How To Share Your Sustainability Accomplishments and Celebrate Your Success

Shared Often

Think of your EcoProfile Accomplishments as an opportunity to publicly take pride in your  company’s ongoing sustainability journey, and a running archive of your sustainable milestones. EcoProfile Accomplishments are the place to tell your company’s green stories in your own words. Don’t be afraid to share intermediate accomplishments or the underlying efforts.

Sustainable Accomplishments – Broadly Defined

To be sure, your company’s GBB EcoProfile is designed to share your sustainability efforts and accomplishments, and not just a place to share general business accomplishments – but sometimes the two overlap, and a great business accomplishment also makes a worthy EcoProfile Accomplishment. For example, if your company is named a ‘best place to work’ for your region or industry, there’s a really good chance that your positive culture of sustainable commitment (at least) partly underpins the accolade. So from that perspective, it’s a fair bet that the ‘best place to work’ accomplishment is a fine example of a sustainable accomplishment – so share away!

Your Story – Not Just A Record of Outside Recognition

While awards, certifications and other recognition from third parties are a great source for EcoProfile Accomplishments, they shouldn’t be the only source. The two questions we hope GBB members answer for themselves before choosing a new EcoProfile Accomplishment are: 1) Does the accomplishment help to demonstrate our company’s genuine efforts to improve its sustainable performance; and 2) Does the accomplishment support our company’s Green Mission and Commitments, and help to ‘tell our green story’? If the answers to these questions are ‘yes’, you’ve found a great accomplishment to share.

Add Color & Detail to Your Completed Initiatives

Well-earned sustainable accomplishments will also commonly mirror the completion of significant GBB initiatives or groups of initiatives – and while earning GBB EcoPoints add to your company’s status, they don’t tell the story of how the initiatives were completed, or why the initiative was prioritized by the business. Sharing the ‘how’ and ‘why’ of your company’s efforts is what makes shared accomplishments such an important part of your company’s EcoProfile – and it’s why GBB so strongly encourages member companies to add their voice to the story.

Specific

Like a well-defined sustainable commitment, your EcoProfile Accomplishments should always be as specific as possible. For example, sharing an accomplishment that touts a vague milestone of ‘reduced office waste’ doesn’t convey the impact of a specific accomplishment of ‘50% reduction in company wide back office paper use’ – with the latter showing a very clear definition of where the reduction came from, along with a precise measurement of the improvement. It’s also worth noting that the GBB system enables members to not only share the headline for each accomplishment, but also a descriptive paragraph section that should be used to provide additional specificity concerning methods, measurement and motivation for each accomplishment.

Grounded In Action

Though this may go without saying, it’s important that sustainable accomplishments are always based on deliberate, genuine effort by your business, and result from those efforts – not chance or factors beyond your control.

Credit Employees

We know that employee engagement and effort is critical in achieving sustainable goals for any business. Without a team to implement business process change, positively inform customers of greener choices, hold peers and managers accountable, drive innovative changes – and myriad other impacts – most company sustainability efforts would be unachievable. It makes sense then, that well-defined sustainable accomplishments will recognize employee contributions in delivering on positive results. Simply put – be sure to praise your team often.