Going sustainable: Why businesses can’t afford to wait for perfection

With the current climate crisis, business leaders can become paralysed when shifting towards environmentally friendly practices, even though they want to implement a sustainability strategy.

They’re waiting because they want anything they do to be perfect, to produce only good results and to unambiguously enhance their reputation. It’s understandable. It’s also a bad move.

It’s said that the ship’s band carried on playing while the Titanic sank and that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. We need to make changes now – for the sake of people, the planet and our own teams – even if we can’t achieve perfection. If we wait for the ideal scenario, one where we risk no flak, we might be waiting too long.

Net zero is impossible unless we take action now

We get it. Even some of the best and most innovative sustainability solutions are criticised.  It makes sense why businesses are taking a wait-and-see approach. For instance, several brands have come under fire because to get to net zero, they have to do some carbon offsetting.

But would it be better to commit to nothing until a route to net zero is possible without offsetting? Until there’s an alternative, achieving net zero through offsetting is the best option, and importantly, it’s attainable now.

Sustainability is a broad topic; sometimes, public discourse can feel entirely black and white. There’s little room for nuance. But as a business determined to be a force for good in the world, you have to get out there and do the very best you can, whatever that is, today.

When better solutions present themselves, we can grab hold of them, but we can’t afford to stand around with empty hands in the meantime.

Offsetting is imperfect, but at least it’s something

As the world has slowly faced up to the perils of climate change and developed ways to limit environmental damage, those solutions have had to adapt and change. For example, offsetting started with tree planting, but it’s impossible to plant enough trees to offset the entire atmosphere.

So now seagrass planting supplements reforestation. As the WWF makes clear, seagrass is a game changer. Among the plants in the ocean, it accounts for 10-18% of carbon storage, despite only covering 0.1% of the seabed. It captures carbon thirty-five times faster than a rainforest.

Let’s think about this for a minute. It’s clear that reforesting wasn’t a perfect solution. It wouldn’t solve the whole problem. But if people had never started offsetting with trees because it was an imperfect strategy, things might never have evolved to the point where seagrass was an option at all.

One of our partners is right now planting sea grass and hiring locals to implement it, adding a societal benefit to their interim environmental strategy. You could say it’s getting better and better.

It’s the same today with any actions your company might take. If it’s a choice between a 50% solution or a 0% do nothing response, take the approach where you do something now. The road may well lead to a more perfect outcome.

Here’s environmental action you can take now: Ethical perks and pensions

Employees want jobs that positively impact our world, and one immediate step a company can take is choosing a benefits strategy that demonstrates a commitment to sustainability. In our survey of thousands of UK employees, ethical perks were voted as the number-one sign of an ethical business.

Will adopting new perks and benefits tech solve all the environmental issues and sustainability concerns your company faces? No. It’s not a 100% perfect solution. But it’s a step you can take now and one that goes a long way towards meeting your teams’ expectations and making the world a better place.

A company’s benefits reflect the organisation’s values. The climate crisis is of deep concern to employees, particularly Gen Zs and Millennials, who now make up more than half the talent in the world. And anything you can do to make your company’s planet-friendly values concrete will help to keep them on your side.

Shameless plug alert: Lumina can help you here. With our perks system, employees can choose to make more conscious choices and offset their emissions, and with our ethical pension scheme, employers can sign their people up to a pension that doesn’t fund 19 tonnes of carbon emissions each year.

Sustainability: more than a strategy, a necessity

As you develop and implement your company’s sustainability strategy, whether it involves changes to risk management, active steps towards damage prevention, new policies, better supply chain options or any of the other myriad ways we can all make a difference, the crucial thing is to start now.

Immediate action is never the perfect solution, but it’s better than no solution. To learn more about how you can make a difference, check out how tech is helping HR and People teams to be a force for good.