Sustainable Silicon Valley

Last week I volunteered at a workshop held by Sustainable Silicon Valley, a non-profit that promotes sustainability initiatives at Silicon Valley companies. This event was an opportunity for green team leaders from different organizations to discuss best practices and common challenges. While some of the green team leaders were hired by their employers to lead sustainability initiatives full-time, I was amazed by the number of leaders who were working in non-sustainability roles but because of their passion for the environment took the initiative to develop corporate sustainability initiatives in addition to their regular work.

I had the pleasure of taking notes at a panel led by Mike Lewman of Applied Materials. The session covered his company’s techniques to track and manage the success of its sustainability initiatives. Mr. Lewman and panel participants provided great insights into components of a successful sustainability program.

Organization

• When launching a new program, pick initial programs with impressive financial savings, to demonstrate to management the potential success of sustainable initiative to reduce costs. Executive sponsorship increases motivation of employees throughout the organization.
  
• Create an organizational chart to identify stakeholders, champions, owners, and participants for each sustainability initiative.
• When building green teams, include passionate volunteers as well as organization decision makers.

Metrics

• Set realistic goals and track progress against those goals. Publish goals to shareholders and employees to promote accountability.
• Use visual representations of status to engage all stakeholder groups.
• Create Scorecards to track metrics and targets from each site. Standardize core metrics across sites.
• Tailor the scorecard to use metrics that are already being tracked, rather than ask participating groups to capture all new data, in order to minimize the extra work required to launch a sustainability initiative.
• Hold status meetings between goal setting and target completion date to allow program participants to adjust progress if not on track to meet targets.
  

From my participation in this event, I learned that Silicon Valley organizations faced common challenges, including engaging and educating large employee groups, standardizing metrics across multiple groups and sites, and measuring impacts where data is not easily available. While some of these insights seem basic, I think they form a great template for companies to successfully launch new sustainability initiatives or improve the success of existing ones. I hope that more organizations like Sustainable Silicon Valley are created around the country to promote sustainability best practices.