One of our clients, Alliance Cleaning, are winners of the Hertfordshire Environmental Business of the Year Award 2011.  They beat multinational firms, the renewable energy company Green Energy, and others.  

Rather than simply sing everyone's praises, I thought it would be more interesting to write about the process we went through.  A commercial cleaning company based in the South East, the Alliance team (by their own admission) didn't know what 'Sustainability' meant in 2010.  

We have named the approach we applied with Alliance, “simplifying sustainability”, which is summarised in the diagram.  From my perspective, the key part was building the support and engagement of the people in the business.  In my experience, this commitment makes everything that follows possible.

The first step of the process was carried out by the Directors at Alliance (Danny & Ian), they came up with a Vision & Mission for the business in consultation with others in the firm, which covered everything from the values most important to the business, and their promise to their customers.  

They attended a couple of workshops during that time, one to clarify the business case for sustainability, and the other which provided a more emotional involvement with the people, profit and planet issues of sustainability.    

Their vision developed during the summer of 2010 was for Alliance to, “provide sustainable cleaning solutions by adopting environmentally friendly and ethical cleaning practices to every commercial workplace”.  They promised to be operating as a carbon neutral business by 2011.

The Director’s vision & mission was the basis for everything that followed.  It had to provide a compelling business case, and a reason for their staff to come with them on this journey.  It was about doing something for the right reasons.  Getting this mindset right was about building the emotional, rational and business case for engaging with Sustainability.

The next step was to get their key People engaged.  People were the key to having sustainability really work for the business.  Obviously, they needed their people’s brains and hands to create and implement the projects and initiatives to make the journey a meaningful one with results, rather than just a “PR exercise” or a fad.  

We ran one and half day awareness and commitment workshops with the head office team, around thirty people, split in two groups.  These gave people a chance to engage in a conversation about Sustainability, the new Alliance Vision & Mission, and what it meant for themselves and the business.  

The workshops raised awareness (using data and multimedia materials about people, profit and planet issues), built understanding and alignment (through conversations), and allowed people to choose how responsible or accountable they wanted to be for changing the business (the overnight break gave people the time to internalise what we were talking about, and people were given the freedom to make their own minds up about what they thought about things).  On the morning of the second day, each group came back supportive and committed to the change, and brainstormed the ‘what to do about it’ together.  

These interventions built a lot of support, excitement, even inspiration.  The next step was to formalise an implementation Plan bringing together all of the ideas, selecting those that were felt appropriate for application.  A small leadership group was created, with authority to plan and drive the strategy, and these people worked with their peers to think through the most urgent and important tasks.  

The leadership group then came together, and developed a Goal Directed Plan, a strategic plan to change the business.  It detailed how the business would look once the changes were made, the outcomes required by when, and who was accountable for those outcomes.  It contained 75 specific outcomes over the next year.  Developed and owned by the team, its implementation was speedy.  Quarterly leadership group meetings were used to keep re-evaluate the plan and to keep up momentum.

Implementation of the plan was remarkable with Alliance.  The end of 2010 was a difficult time to trade, with a lot of uncertainty surrounding a major contract, and the financial crisis has had a knock-on effect to the whole cleaning industry – almost as if many clients are taking out their woes on their cleaning suppliers by becoming extremely demanding.  The leadership group delivered on their plan despite this environment, which may have had a lot to do with the high level of engagement and commitment from their people.  

The primary Measure put in place with Alliance was a carbon footprint.  Perhaps because they did not know better, we set the boundaries for this to include their supply chain and the impact (energy and water) that they have on their client’s sites – being able to set such a wide and responsible boundary may also have something to do with the fact that the Directors are doing something for the right reasons.  This information clarified where the main carbon impacts were (supply chain, followed by transport) and allowed for a detailed carbon management plan with meaningful targets to be developed.  

During 2011, Alliance came to offer the World’s First Carbon Neutral Cleaning Service, and they have committed to maintain that status until 2014 at least.  Danny had to do a lot of research before he was ready to claim Allaince had achieved a World’s First!  It is the wider responsibility (supply chain and customer site impacts) which sets Alliance out as unique.  

Alliance had to think about their Style, how sustainability fitted with their brand and their clients, and how it could be Communicated internally and externally.  They found that it gave their sales people a key differentiator to talk to many clients about.  Some clients were not interested in Sustainability, but many were.  Rather than just having to talk about price-price-price, levels of service, responsiveness and the like, they had something bigger to talk about – something of benefit and interest.  Alliance was also able to acknowledge significant success with its people.

The final part of the year programme has been to Systematise and formalise the management process within Alliance, providing rigor to the day-to-day matter of ensuring control, conformity and competence.  We are implementing a simple management system, which can be certified to ISO 14001.

This process, and the results they have produced as a result, led to winning the Environmental Business of the Year Award, beating major multinational companies.

Alliance's staff have been clearing ground and building fences with their client Timberland, recycling and composting in the office, working out the carbon footprint of the business, printing less, replacing old equipment with new more efficient stuff, bringing in a hybrid and low emission company car fleet, developing an environmental management system for the business, and trying to make sure that only one version of certain key documents exists on the server!  They have rebranded their business, developed a new website, they have a new uniform, and they offer the World’s first carbon neutral cleaning service.  They introduced a new cleaning product system across the business, and they now talk to existing and potential clients about sustainability.

Ian the MD also sold his Jaguar XK, and Danny the other Director is driving a Golf Bluemotion – and they both seem to be ok!