Learning to talk

Like many businesses, The Beacon Press is committed to communicating its environmental policies throughout its workforce. But that’s easier said than done. Chairman Mark Fairbrass admits to some failings - and asks for advice.

They say that one of the essential characteristics of environmental reporting is the preparedness to publish bad news as well as good. Well, the bad news from this particular Green Futures Partner is that we haven’t been doing well enough in communicating the company’s environmental policy to our staff.

It was an area for improvement identified during a recent ‘surveillance review’ of our environmental management system, and we have no complaints about it being pointed out to us. After all, that’s what a review is for, and we are always seeking to improve our performance. We have always been conscious of the fact that our drive towards environmental responsibility - which has dominated the company culture for nearly 19 years - must excite the enthusiasm and active participation of the workforce and not just management. And we are aware that all our employees can potentially help improve our environmental performance so long as we supply them with adequate information and training. Actually, we thought we had been doing rather well in this area.

We’ve tried to incorporate a practical, but fun, element in our staff communications about the environment. We publish a regular staff newsletter - The Green Beacon - which deals with a whole range of issues in a way that our staff can personally identify with. Over the years, topics have included global warming, protection of the local habitat, the wise use of water, the safe disposal of pollutants, the need for recycling, and industrial impact on the environment. We run a staff household waste recycling scheme. We ensure that all staff have copies of environmental publications designed for external audiences. We celebrate the winning of environmental awards together. We highlight a different environmental issue each month on staff noticeboards.

And we do get a response. For instance, a group of our employees (pictured above) spontaneously volunteered to clean up a stretch of the River Uck flowing (or at least trying to flow) alongside our factory. One morning’s wetsuit work retrieved traffic cones, milk crates, road signs, three supermarket trolleys, a dishwasher, over 70 car tyres, and one from a tractor, concrete posts, half a canoe and other rubbish, which in the end covered four bays of the company car park!

Impressive stuff - but not enough to convince the review team, who were clear that we needed to do more to really involve the staff. So, what to do?

Our present structure ensures that departmental managers and overseers are responsible for the day-to-day issue of environmental directives and their implementation. That means we can be sure of compliance with all the processing, inspection and documentation activities formally specified in our environmental management system.

But clearly a process of this kind is not sufficient. It runs the risk of becoming just another management system in which policy is handed down from above. It lacks the essential two-way communication of ideas and questions, of genuine participation through consultation with all our staff. So after board-level discussions, we’re now actively seeking to find ways of improving communication. We’ve already appointed two ‘environmental champions’ from the workforce who, we hope, can link management’s need to ensure compliance both with formal EMS obligations, and with the pool of spontaneous ideas and enthusiasms of employees, who might otherwise just be regarding our EMS as merely another bee in the boardroom bonnet.

We have yet to define a list of realistic tasks for our champions to undertake and are looking for guidance and ideas. If Forum Partners or others can share some thoughts on this with us, I’d love to hear from them!

Mark Fairbrass is chairman of The Beacon Press

17 October 2001

Mark Fairbrass