E061 - Karen Higgins from Grant Thornton

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Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Karen, welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. Karen, you work for Grant Thornton, one of the best accountancy firms in the world. I would say, because we've been working for ages and I know how much stuff that you've done behind the scenes environmentally and how dedicated to reducing your environmental impact you are, I mean, how would you best describe Grant Thornton and what it is that you guys do?

Yeah, I mean, as you quite rightly said, we're an accountancy firm, also an advisory firm. Grant Thornton UK is a member of Grant Thornton International. We're a network of organizations that provide services to private sector and public sector. And within that, my role is Head of Sustainability, so looking at how we can be a socially responsible— socially responsible business and how we can reduce the impact that business can make on their community and the environment.

And you've been reducing your environmental impact for a long time now? I'd say probably 8, 9 years you've been really focusing in on reducing your impact. Would that be fair to say?

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yes, so probably, I mean, a lot has happened over the last 8, 9 years. Obviously general awareness levels within the firm and also external from the firm, you know, you've got things like Blue Planet which has completely escalated awareness levels. And I remember when I first came into the role and I was looking to implement certain things that it was like banging your head against a brick wall sometimes, whereas now I feel that there are things, for example, us signing up to science-based targets, where it was a very open conversation, it was a very easy conversation to have, and actually it was a bit of a no-brainer with our senior leadership team. So for me, that demonstrates how far we've come as a business.

And do you feel that with what you've achieved over the last 8, 9 years, you're really seeing a benefit to the organisation as a whole in the UK and with clients and work, etc.?

Yes, I mean, I still think there's a lot of work that we can do, but we have information, we have proof, we have stats, we can demonstrate our credibility in this area, that we are moving forward in this space and that we're wanting to make an impact, not just as a tick box exercise, but that it's the right thing to do There is demand out there from our stakeholders. We want to ensure that we as a business and all our suppliers are moving on in the same direction, so we've got stuff to talk about in terms of the environment. We're not just talking the talk, we're actually doing something about it, and we've got some great examples of things that we can talk to our clients about.

And do you think that that was the driver at the beginning, was to reduce the impact, or what like cost savings is obviously, especially for you guys, is such a big thing because you're a big organization. Therefore, we can't— there's no point hiding from the fact that cost has reduced because of reducing your environmental impact. And was it cost-driven or was it environmental-driven or was it a mixture of both?

If I'm completely honest, I would say it wasn't necessarily cost-driven. It was driven by tenders coming in the door and asking if we were— we had ISO 14001. I think that was probably where it first came from, so although we was— we were doing stuff, I would say we were scratching the surface, and when we were being asked questions about the what else we were doing or whether it— there was an actual thing that we could link all the activity to, such as, you know, having an environmental management system, it was a bit more like, well, actually, I think we need to do this to demonstrate to our potential clients and clients when we get compliance questionnaires that we're actually credible in this space and, and we've got something to prove the work that we're doing. So I think it came from there initially, and this is what I meant when I was talking about banging my head against a brick wall, because when we first had those conversations around ISO 14001, it was almost a little bit like, well, we know it's important, but there are other things that we feel are more important at this precise time. And therefore it was a real battle to really try and drive this agenda forward, because we were doing a lot of stuff, it was just the cost of setting up a proper environmental management system. And we then got agreement that we would do this in London, because London is our biggest office, it's got the most amount of people in it, and then the idea was we would roll that out quite quickly. What actually happened in reality is we did this in London and it took a little longer than expected to roll it out nationally, which was frustrating, but we learnt— saying that, I think we learnt an awful lot from doing it in London alone, and then we could take that when we rolled it out to the rest of the regions. However, now because we've done that, And yes, now we can tick the box that we're ISO 14001. It is so much more than that now. And where I was coming from all those years ago, I can now, you know, it's coming to fruition now that we're talking about stuff that is— it doesn't matter about the tick box. What does matter is about that we are doing something really positive, or the things that we are doing are really positive in reducing the impact of Grant Thornton on the environment and reducing our own carbon emissions.

Yeah, you're reducing your absolute reduction emissions by 2% every year on year for electricity, which is phenomenal. And gas alone is 22% absolute reductions year on year. So you're doing huge amounts. And communicating that, how do you engage your staff, suppliers, and customers with communicating that message of an environmental In a number of ways.

So with our own people, probably like any business, we're always up against the noise, we're always competing with the noise. However, there are certain things that we do. So we have something called Growing Together and our Community Day, which takes place in September, which is a global initiative where all of our member firms come together to act, to share, to commit to something around sustainability. And for me, that's a great opportunity for us to tell the world, literally, what we've been doing around all of our sustainability programmes, including our environmental agenda. We are able, and you know, we have, we are able to do blogs on UK intranets, but also worldwide ones, we're able to tweet out results to our external community, we'll put something on our website, so it's a real hook of you know, time of year. We also use other hooks across the year such as World Environment Day, Earth Hour, where, you know, there's a little bit more awareness out there generally that we can then sort of link into again and tell the message. Engagement, obviously behaviour change is something that we're constantly working on. You get those within the business that are really behind this, they absolutely live and breathe this stuff at work and at home, You've got those that, you know, at work they know it's the right thing to do, but are maybe not quite as passionate yet. I always use the word yet because I think it is a journey. And when we're talking about what we're doing with our supply chain, I mean, we have a responsible purchasing policy. And when we meet with our clients— sorry, when we meet with our suppliers, we take them through that policy. We tell them what is important to us. For example, living wage, environment, our own modern slavery policy, to just give some examples. And we kind of work with our suppliers so that we, you know, we feel that we're all working together and we're all moving in the same direction in those spaces.

And have you had any kind of struggles, and how have you come across those struggles? Has, within that communications and piece, has anything kind of gone, oh wow, this is really hard work, and you've tried to work at that and try to overcome it?

Yeah, I suppose it— one of the things I talked about earlier was competition with the noise. You know, with a firm of our size, there's always a lot going on, there's always a lot of communication. So it's how do you pitch your communication in a way that is going to— people are going to get it and people are going to want to look at it and want to take note of it, if you like. We are also a small team. There are 2 of us within our sustainability team, so that is a challenge. know, we want to do so much more, you know, we constantly want to do more and more, so it's for us, it's being creative in the ways that we do things, and it's about collaboration with others. We know that we can't do a lot of this stuff on our own, and in terms of challenges with communication, one of the things we've done is we've set up an environmental champions group across the UK. So these are those people that I said earlier that are really passionate about the protection of our planet. They really believe that we have to do something and we have to do something now, and we have engaged with those individuals to create a community of people, of like-minded people, that are driving this agenda locally. So Daniel and I sit on our national team and we're driving the agenda from the centre, but we need those people that sit in our local offices to spread the communication, to raise the awareness, to Just generally have conversations with people by the coffee machine and by the water machine to say, did you realize, did you know, and actually, do you know that you're putting your tea bag— we have got a food waste bin here. Just having those conversations to increase awareness, and that has helped hugely actually. And we're finding that we're getting some traction with some of our campaigns now. An example is we ran a campaign called Goodbye Standby, which is around unplugging monitors, laptops, phone chargers, anything when you leave your desk or leave the office. You know, we were finding that monitors were being left on, and although it's not a massive— if you look at it, it's not a massive waste of electricity if you add all those, you know, add sort of put one monitor, but if you add them all together across the firm, it's a substantial amount. But it's also more about behavior change. It's about people recognizing the individual step, individual thing that they can do that would make, you know, as a collective would make a huge amount of huge difference. So those have been run in some of our local offices. The champions have taken those and run with them, really driven them because they're passionate about it. You know, we provide a framework of an idea and then they go and maybe tweak the framework and do different things with offices to increase engagement, and that's worked really, really well. And what we're looking to do in the future is to use that, use this champion network to generate ideas, drive activity, increase awareness more and more and more.

I think that's really important. It's that behavior change and highlighting that, as you say, a monitor left on isn't huge amounts of energy, but actually it's that behavior change and it's that way of communicating the reductions of your environmental impact as an organization across the board. by instilling that very minute kind of behaviour across.

And I think it's understanding the kind of the small steps that people can make to make big differences, and one of the things that we're going to be doing in September as part of Growing Together in the Community Day, which I mentioned, is showing the film that's been recently produced, which is Our Planet, Our Business, and what we want to do is host screenings of that across Grant Thornton, because for me it's always a beautifully shot film, but also it's so— the messaging is so powerful. And sometimes we think about it in the micro detail, so we think about it as in, well, remember to unplug your machine, or take the stairs instead of the lift, or, you know, those small things which are really important because we can all do that, but we need to understand the bigger problem. You know, climate change is the biggest social challenge of our time. People need to understand it, they need to hear the story, they need to understand why it's so important to do those small things and how those small steps can all add up to something bigger. So it's having that bigger view, that real awareness level, and then chunking it down to saying, well, what can I do? What impact for me as an auditor sitting in our Norwich office, what can I physically do? And all those little things that someone can do really, really does add up when you sort of multiply them by 5,000 people across Grant Thornton.

How would you say you approach environmental management and your carbon footprint across Grant Thornton as a whole?

In terms of engagement or—

In terms of reduction, so if you could take us, like, who do you report to? Do you report senior level? How do you approach environmental management? Is it all led from the bottom up, or is it a mixture, or is it—

I'd say it's a mixture. I think firstly it's looking at, um, in terms of those bigger conversations, we do have a member on the senior leadership team who is our Chief Operations Officer, who is our kind of sponsor, if you like, for environmental management. So he drives it from a senior partner level. From sort of middle management side, it's looking at— it's working with our facilities management company, Engie. It's around thinking about where our impacts are and how we can make a difference and working with Green Element as well to see where we can make the most impact. Interestingly, we get a lot and a lot of questions from our new talent entering the firm as to what we're doing. The demand is there from new people coming into the firm, and that keeps us on our toes, that keeps us moving forward because, you know, they come up with some great ideas. Some of the stuff sometimes we're already doing. As you know, a lot of this stuff takes a lot of work in the background and people don't necessarily see it. But, you know, I have regular meetings with the member on the SLT to talk about what we're doing, what's happening. where we're making a difference, as well as meetings with NG, our facilities management company, to, you know, they are fantastic. I must say the success of what we do is a lot of it is down to their passion, their energy around this, their constant— what's the word I'm looking for— but desire to make Grant Thornton the best it can possibly be, and for them coming to the table with ideas about what we can do. So I think it's a— I think in answer to your question, it's a real mixture, and I think you need— you definitely need that support from the top, absolutely. You need that drive from the centre, some guidance, some frameworks, some support, but you also need those people that are passionate locally, that are wanting to say, you know what, I believe in this so much I'm willing to pick this up and drive it and do something about it. Everybody's busy, everyone has a busy day job, and it's those people that have got that passion, that real desire, that make things happen and make Grant Thornton a better place because of it.

Yeah, it's really good to hear because I think many companies and organizations forget that they do need that senior leadership buy-in and they're so driven to become more environmental, but you almost get stopped, don't you, at a certain point if you don't have that senior leadership buy-in?

Absolutely, yeah, absolutely. And I think as well, not only do we have the senior leadership buy-in in the UK, we have it Grant Thornton International as well. To provide an example of that is the Global Partners Conference that's taking place in October, and I've had conversations with the team about, well, what could you do in the conference to make it much more environmentally friendly, but how we cannot have as many emissions, reduce emissions through certain things that we can do at the conference. So it's— and that is very much supported by the CEO of Grant Thornton International. So You know, I think we've got some great people. We've got some great people that really believe in this and are very, very supportive of it.

Have you got any advice or learning that you'd like to share with people listening to this podcast about this journey?

Probably the biggest thing for me is keep banging the drum, no matter how many nos you get or how many kind of go away and write a business case about this, which is always a, you know, if you've got an idea and you take it to somebody and someone then turns around and says, well, you know, you need to come to me with a business case that states this, that, and the other, sometimes it's quite disheartening. It's more about if you believe something is right and you know it's the right thing to do, absolutely continue to go for it, because we know that we've got to do things, and people that are working in sustainability spaces, environmental spaces, they're the ones that have got the voice, they're the ones that have got the drive, they're the ones that maybe have got a bit of budget to actually do something really positive, and it's about continuing to make that happen. Have some good people around you, build a community of like-minded peers, and actually keep having the conversation, because I think sometimes— and a great example of this is there was a partner in our firm quite a long time ago now who's left, who took a lot of convincing about ISO 14001, And we had several conversations about it, and we then got the green light. Yeah, absolutely fine, off we go, go ahead. And I was at a training course that he was delivering a couple of years later, and he actually used this as an example about changing mindsets, about if an idea was communicated in a different way and communicated so he could see the big picture. that actually completely changed his outlook, and this was around our environmental agenda. And he looked at me and he said, oh, you didn't realize I was going to say that, did you? And I was like, absolutely not. To me, that's what it's all about. If people understand something and know why they're doing it or they're being asked to do it, or, you know, a lot of it is— I think it's right, it's on an operational level. It's about people see it as to the benefit of the firm rather than the benefit of the wider community and society at whole. And so it's that awareness level. So I think absolutely just keep banging the drum. Tenacity is key.

And now you've got so many figures and statistics about how much you've reduced and what you've saved and, and where you've reduced as well, in, in quite a lot of detail over the years. You said that one of the driving forces was tendering initially. Has that helped you with that process now? being able to fill in tenders and having a firm grip on your environmental impact?

Oh my goodness, absolutely. And I would say, so however many years ago that was, so 8 years ago, what's happened now in the tendering process is that the questions have become so much more complex. So in the old days, it used to be a simple question, um, do you have ISO 14001, yes or no? That was almost all it was. Now we're being asked for all the stats around it, for every single thing that we report on, and explanations of what we're doing, what we're going to do in the future. So the answers have become much more complex than we are able to— because we've got the information, because we measure it and analyse it, we're able to provide that information. And we'll also be able to— being able to provide, not just saying, well, we have this information, this is what we've got, but this is what we're going to do with it. And this is how we're going to use this to really drive forward further reductions in emissions in each of these particular KPIs.

And do you— we touched upon the Science Based Targets initiative and the fact that you were one of the first companies to sign up, well, let alone sign up to it, but actually have your targets verified. Have you found that that's helped in the communication message?

Internally, probably not quite yet, because I think again it's that understanding of what our science-based target is, so I think we need to do some work around that. However, when you're talking to people in the know, it is obviously a big thing that we have done this. For us, it was a no-brainer really. It was like, well, why wouldn't we? And climate change is so, you know, it's so key at the moment, and we have to collaborate with others, we have to be innovative, we have to be bold. we're not going to make a difference if we just carry on by scratching the surface. We need to come together with other companies to understand what we need to do to change the direction and, you know, in years to come to ensure, you know, we have a planet to continue to live and enjoy. So for us, it was very much a no-brainer, and this particular person who I mentioned earlier who had had this change in mindset sat down and had a conversation with him about it. Absolutely no real discussion really because we knew it was the right thing to do. Also it's that thing, well let's be big and bold now, you could always put these things off for, you know, we'll do it next year, but why? You know, let's do it now, let's set ourselves bold targets, let's get this thing in motion and let's also, it's an opportunity for us to talk to others to say, well, you know, have you thought about doing that? Have you thought about signing up? If not, why not? And try and have that conversation with people. And that actually has been with sort of peers for me in the sustainability community, that's been quite good. That's a great conversation to have with people because I think not a huge amount— it's growing every day, I know, but we want more and more companies to sign up. And I think if we can help to spread that message, that can only be a positive thing.

And I think as an accountancy firm, that message is almost Yes, absolutely. Where do you see yourself going now? Because you have to report on quite a lot of your emissions through various different means, whether it's CDP, whether it's the UN, whether it's, you know, now science-based targets and voluntary schemes that you've signed up to. Where do you see your organization going, or the environmental management within the organization going?

Do you mean more in terms of what more we can do?

Well, yes, yes, and is it just keep on reducing? It could be as simple as that, or have you got, you know, what, bringing it more globally, internationally, or I'm just curious.

Yeah, at the moment, I mean, we've already done one thing, so I think we have to be— I mentioned earlier about being bolder, so we have for all of our electricity supplies that we manage, we now use 100% renewables, so that for us is quite a big jump, and it'd be really interesting to see— we're actually in the process of analyzing and measuring the results as we speak for our previous year's performance, so it'd be really interesting to see the impact that has had, but that's quite a bold move, and one that you think actually, yes, we should, should be doing it. But again, I think that shows how far we've come as a business, that actually it was a really easy discussion to have. You know, have you thought about it? Yes. Here are some quotes. Okay, yeah, let's go for it. You know, it's a no-brainer, we shouldn't not be doing this. So that's something we've already done. There is still a lot we can do with our current KPIs. So as an example, we've reduced our paper consumption over the past year by 14%, which is You know, still a great figure. We can still do more. We have so many digital tools at our fingertips at Grant Thornton that we are not using to their full capacity, and I will hold my hands up to say I'm probably one of them, and there's certain things that I need to use more so that I don't print out a sheet of paper. And it's training people up on those tools so that they understand. We've got, in September, we're having a bit of a back-to-school event, if you like, where people are going to learn more about the digital tools, and we're linking that into zero waste week because it's around— actually, if you're using all these things, OneNote to make your notes, you're using Skype so that you're having meetings over Skype and you're not traveling, you're reducing all the time, and that again is a really positive thing. And so it's not just talking about the environment, it's talking about efficiency for our people, you know, working in a much more efficient manner, saving money for the business, but also doing the right by the environment, so linking all those things in. Travel is a big one, you know, for us. You know, we still have quite a bit of air travel. We travel out to see clients, and therefore it's thinking about, well, how could we potentially do that differently? Because it's that challenge, isn't it? The balance of face-to-face meetings and building that rapport with somebody face-to-face and doing it over a Skype call, which sometimes can be stilted, particularly if you've got a lot of people on that call. So how do we get better at that? How do we come up with some innovative ideas to do that? So there's still a lot of work to be done in this space. So I feel it's still an exciting space to be because there's still a lot more that we can do. So I think it's taking opportunities where we can, those bolder opportunities, but it's also carrying on and looking at ideas about how we can continue to reduce in the work that we're already doing.

Brilliant. Thank you so much for today. It's been really interesting listening to how such a large organisation is able to reduce that impact and the sort of things that you're planning on doing as well and how you've reduced your environmental impact. Thank you so much. I mean, to find out more about Gran Thornton, have you got a place for people to go to? We'll obviously put the links on our website, etc.

Yeah, on our website we have got some information about sustainability and some of the stuff that we're doing, and we're looking to kind of add to that over the next few months as well, particularly around growing together in the community.

Brilliant. Thank you very much, Karen. Thank you so much for listening to the end of this episode of the Green Element Podcast. Do take a moment and share this with your friends and colleagues and rate and review the podcast wherever you get your podcasts. I'd love to know what has been your biggest takeaway from this conversation. What are you going to do differently? Please share your thoughts across social media and tag us so we can see them too.

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