Building sustainability capacity and leadership
28 September 2018
The University’s sustainability team works to facilitate implementation of the University’s formal commitments to sustainability. It does this by partnering with others to help build a culture within the University that is underpinned by sustainability principles.
“An organisation’s culture results from the basic underlying assumptions that its people have invented, developed or learnt that are effective in enabling them to navigate internal and externally-driven challenges," says sustainability and environment manager Dr Lesley Stone.
“We felt it would be useful after a decade of the University’s sustainability programme, to assess the University’s culture from a sustainability perspective.”
Indicators of sustainability culture
To do so, the team worked with an independent organisational psychologist, who uses a set of ‘indicators of sustainability culture’ to gauge what sort of culture the University had fostered in terms of sustainability.
Since an organisation’s culture reflects both its people and its organisational context, the indicators are divided into those that measure the extent to which individuals enable sustainability, and the extent to which the organisational context does so.
The resulting survey was sent to all staff via the Vice-Chancellor’s fortnightly email update. While there was a relatively small response rate (268), most of those who did respond appeared to have a relatively high level of individual knowledge and commitment to sustainability, while believing there to be a relatively low level of organisational support for the actions they need to take to progress sustainability at work.
We felt it was important to drill down into the findings of the survey, and learn more about the organisational challenges that champions believe hinder their ability to put sustainability principles into practice.
Follow up focus groups
To follow up on, and address, these findings the team’s engagement coordinator, Charlotte Blythe, ran a year-long series of focus groups where participants were invited to “contribute ideas and discuss how we can better grow a culture of sustainability within, between and beyond our faculties, service divisions and research institutes”.
A total of 82 staff, who each gave a couple of hours of their time, took part and nominated more than 20 topics for discussion. The most popular were ‘waste’, followed by ‘transport’ and then ‘procurement’.
Charlotte was impressed with their level of commitment, not only to sustainability, but also to understanding the issues that they felt were making it difficult to apply sustainability principles at work.
Over the sessions, she was often questioned about the University’s position or progress on a particular issue because participants seemed unaware. Common topics that needed clarifying included composting and the scope of the food waste diversion trial, our recycling systems, and the breadth of existing sustainability groups on campus.
Common concerns and ideas for improvement were summarised in terms of the support champions believe they need to be able to implement sustainability principles, and the extent to which they are able to exercise control in doing so.
Changes suggested
Changes staff felt need to be made included a need for more explicit indicators of strategic commitment; much stronger and more extensive leadership for sustainability; more activities that help to embed sustainability; more innovation, inclusion of responsibility for sustainability in all positions; more opportunities for rewards and recognition; and requirements for all operational processes and facilities to be more sustainable.
More detail on the results will be included in a comprehensive review of the University’s status with regards to sustainability commitments.
This review will inform a University-wide Sustainability Strategic Action Plan to be drafted next year.