Craig Paterson-Cheyne, Global Sustainability Manager, Wood PLC
Tell us about Wood and your role?
Wood is probably best known for our work in conventional energy, but that now only accounts for about 35% of our business. In addition, we have a significant interest in renewables and sustainable infrastructure. We are a global leader in energy and the built environment consulting, projects and operations solutions. We have around 39,000 staff working across 60 countries.
I have been the Global Sustainability Manager for four years but with Wood since 2009. I report to the President of Sustainability. As our team grows, we've consciously tried to avoid creating a central sustainability function. Instead, we focus on educating, empowering and enabling our colleagues across the group to integrate sustainability into their everyday decisions. As a result, the new sustainability team members don't sit centrally but instead sit in each of the different business areas. Helping our business embed sustainability in all that we do.
Sustainability reports through our Health, Safety, Security and Environment (HSSE) function at Wood work well for us - it means we are seen as impartial when we talk about both risks to the business and opportunities to do things better.
In such a large organisation, how do you get buy-in?
We had a vision that from day 1, sustainability would sit comfortably on the broader business and not be siloed. At Wood, we do this from two different angles.
Firstly, while we have a group strategy, each of our business areas has been asked to develop its strategy from 2022 onwards. To deliver our goals, support the group strategy and educate our colleagues across Wood on sustainability issues. We know that these plans are more likely to be effective and account for the fundamental challenges each of our business units faces. We will filter down to the business group and project level, where we hope to see actual action plans that align with that group-level ambition.
Alongside that, we use our Employee Networks and the mantra of 'Think Global, Act Local'. We have an annual Sustainability Week at the end of September each year, which is our opportunity to shine a light on local action that supports our vision and goals. Having just launched our new sustainability goals and strategy in 2021, one of the actions was to re-launch our champions' network. And continue our quest to recruit a local champion for sustainability in each location we operate. These events and networks help to connect passionate employees around our business on crucial sustainability issues. Sharing our collective success and supporting each other on our journey to deliver our goals and vision. The champions are there to help local offices understand our approach to sustainability and to help develop local plans of action. That support and go beyond even the goals we set. We want an active platform to share, collaborate, learn, and celebrate our progress.
Where did you start with such a large business covering a breadth of activity?
Combining two large legacy organisations, Wood was formed in 2017. We quickly identified the need to focus on the key foundational blocks of our sustainability programme; the most significant task is measuring our carbon footprint. We had two different ways of reporting, working to different reporting calendars and multiple systems in play. The challenge was to align all of that and establish a baseline for Wood to set a group-wide carbon reduction target. Having a three-year strategy in motion, by 2019, we were thankfully ahead of our plans when the COVID-19 pandemic hit - which disrupted everything. Although not our original intention, 2019 became our baseline year and allowed us to set a group-wide target reduction. We were seeking to capitalise on our learnings from the pandemic and changing behaviours.
In addition to carbon, another key focus was supporting our communities. In particular, employee efforts to fundraise for causes close to their hearts. We wanted our employees to be in the driving seat on how we distributed our central community fund. Splitting our financial support into two action-focused programmes. Our employee-matched funding programme supports the personal choice charities our people fundraise for to choosing a global cause to unite our people across Wood. Both these programmes focused on rewarding efforts to show up in our communities, over and above the money we donate. We understood the importance of giving our people choices.
When choosing our global cause, we deliberately didn't ask what charities we should be supporting. Instead, we identified 4 of the UN Sustainable Development Goals that we felt were most relevant to our business. We then asked the global workforce, 'which of these matters most to you?' Supporting a cause - as opposed to a specific charity - gave us the flexibility to deliver on that theme; our people chose education and SDG 4.
In 2019 we developed our 5-element education framework
to help detail and educate our people on our impact on quality education. In addition, we launched our first global cause challenge in 2019, giving our employees the chance to pitch for seed fund support for educational activities in their location. This challenge has awarded over $500,000 in seed funding to over 60 employee-led educational activities. From looking at something, we take for granted, like direct access to education, to STEM projects across over 10 of our operating locations.
Photo By: Jeswin Thomas on Unsplash
You've talked a lot about including employees. What about the Executive team and Board?
We've just published our sustainability goals, an 18-month process in which our Executive team and Board were engaged. Although initially, we had a Board committee involved with work to set a carbon reduction target for the group. This quickly evolved to include their input on a broader range of sustainability targets, ensuring we had top-level management engaged throughout the target-setting process. With many voices in the mix, it took time to land our goals. However, we are confident that we have a direction endorsed at all levels of the organisation.
That top-level support can help with some resistance that we might have seen at lower levels of the organisation, where there is often support in theory. However, people are under other pressures, so something like sustainability can slip down the agenda. We made sure it wasn't just us talking about sustainability but our colleagues from different functions and operational groups, such as our tax and treasury team. Or supply chain, explaining why it is also essential for their work areas. Ensuring we educate and inspire all levels of the organisation is a strategic priority of our sustainability programme. And a key element towards making sustainability live within our organisation and owned by the people able to drive the agenda forward.
How do you measure and report on sustainability?
We do look at external verification and global standards to be able to measure, evaluate and benchmark what we do. We also look at how we can work with others across our sector to have a collective impact. So, for example, in human rights, we are part of an external initiative across construction and engineering on worker welfare. Which collectively has responsibility for about 1 million workers across the globe, so when we agree and uphold standards, that can shift the needle.
Internally, we'd like to get better at collecting data. We still use many systems across the business, making it challenging to synthesise. Then there is the issue of what we collect. For example, to improve diversity and inclusion, it can be helpful to understand your starting point. However, there is also a nervousness around gathering personal data, so it's an evolving piece.
What risks do you see with sustainability in a large, complex, global organisation?
One of the most significant risks we've tried to mitigate against - is when sustainability is seen as a central function, and it loses connection with the rest of the business. That's why we engage as many people across the company as early as possible, in a genuine way. We care what they think and shape our programmes around what they tell us. We also look at our stakeholders more broadly – what are they telling us, and can we weave that in?
The other challenge is the pace and the ambition of some areas of the business compared to what is sustainable. We want this to be inclusive and ensure that the changes we are making are not only still there in twenty years but improved upon. It's not a race; we are trying to build a rock-solid foundation. Yes, we should be ambitious, but we need to start from where we are and look at what we can do as individuals and as an organisation to move forward in a realistic timeframe. We must balance long-term goals with short-term targets that seek to adapt behaviour in our current leadership's lifetime.
Everyone must contribute to sustainability, and by setting milestone goals, we work together towards our shared vision of tomorrow.
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