ask them to document their sustainability achievements and the sustainability of their supply chain.
To find out the level of customer interest, ask your company’s marketing and sales departments if existing or potential new customers have started requesting in their purchasing process about your company’s organizational sustainability achievements. If the answer is yes, ask them what the financial value is of the marketing and sales benefits of increased sustainability within your organization. Then include these additional benefits in your financial analysis and decision-making process for sustainability improvements to your company’s buildings. If the answer is no, keep asking because they will start showing up soon.
What are areas of organizational sustainability that are beyond buildings? Basically, all the company’s actions and impacts that advance or degrade environmental stewardship, financial well being and social responsibility. Examples include company operations, the entire supply chain, the distribution chain and in the waste management actions. A few simple examples would be the energy use and emissions from company travel and transportation.
How does Leonardo Academy’s ANSI standard development work? ANSI is a nonprofit organization that administers and coordinates the U.S. voluntary standards development and implementation. Leonardo Academy, an ANSI-accredited standards developer, is assembling a standards committee to work on developing the Standard for Sustainable Organizations. The standard development committee members will represent four interest categories: (1) companies and organizations that will follow the standard to make their companies or organizations sustainable; (2) companies and organizations that will use the standard to specify the level of sustainability they want from the companies and organizations they do business with; (3) environmentalists; and (4) general interest, which includes government, academia, and others.
This committee will develop an ANSI standard that defines what makes a company or organization sustainable and how to measure and document the level of sustainability achieved. The standard will also define the process for third party verification of sustainability achievements. Once the standard committee has developed the standard Leonardo Academy will distribute it for public comment. The committee will review and decide how to address all the public comments and Leonardo Academy will submit the proposed standard to ANSI for promulgation as an ANSI standard.
There are many ways you and your organization can participate in Leonardo Academy’s process for developing the Standard for Sustainable Organizations development process. On the Leonardo Academy web site you can:
- Sign up to be on the interest group for this standard development process.
- Request and application form for applying to be a member of the Standard Committee, a subcommittee or to be an observer.
- Sign up to participate in the pilot program for the Leonardo Academy draft standard.
- Make a charitable donation to support the standard development process. Leonardo Academy is a charitable 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization.
For more information visit the Leonardo Academy website at www.leonardoacademy.org