Service is an important factor in a company's ability to achieve sustainability goals. Unfortunately, however, it too often remains lip service and lacks a well-structured implementation process. Following this 5-point plan often helps to take a more structured and targeted approach.
As part of their sustainability plans, many companies focus too much on reducing the number of kilometers driven as part of their daily work. Although this is often a sensible first step, there are many more points that you can address in order to achieve recognizable progress on the road to a green economy. In the service sector whole cornucopia of construction sitesthat you can process to make your company more ecologically valuable. In an age of scarce resources and high raw material prices, this also offers a considerable economic advantage.
If you want to implement projects that reduce the harmful effects of your business operations, you need to take action. You need to be able to define goals, develop strategies based on these goals and then put in place the processes and tools that you can rely on in regular operations.
Realign your focus!
What goals has your company set itself in order to operate more sustainably? And how can the service department play its part in achieving them? As a rule, your department can make a significant contribution. Find the focus topics in your processes that you want to concentrate on. The focus does not always have to be on reducing travel costs. Improvements are also possible in other areas, such as the optimization of supply chains and warehouse processes or the optimization of the so-called "last mile". In any case, you must first determine what your construction sites are and in which operational areas you want to improve.
Find out how sustainable your department already is!
Now that you have defined the effective starting points in your department, you should record as precisely as possible how sustainably you are already working in these areas at the present time. First of all, we want to determine the status quo as precisely as possible before we move on to developing a strategy. This is the right time to look at the sustainability of all aspects of your organization - not just the obvious aspects such as transport and electricity consumption. Of course, we need suitable key figures for this. But also focus more on the problem or target sectors that you defined in the first step. At the end of this step, create a heat map to show what you need to improve in each area.
What services do you want to offer as part of your sustainability strategy?
You need to be aware of what your service offering should look like in the future so that you can also provide your services profitably. Genuinely sustainable services must be both reliable and economically viable. Otherwise, projects cannot be implemented in practice and noble motives instead of real progress are the result. At this point, you should therefore clarify how future services can be designed. Compare your results from the first and second steps. Where are we and where do we want to go?
Define initiatives and measures to achieve your goals
Once the operational areas in which you want to become more sustainable have been defined and clarity has been created about future services, you should translate your goals into actionable initiatives and measures. We now know the current status and our goal. The next step is to plan the measures we need to implement. These initiatives and measures should be clearly defined so that everyone knows what role they play in the overall process. This way you can avoid confusion and ensure that everyone is working towards the same goal. Evaluate the expected business impact of the prioritized sustainability initiatives to get an idea of the biggest levers.
Design a roadmap
Draw up your roadmap and implement it - which initiatives do you need to tackle and in what order? Prioritize the actions from step four according to their urgency and importance. What resources and decisions do you need to get the process going? Determine the decisions and execution steps that have priority and execute them according to the plan.
Sustainability is an ongoing process and you need to keep prioritizing your initiatives. This 5-point plan can help you focus on the most important actions for your business. It will also help you to measure progress over time. Of course, the template presented is not rocket science and deals with the topic relatively superficially. Unfortunately, however, in practice we see that projects fail precisely because of the structure described and are not approached in a targeted manner, which is why it often remains a case of "you should...". It therefore makes sense to approach sustainability projects in a standardized and structured way.
