Enduring Value: Linking Lean and Sustainability | By Stephen Dennis

Sustainability touches all aspects of our business, so it is especially important to apply continuous improvement systems to drive progress on our sustainability goals. This article, by Granite Director of Continuous Improvement, Stephen Dennis, explores the interaction of Lean principles and sustainability.

The concept of Lean is a big part of Granite’s strategy to grow our business, and it’s closely linked to our core value of Excellence. Lean is a set of guiding principles, toolsets, and methods that our teams employ in everyday work to reduce waste and create value for our customers, owners, and our business. ?

However, Lean is also deeply connected with Sustainability. Let’s look at how the two are linked, especially with the aspect of creating value, keeping in mind Granite’s Lean Principles.

Lean and Social Responsibility

Our most valuable partnership is with our people—without them, nothing gets done, so we must first begin here. Actively practicing respect for our people firmly supports the social responsibility tenet of Sustainability. In Lean, we respect each other’s individuality and the contributions that every single person working for our company gives to the rest of us and our customers. The experience and knowledge of our workforce is a vast repository of valuable information that, when applied, can move our company forward. When we direct sustainability efforts toward our workforce, we preserve that knowledge and experience within our company for the long term.?

Through continuous improvement of Safety, such as the recent STCKY initiative, we meaningfully demonstrate that we are sincerely concerned for our people. In problem-solving, by involving those who perform the actual work, we increase employee engagement to higher levels and thus improve retention. This fundamental facet of Lean also supports our company’s Inclusive Diversity efforts.

Lean and Environmental Stewardship

Lean is highly focused on reducing waste, which directly ties into sustainable environmental stewardship. We’ve been given the Earth as stewards to take care of for future generations, so any waste we can eliminate is tantamount for its preservation. We use TIMTWOOD as an acronym to identify the different types of wastes in processes, and certainly we must include any wastes related to the environment as things we want to prevent, reduce, and eliminate, such as emissions, construction wastes, and spills.

Lean and Enduring Value

As builders, we build infrastructure of enduring value for owners and the public. How we build is where Lean can help with its focus on customer and business value. We align our clients’ expectations to our deliverables to ensure their conditions of satisfaction are met. Lean helps reduce project costs that are inflated by suboptimal quality and rework. Lean assures streamlined processes both in the field and in the office that minimize our costs, keeping SG&A expenses in check so that we don’t grow overhead faster than revenue.

In Lean, we advocate that everyone tries to get better by 1% every day. Let’s also apply that to our company’s Sustainability focus so that we are 1% better socially, environmentally, and economically every day.