This entry was winner of the 2012 Peer Award “Sustainability and the Environment” category
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The @one Alliance Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Strategy
The @one Alliance: change towards sustainability leadership
Overview
The @one Alliance is a collaborative organisation formed of seven companies tasked with designing and constructing water and wastewater infrastructure for Anglian Water.
The @one Alliance CR&S strategy reduced embodied carbon by 34%, the amount of concrete used to build Wembley Stadium and operational carbon by 80%, equivalent to three Olympic swimming pools of petrol. We therefore use much less resources and energy. We produce less waste, and reuse all what is left. We have no pollution incidents, and among the safest standards in the construction industry. Local communities praise our activities.
And all of this costs less.
Impact
In 2009 we pledged in the CR&S strategy to enhance the Anglian Water region through sustainable and responsible asset creation. Results show how we made a real positive difference to our customers, investing in our people to help them give their best and to go far more than the “extra mile”.
@one Alliance employees enjoy doing what they do and receive spontaneous letters of compliments from the communities we work in. More than 90% of our workforce comes from the East of England and almost 60% of our £600m expenditure is spent with local suppliers.
Innovation
We have been praised by Academia as one of the leading organisations in the UK to embed sustainability into its organisation. The only construction company to receive such commend.
For us corporate responsibility is about empowering leadership in everyone, allowing them to break barriers of traditional construction engineering.
We achieved our objective by asking our people for solutions to important issues, and then implementing most of them.
This was and is necessary as we live in a world of finite resources, financial included, which is characterised by a changing climate that poses new challenges, requiring fundamental new and exciting solutions.[/one_half_last]
Insight
We created ten areas of focus in the CR&S strategy. Carbon management is one of them and we invested a lot in reducing carbon in everything that we do. We did it so successfully that most of the time the broad concept of sustainability was replaced by the notion of decreasing carbon. This overshadowed some of the other nine CR&S areas, which is why we have been recently galvanising each of them, identifying and building stronger links among all ten areas of our CR&S strategy.
Inspiration
Change management does not happen with top down initiatives or necessarily from inside an organisation. It needs to be initiated and sustained by an interdependent and non-hierarchical management system parallel to the existing one, possibly led by an outsider.
Corporate responsibility and sustainability represents a unique opportunity for organisations to make an effective change towards collective leadership as it involves everybody.
In the @one Alliance we understood and embraced these concepts taking them to excellence. Our CR&S strategy is delivering more for less. And now teams master the art of possibility, confident that no challenges are not worth pursuing.[/one_half_last]
The Speaker
Davide was appointed Corporate Responsibility and Sustainability Manager of the @one Alliance, Anglian Water in 2009. In less than three years he led the @one Alliance from having a statement of intent to become a CR&S champion in the industry to being an international case study of merging change management, leadership, corporate responsibility and sustainability as a successful and effective business model.
He won the USIT Harvard Leadership Award 2010 for pioneering CR&S as a strategic management tool in the utility sector.