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Future Proofing Your Business and the Environment

Ahead of the upcoming 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26) the terms carbon footprint or net-zero are probably terms you are hearing and seeing more about in the news. However, knowing how it can be achieved within your organisation can be tricky.

Posted 29 October 2021

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Only for big business

Often people think carbon-neutrality or net-zero is only for bigger companies but actually, the process is the same regardless of the size of your organisation. It starts with understanding your carbon footprint, setting targets, and taking action by reducing and offsetting your footprint.

In fact, sometimes being smaller has its advantages as smaller companies have a less complex value chain and can gather data more easily and quickly to reach goals. It also often requires a smaller investment, making it easier to build a business case for being carbon-neutral.

Stumbling blocks

A lot of the time one of the biggest obstacles when trying to implement any type of transition is getting organisational-wide behavioural changes in place. Incorporating and developing your staff's soft skills or often called meta-skills can play an important role in driving behavioural changes. It can help individuals understand the ethics and urgency of these changes and ultimately the benefits of the transition to net-zero. Online learning is a great tool to help develop these types of skills within your organisation and can be tailored to suit your organisations needs big or small.

Simple changes and saving money

The obvious goal of becoming more carbon neutral is to preserve and protect the planet for the future, which is important, but it can also save your organisation money in the long term. Setting small goals is a great starting point when creating a carbon-neutral plan as even small actions can have an environmental impact for the better.

Things like switching the office lightbulbs to energy-efficient, or implementing a companywide recycling initiative by providing the appropriate bins, also cutting back on travel costs. All these little things can make a big impact over the course of a year and are easily achieved without tons of effort. On a slightly bigger scale with a bigger impact is switching to digital delivery for learning, assessments or digital certificates instead of printing. Why not read our ebook 5 Steps to Digital Transformation to see some of the benefits.

Future proofing

As the world starts to work towards becoming more carbon neutral and the implementation of new laws or requirements come into play, it will be important to already have a head start on any potential compliance needs and how you could facilitate that quickly and efficiently to your staff or clients. We have already helped many organisations future proof their learning strategy including helping NetRegs which is a partnership between the Northern Ireland Environment Agency (NIEA) and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) develop eLearning and online assessments for clients using eCom learning solution tools to check their environmental compliance.