How can benchmarking improve your company's environmental sustainability?

Benchmarking is a valuable tool that can help improve a company's environmental sustainability by providing a basis for comparison with industry peers and identifying areas for improvement. Benchmarking provides a structured approach for companies to assess their environmental performance, learn from industry leaders, set goals, measure progress, and drive continuous improvement in sustainability efforts. It can contribute to making informed decisions that benefit both the company and the broader environment.

Benchmarking is a valuable tool for companies looking to improve their environmental sustainability by comparing their performance against industry best practices, standards, or the performance of peers. Here's how benchmarking can contribute to enhancing your company's environmental sustainability: Identify Areas for Improvement: Benchmarking allows your company to compare its environmental performance with industry leaders or best practices. By doing so, you can identify specific areas where your environmental practices may fall short and prioritize improvements. Set Performance Targets: By benchmarking against industry standards or top-performing companies, you can establish realistic and ambitious environmental performance targets.

You're already mentally benchmarking your monthly utility bills even if you don't keep a spreadsheet or a dashboard. Hopefully your monthly utility bills aren't substantial enough to merit severe scrutiny but as a business you are responsible to your stakeholders. If you are wasting money every month because your set temps are too high or too low, then you aren't efficiently deploying your capital. Capturing your business's monthly utilities is the first step to improving your efficiency. If you are spending time to look at monthly numbers then you will associate wasteful habits and a dollar amount. After a while you see the wasteful habits and make a change thus improving your environmental footprint and bottom line.

Benchmarking environmental, and all other important areas within your corporate sustainability program, is important to understand how you stack up against other peer companies. It can also be valuable to learn from others on what specific metrics they are tracking and reporting, as well as how they are reporting. How are they communicating to their different stakeholders and what level of engagement are they getting? It can also help your company learn about specific programs and initiatives other companies are implementing to advance sustainability at in their organization.

Start off simple by benchmarking your building's utilities with the EPA's ENERGY STAR program. Approximately 25% of commercial buildings in the United States report their monthly consumption into the ENERGY STAR program. If your business leases its space, then there is the ENERGY STAR Tenant space program which will help benchmark your leased space against other spaces so you can determine how your leased office compares against comparable spaces. With a separate utilities meter for your office you will be able to get started with the program. The program also helps create business procurement policies that will contribute to a better environmental footprint such as an energy efficient equipment procurement policy.

El benchmarking puede ayudar a mejorar la sostenibilidad medioambiental de una empresa al permitir la identificación de mejores prácticas, proporcionar un medio para la evaluación y comparación, mejorar el desempe?o, incentivar la mejora y ayudar en la elección de herramientas y estándares adecuados. Sin embargo, su uso debe ser cuidadoso debido a la complejidad de la sostenibilidad. Debe ser realizado por expertos en gestión empresarial.