For Tom Eggert, there’s no question that business is the solution rather than the problem when it comes to forging a greener future. As business sustainability outreach director at the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council, Eggert is eager to quash any suggestion that the business community needs to be dragged into the 21st century with respect to its sustainability efforts. On the contrary, he says, businesses are consistently and earnestly blazing greener paths for the rest of society.
“When you look around, where are the actions of leadership happening right now?” said Eggert. “The vast majority – I’m going to go out on a limb and say 90% – of leadership kinds of activities are being taken by the private sector right now.”
| “The vast majority – I’m going to go out on a limb and say 90% – of leadership kinds of activities are being taken by the private sector right now.” – Tom Eggert |
That may go somewhat against the traditional script, which suggests that business needs to be prodded into doing the right thing by government and activist groups – a stereotype that’s often reinforced by high-profile incidents like the Gulf oil spill and Manichaean Hollywood melodramas like Erin Brockovich. But down in the trenches, where most of the cultural shift is taking place, business leaders are flexing considerable muscle when it comes to greening our world, and by and large they’re being gently nudged into taking action rather than browbeaten.
One prominent reflection of this new approach to sustainability is the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council’s (WSBC) Green Masters Program. Now entering its fourth year, the program is heavy on carrot and short on stick, encouraging companies to hone their sustainability efforts through a points system that’s similar to that used in LEED certification. While Green Masters has been around in some form since 2008, when a pilot program was launched, it’s continually evolving and being re-evaluated. In October, its latest iteration won the Eco-Service of the Year Award at IB’s Business Sustainability Awards, and Eggert says the WSBC is eager to widen the scope of the program in 2013.
“Our goal this year is to double the size of the program again, and our target audience this year is small and medium-sized businesses,” said Eggert. “We’ve done a pretty credible job of bringing in the large businesses in the state, the iconic Wisconsin companies. … They’re by and large in the program. So the next challenge for us is the tier of companies that employs most of the people in this state, and that’s the small and medium-sized businesses. And clearly with 130 companies participating in the program and tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses, we’ve got a real rich field to work with.”
Scoring big
The program itself is based on a nine-point ratings system. Companies are evaluated based on the actions they take in nine areas: water, waste, energy, climate change, governance, workforce, community engagement, transportation, and supply chain. Companies can earn from one to nine points in each of those areas, with points given for the environmental impact of the actions taken as well as the work involved in taking that action.
So a company that becomes far more energy efficient while pouring considerable resources into doing so would receive a high score for that category.
After companies’ scores are compiled, they’re slotted into tiers, with those companies scoring in the top 20% being named Green Masters and other high-achieving companies falling into the lower-level Green Apprentice and Green Professional tiers. In addition, companies are placed on a continuum with all others that applied to the program, giving them a sense of where they rank with their peers.
So not only do the designations help companies burnish their green bona fides, they provide them with an incentive to continue improving.
“What the companies have found is that sitting on your laurels probably results in your being bounced from the Green Masters level,” said Eggert.
Of course, the Green Masters Program has avoided resting on its own laurels as well. The program is continually being tweaked to better reflect the realities of running a green business.
“A year ago what we did was say, ‘we’re going to provide that same continuum but on a sector-based approach so that companies actually are comparing apples to apples,” said Eggert. “So a printer would be able to see where they are on the continuum vs. other printers, which we’ve been told is a little more meaningful rather than simply being told, here’s everyone in the program and here’s where you rank.
“Then the final sort of improvement in the program is that we make that continuum available in each of those nine areas also. So they’re going to find out, oh, we’re strong because we’re at the high end of the continuum in water and in transportation and in community engagement, but we’re not really doing very well against our peers in climate or in governance. So it provides feedback to them at the same time as it gives them the score.”
The program’s influence doesn’t end there, however. One unanticipated benefit of the program, says Eggert, is that it’s given companies interested in following a sustainable path a rough outline on how to do that. According to Eggert, the Wisconsin Sustainable Business Council’s website receives a generous number of hits from people downloading the Green Masters application.
“So we talked to some of those folks, and they say, ‘oh, we take that into our first green team meeting as a guide for the kinds of things that we could do. Which of these do we want to do?’” said Eggert. “I really think that facilitates some great discussions and encourages businesses to engage in ways that they maybe would never have thought of in the past.”
Growing greener
Of course, this evident zeal for greening one’s company is part of a sea change that was a long time coming. Today, if you’re not acting sustainably, you’re not acting efficiently, and thus are not respecting your bottom line. In addition, you’re increasingly swimming against a tide of public opinion.
“Business is in a very different position than they were in the ’50s and ’60s,” said Eggert. “At that point, the only reason that business did anything in this environmental area and ultimately in this sustainability area was because of the government that said, you’re going to do this or you’re going to pay the consequences. So fast-forward now 50 years and why is business taking these steps? It’s because their customers are asking them, what are you doing to be green? They’re taking them because they’ve got pressure from their supply chain. They’re taking them because investors are asking those questions. They’re taking those steps because prospective employees and existing employees are asking those questions. So you have this whole new set of drivers of business performance that didn’t exist in the ’60s.”
Indeed, Eggert said that today’s businesses guard their “green” reputations so jealously that when his team went looking for signs that some of the companies in the program might be fudging their applications, it failed to find a single cheater.
“We were challenged by businesses in the second year of the program – ‘can we trust the businesses to be doing what they’re saying they’re doing on their questionnaire,’” said Eggert. “So I had a team of students go out and they interviewed the businesses, took their responses to the questionnaire out to the business sites with them and said, ‘show me evidence that you’ve done this, or prove to me that these are all actions that you’ve taken that you have evidence of.’ And the results of that analysis were that we found no instances where businesses couldn’t justify claiming that they had taken the actions they had taken.
“So we asked them about it, and businesses’ consistent response was, ‘right now, there’s just too much downside to claiming that we’re doing something and getting caught without being able to prove or verify that we were doing that, so it’s a huge reputational hit at a time when our green credentials are really important to us, and we can’t jeopardize our green credentials.”
While Eggert is no doubt happy to be part of the surging sustainability movement, at least in Wisconsin, he hopes that the Green Masters Program can serve to some degree as a model for the rest of the country. Another emphasis for this year is a focus on beefing up the social side of the program by asking what kinds of potential actions businesses can take in relation to the community and community involvement.
As for reasons to take part in the program, they’re much the same as the reasons for seeking out and implementing sustainability measures: It makes more economic sense to take action than sit on your hands.
“It’s a really low-cost, low-risk program for businesses, which is what my advisors were looking for,” said Eggert. “Why wouldn’t you participate in this? There’s nothing but upside, and you get recognition for thinking about some of these issues, and you sort of put this on the radar screen, and you get people talking about it, which helps to build some momentum to continuing to do more within your company.”
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