Developing Effective Management Systems

Sustainability is currently the greatest imperative in business and many need the skill set of developing and implementing a sustainability plan to scale the heights of success regardless of whether or not they are experts. The handbook “ The Sustainability planning, How to create and implement sustainability plans in any business or organization ” by Darcy Hitchcock & Marsha Willard acts as a guide to the design and implementation of a customized sustainability plan in any type of business, government agency, or organization department regardless of scale and type. The guide elaborates on how to create a sustainability plan and report with every chapter containing two vital sections. The first section entails background reading and tips as well as case examples to help one become successful. The second part entails a set of methods that come with step-by-step instructions and a selection matrix that help one choose the best and most effective methods. The following paper will summarize chapters 7, 8, and 9 of the book and give a reaction to the same. A means of setting priorities and monitoring progress as well as reviewing the entire effort's success is imperative when implementing sustainability and any other corporate initiative. The sustainability management system (SMS) is a way of evolving towards a more mature and sophisticated process of managing a sustainability initiative (Hitchcock et al., 2008). An effective SMS comes with key benefits that include: 

Ensure the survival of sustainability initiatives after the moving on of key individuals 

Provision of regular trafficking and reports;

Provision of a systematic framework that allows movement towards sustainability; 

Allow one to become more proactive than reactive; 

Transfer learning from one project to the other; 

Significantly reduce risks and liabilities; 

Reduction of confusion and overlapping as well as conflicts in priorities and projects. 

The SMS must have the following four elements for it to be complete: a plan that identifies and selects the projects to improve; implementation, launches projects and proceeds to develop appropriate systems of support; monitoring, checking the effort progress, monitoring the support systems and take preventive and corrective action when necessary; Review that evaluates the efficiency of the projects and the overall initiative The SMS should achieve two things simultaneously and the two include management of projects and management of the program. An SMS and EMS differ because the EMS is focused on the environmental issues that include improvement of the performance of the environment and regulatory compliance while the SMS takes on a broader focus and accounts for the natural limits (Hitchcock et al., 2008). The SMS has three stages of maturity and these include the incubator phase, initiative phase, and integration phase. The incubator phase is the phase of toe-testing and entails the time when an organization experiments with the sustainability concept but may not issue a formal commitment to the same. The initiative phase entails making sustainability a formal initiative after many talks and consultations. Lastly, the integration phase entails embedding sustainability in everything that an organization undertakes. A program is headed by an executive sponsor or director of sustainability who chairs the committee that steers and oversees the implementation of sustainability. A temporary task force usually works on specific areas and projects and eventually evaporates as sustainability becomes a part of the normal of the management and the entire staff. The sustainability director assumes different roles that include chairing of the steering committee, managing and monitoring the process of change, being a resource, inspiring others, ensuring proper working of the management system and drafting documents as well as preparing the annual sustainability report. The steering committee act as the parallel structure of management that is usually employed to implement the new initiatives of the corporation. The committees are usually sponsored by the executive and function within the span of influence of a person setting priorities, launching and overseeing task forces, and managing strategic decisions in relation to the implementation of sustainability. Teams do well to involve employees in the efforts of sustainability. A good number of these teams get formal sanctions from the organization that gives them legitimacy. Sustainable solutions usually entail interdisciplinary multi-stakeholder approaches that involve people from various organizational areas and even multiple organizations. Voluntary or green teams usually begin as voluntary groups that meet during off-work hours and usually lack any formal standing in the organization. Task forces on the other hand entail temporary teams that are assembled for the purpose of performing a specific task and mainly report to the steering committee. Standing teams on the other hand are permanent and seek ways of improving the sustainability performance on a continuous platform. The sustainability structure entails following instructions to determine the best structure set that will help one in their sustainability efforts, convene a group of persons with authority to help prepare and effect the structure in the organization and the activity should be conducted by leveraging existing roles in the organization. The process of review includes chronology that maps out what happens and when it happens, analysis that compares the chronology and results to the desired outcomes, future that distills the lessons learned for purposes of the future, and institutionalization that decides the best way of integrating the lessons learned within the standard practices of operation. People are busy and as such an organization requires a comprehensive plan of communication to keep sustainability at the forefront of the minds of people. Communicating with employees allows them to grasp a shared mental model that is a way of organizing and talking about the issues pertinent to the organization. Communication is important and one must let the employees know why and how they pursue what they do. The effects of not communicating are more adverse than having people stay in the dark and the organization must touch all critical parties in its communication. Delivery of information to people is imperative but should come with mechanisms to get them involved. The organization or communicator should make sure they have systems in place that manage inevitable ideas most probable to ensue. Training is different and involves more than sharing information with the employees because it implies that the organization verifies that indeed people learned something and as a result can do something out of the training. The concepts of training include explaining upfront why the employees must learn what is being covered, one should not give more than can be absorbed at a time, and as such, the training should go for about 20 minutes per session. In addition, the training should help link the employees with what is being taught, provide learning activities that give feedback on how much earning can be achieved, and further give employees job aid. Communicating with the employees will need a communication plan, training plan, and lesson plan as well as the final evaluation structure (Hitchcock et al., 2008). The communication plan must be clear and take part in the planning process. The training plan must be thoughtful to ensure that every person gets training in the right concepts and activities. The lesson plan on the other hand must take a design that is tailored to the particular needs of an organization. The book is properly written with the authors concentrating on the technical bit of sustainability and acting to convey the message in that way. Chapters 7, 8, and 9 take a proper flow of topics that relate with each other in the manner of authored flow. The authors give an outline of what is to be discussed and properly introduce the main area they wish to discuss in the preamble of every chapter which allows the reader to be prepared and know what to expect. The outline beginning in every chapter does well to ensure the client is prepared for what to read. The book considers the key areas of the topic and proceeds to discuss them in detail such as the parts of conveying information to employees in the organization. It does well to appreciate that this is a problem organizations suffer with and as such need to be addressed. According to the authors, the relaying of information needs to be systematic and assume processes similar to all the other steps in the organizational programs like assessing problems. The authors fail to use real-life examples that would do well to put emphasis on the reasoning behind the concepts they give. The book gives thought-out situational cases to drive the point home, which serves the purpose right but not to effect and totality because it lacks the real-life touch. Moreover, apart from the examples, it appears that some of the information is dispersed all over the chapter without proper flow. For instance, the training plan, communication plan, and review have so much in between them that one may lose touch with what the section was talking about. 

References 

Hitchcock, D. E., & Willard, M. L. (2008). The step-by-step guide to sustainability planning: how to create and implement sustainability plans in any business or organization. Earthscan.