Tag Archives: CSR

corporate social responsibility

Construction lacks green, key business and foresight skills

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Construction lacks essential skills. A recent poll of 1,450 construction employers, conducted by Construction Industry Training Board and Sector Skills Council, CITB-ConstructionSkills, skills gaps such as understanding the implications of green issues (43%), identifying potential new business (39%) and not having sufficient IT skills (43%) were all areas picked out by industry managers and supervisors as lacking in their organisations.

In addition, a third (32%) of employers said that keeping up to date with the latest innovations, products and techniques was an important concern for their business. A further 32% also stated that their management team’s ability to identify the training needs of staff was an area that needed improvement.

Begs the question what have we been doing in the world of construction improvement over the last two decades since these skills were identified in seminal reports, eg Egan , Latham and others.

Importantly it also demonstrates a lack of awareness and vision at board, owner or senior management levels to identify, acknowledge and prepare for emerging trends, particularly in the sustainability, IT and social media arena.

Links:

A Low Carbon Diet For Construction Boards (CSRWire post by Martin Brown)

Future Proofing the Boardroom – Part One: Grounding and Stargazing (CSRWire post by Lucy Marcus)

Link to CITB 

What is Green Deal: the hard, the soft, the CSR and the terminology.

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Just what is Green Deal? Associated with my support for organisations developing strategies and implementation plans for ‘transition’ to eco refit or green deal work, the following documents are proving very useful indeed.

Getting Ready for Green Deal (Fairsnape and PBEnergy)  Is your organisation ready and equipped to work in green deals? Check against our top tips.  Time to green your board. It is absolutely essential that your Green Deal approaches are fully supported and sponsored by a board level director or equivalent. Green Deal has to be a key element of your CSR and Business strategy, not a bolt-on or suck and see approach.

What is the Green Deal and how will it work? (greenenergynet.com) Gives a general overview of what will be involved in Green Deal, who it is aimed at and useful terminology

Behaviour Change and Energy Use (Cabinet Office Behavioural Insights Team). Its not all hard technology and finance as this recent publication demonstrates. Energy reduction alongside Green Deal is one of behaviour change, nudge approaches and good CSR understandings.

This paper draws on evidence from behavioural economics and psychology to outline a new approach to enabling people, at home and at work, to reduce their energy consumption and reduce their bills in the process.

Behaviourally based changes that reduce emissions have major advantages. First, the benefits can be very fast, unlike major infrastructure changes that can take years, or even decades – a 1% gain today is worth more than a 1% gain tomorrow. Second, they can be highly cost-effective. Third, they can provide savings and other benefits directly to citizens

Green skills ‘essential’ to carbon-conscious building industry. Recent Guardian Sustainable Business article.

Green Deal Terminology

Improver – The household, business or community that carries out energy saving measures through the Green Deal.

Green Deal Provider – This is the organisation funding the Green Deal. They could be your utility supplier or commercial companies, charities or social landlords.

Accredited Advisor – This is the person who recommends energy saving measures that could be carried out on an improver’s property. The advisor would document the energy saving measures on an Energy Performance Certificate which he would pass on to the Green Deal Provider and Improver.

Accredited Installer – Approved contractor who carries out measures recommended by the accredited advisor. The Green Deal provider could be the Accredited Installer but could also contract this work out. Whoever the Accredited Installer is the contractual agreement is always between the Improver and the Green Deal Provider.

The Green Deal Plan – The Green Deal Provider offers the Improver a Green Deal Plan. This includes arranging an accredited advisor and installer. It also includes the financial and contractual agreement between the Green Deal Provider and Improver.

The Golden Rule – The financial savings derived from the Green Deal energy saving measures recommended by the accredited advisor must be equal to or more than the cost of implementing the energy saving measures and the repayments must not be longer than the expected life span of the measure.

For more on Green Deal awareness of support 

social media in the workplace

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Workplaces need social media. Martin Pickard @FMGuru posted a question on twitter this morning on (should we) use Social Media in the Workplace in preparation for a debate this week. These debates are happening across all sectors, particularly so within the built environment, but I find it odd that we are have these debates at all and wonder:

  • What do I tell my son who is learning how to use facebook and how to blog at school, with QR codes to promote school sports day results, that when he starts work he wont be allowed to use such skills?
  • Did we have these discussions when the telephone or fax was introduced. (Lets send a hand written note around, get people together to explore whether we should allow the telephone on to sites)
  • Or indeed when email was introduced. I work with construction contractors who still do not allow computers on site, emails are send to an info@ address, printed in the head office and taken to sites by the contracts manager. We laugh at this now, but are we doing the same on social media?

Lets think about social media as collaboration and communication. Do we really want to have a debate as to whether we need ‘communication’ in the work place? Or whether we want people to work together, to collaborate?

Increasingly we shore up our policies and employee guidelines preventing the use of social media rather then guidelines on responsible behaviour. Better to have a workforce of ambassadors across social media than a frustrated annoyed workforce who criticise or worse during their own time or in their lunch times?

If we start to use the expression of ‘Real Time Web’ rather than social media it opens the door to thinking about using it as a tool for learning, sharing, communicating and gathering the intelligence an organisation needs (market, client, comptetitors, innovations etc)

Google have enabled Real Time as part of their search options. Staff can now see who has tweeted, blogged or shared anything they search for. Should we hence prevent the use of Google.  We cannot stop the use of social media or real time web, are we (as employers, managers, directors etc) just trying to stick more and more fingers in the soon to break dam?

Reading the traits of successful collaborative leaders for a piece of work with an innovative construction organisation and I see time and time again that a collaborative leader, (to which most built environment leaders would profess to be) is one that is connected, internally and externally across many sectors, through, yes, social media as well as traditional media. (Blog post to come)

Increasingly I am working with organisations who are waking up to the use of social media applications to improve winning work potential, from gathering leads/market/client/competitor intelligence, to gathering evidence for PQQ’s (from eg project blogs) to collaborative writing of responses and much more. (Follow me on @fairsnape for more on this)

Related links:

Using social media can help boards be better on sustainability. (CSRWire Talkback Blogpost)

Why FM needs to go social (a @be2camp FMX Article with @EEPaul)

Top 10: uses of social media to win work (check back after 23rd June after my session with Lancs Construction Best Practice Club)

ConstructCO2 now records zero carbon travel

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ConstructCO2, our construction carbon calculator now measures ‘zero’ carbon travel to and from job sites.

Recording and increasing the travel from managers, visitors and operatives who get to site under their own steam (eg walking and cycling) or via car sharing is an important element in reducing construction impact on the environment, travel miles and the associated carbon emissions

It is also an important KPI that measures the projects performance against any green travel or car share plans.

The Zero travel KPI is expressed as a percentage of all travel or can be broken down to percentage of zero carbon travel for managers, visitors or operatives.

It is very very early days as yet, but it looks as through zero carbon travel is below 1% of all people travel. More later when we have more data.

can data centers power all homes …

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How green is your data center? Stumbled upon an amazing post and comments over at The It Sanctuary

According to figures from IT market research company Forrester Research, a data centre with 2,500 servers – relatively small compared to many out there – will devour enough electricity over the course of one month to power 420,000 homes for a year. *

That’s bad news for the environment – and it also takes its toll on a company’s bottom line. Analysts at IT market analyst firm Gartner calculate that energy expenditure typically accounts for about 10 per cent of the IT budget, and is likely to rise to as much as 50 per cent over the next few years, as energy prices continue to soar.

As the comments on the post hint at – how well is IT covered within an organisations ISO 14001 scope, impact and assessment exercises? Or even within their CSR, Corporate Social Responsibility remits? With something like 60% of a buildings / organisations energy requirement being IT related, it needs to be a central theme.

But its the ability of data center energy to power homes that needs urgent investigation. If these numbers are correct thats a staggeringly high, unbelievably high, number of homes and would resolve the domestic electricity demand at a stroke. I will check the research and invite Forrester Research to comment here,

ISO9001:2008 … what will the changes mean?

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Shaun over at Capable People flagged up the changes to ISO 9001 on his blog over the weekend … Ah, here’s the inside information you’ve all been waiting for.

The changes are so not dramatic that the BSi are giving you … approximately one year after its publication to make any updates. There should not be any major disruption to your organization or your registration and your client manager will guide you through the process.

Sorry, but if the changes are minor, under whelming and very small, mainly relating to clarification, then why give a year to update, and why the need of a client manager to guide you? Is this a case of quality-wash? (We have white and green wash so what colour would quality wash be?)

Without ISO9001 moving forward in line with world of quality, which is now talking in terms of ‘experience’ rather than excellence, or just quality, can the standard remain at the core of the quality management systems paradigm? Or is its day over, and if so what will replace it?

maybe ISO 9004 …

ISO 9004 will undergo a more significant revision but not until end of 2009. According to the BSi the proposed updates focus on the economic sustainability of an organisation. The current suggested title is “Managing for sustainable success – a quality management approach.”

The cynic in me jumps at the sustainable success in the title – surely this will confuse with sustainability in the CSR, triple bottom line sense. Maybe thats the intention – time will tell – but we have to wait over a year to find out.

Meanwhile …

on learning from eco-challenges …

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What can we learn from the fact that bidders are pulling out of the next carbon-challenge project at Peterborough? (Shortlisted bidders flee from EP flagship project)

Could it be English Partnerships are using a traditional, cost based procurement route? Even with PQQ and other ability or capability ‘gates’ selection may still be based on cost. This could lead to the all too familiar high price of low cost syndrome, but as long as cost remains the main selection paradigm we are not going to think differently about sustainability, carbon zero, social responsibility and all things green.

What an opportunity we are missing. Eco challenge projects must do the same for our industry as Building Down Barriers did for partnering, collaboration and supply chain management a decade or so ago.

Why cannot the builders, designers and others be selected on improvement criteria (- ability and solutions in reducing carbons to zero, in design and in the construction process) and of improvement in cost – yes reducing cost at the same time through waste and improvement initiatives.

The oft quoted 30% waste (time, materials, energy, value, effort) in construction could more than pay for carbon zero and sustainability improvements.

We have a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate and to learn that we can get close to zero carbon, level 6 and all that without adding costs to the overall project – if combined with basic and proven improvement approaches.

The alternative? continue with business as usual from a construction perspective, with the exception of integrating some natty designs and product solutions, and continue to moan about the costs …

is the code for sustainable homes working

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Building Design asks the question is the code working and carries two viewpoints. Andy von Bradsky sees it as credible tool that will evolve and allow us to lead the field in zero carbon futures, whereas Mark Brinkley sees it as a graveyard of intentions.

The article finishes with a what do you think prompt…

I couldn’t resist replying, and include my post to that page below

Code level 6 is, as I have mentioned more than once, the wrong tool for the wrong job.

Why?

It doesn’t pick up on the wider sustainable communities issues, the triple bottom line and CSR issues that contribute to sustainable homes/developments, ie the eco-home within the context of an eco-place.

More importantly it does not address the construction process as Mark illustrates, allowing business as usual for the builders, other than integrating or assembly new bits of building kit. (I was not surprised to hear that the Hanham Hall project will not be monitoring or attempting to improve the carbon footprint of the construction process)

I also question whether we (the UK) are indeed leading the field in zero carbon futures. Are we not just waiting to be led by legislation, and then complaining when its too hard, too expensive, too different ? (as illustrated by bidders pulling out of the next eco-challenge project at Peterborough). I sense elsewhere they are just getting on and doing it – because it makes good sense, commercially, for image, and for the planet.

Time for a re-think on this one. But then thats what targets are for – to learn and improve.

Postscript:

Jonathan Poritt’s view point on this is well worth a read – as he says, Continue reading →