How Sustainability Can be the Next Step for the Chief People Officer

As part of our ‘Sustainability Matters’ series, Clare Moore, CPSO of UK-based flooring distributor, Headlam Group Plc, spoke to Jo Mortimer and Ella McCorquodale about how a sustainability agenda can be integrated and actively evolved in a business, providing practical guidance and inspiration for people officers entering the sustainability function.

How did you become involved with the sustainability agenda?

Our investor relations lead had previously developed the organisation’s sustainability activity and when she left the business, I expressed my interest in the opportunity to our CEO. I felt it was the right fit as I hold a very broad network across the business and ultimately, sustainability is driven by mindset and behavioural changes in a similar way to the people agenda.

How have you engaged stakeholders with the sustainability agenda?

There are parts of the strategy where you feel like you’re running to keep up with the regulators, which is great in terms of setting expectations. Most of our customers are small businesses and independent retailers who may not be as focused on sustainability, so there isn’t the same pressure in our customer set as there may be in other industries.

One of our growing customer bases is large multisite retailers, who have their own scopes 1 (direct) and 2, 3 (indirect) emissions targets and sustainability agendas, and to do business with them, we need to operate our own scope analysis. Our contract and commercial customers are also very focused on working with a sustainable supply chain. 

We need to ensure that we work with suppliers who are developing recycled and recyclable products with end-of-life options and that we work with recyclers to implement take back schemes.

What have you found has worked well with sustainability at Headlam?

On the environmental side, we’ve completed a big transport integration project, reducing the mileage of our fleet by 20%. We’ve added a routing system that plans our delivery routes, rather than drivers determining their own routes, which was a massive cultural shift for us. This has enabled us to optimise our fleet, reducing our carbon emissions and costs. 

We are proud of our social sustainability activity. The UK has an ageing demographic of flooring fitters and currently there are not enough fitters to meet demand. We have gathered seven of our suppliers together to create a training program, where we pay for individuals to be trained in how to fit flooring for six months and then we help them secure a job with one of our customers. We are trialling this programme in September and are really excited about our collaboration with key industry suppliers. This helps with the sustainability of our industry by increasing the labour pool, the sustainability of our local communities and part of the training incorporates sustainably in flooring fitting to help the environment.

What do you see as the challenges facing HR executives who haven’t previously worked in sustainability?

Chief People Officers (CPOs) are in an advantageous position to begin with, thanks to the breadth of business knowledge which other colleagues might not have. I’ve had to learn about legislation, reporting requirements, data and the emerging technology. A lot of the time, you must rely on yourself to keep up to date with the latest developments, but the art of being successful is having the right people around you with the right capability in the team.

Ensuring you have people around you who can think commercially is really important - one colleague has started running a take-back scheme and is focused on how we can make the scheme commercially sound to cover the costs of haulage and realising the value of the raw materials, as well as doing the right thing. It’s a natural next step for any HR leader to see what capability they have and plug gaps. We’ve brought in personnel to focus on human rights and modern slavery, environmental management and quality, as well as DE&I, ensuring we have a depth of expertise that we haven’t had before.

What advice would you offer?

Odgers Berndtson identifies top-tier leaders who can meet the challenge of establishing and implementing successful sustainability and ESG agendas. We advise organisations across the globe on their sustainability journey, no matter the starting point. Our own carbon emissions reduction targets have been approved by the Science Based Targets Initiative (SBTi), an independent organisation which evaluates and provides accreditation to companies’ carbon targets.

Read more articles in our ‘Sustainability Matters’ series.

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