How HR & OD Can Save the Planet with Dr.Tara Shine, Change by Degrees - OrgDev Episode 52

How do we make our organisations sustainable? What is the role of HR, OD or Learning and Development in achieving this.  Our esteemed guest Dr Tara believes the  'people' people  of the business - HR, OD, Talent, L&D - have a critical role to play in saving the planet.

Subscribe to the Change By Degrees Sustainable HR course here:
https://changebydegrees.thinkific.com...

💼 Dr. Tara Shine, Change by Degrees
  / dr-tara-shine-15810413 

Visit Change by Degrees here:
  / changebydegrees 

Dr Tara Shine is a globally recognised sustainability expert, public speaker, and author, with a career spanning over two decades in climate change negotiation and environmental policy. She is the CEO and co-founder of Change by Degrees, a sustainability skills platform designed to empower individuals and organisations to make sustainability their superpower

Thanks for listening!

Distinction is an evidence-based Organisation Development & Design Consultancy designed to support modern, progressive organisations to bring out the best in their people and their teams through training, consulting, and coaching.

Our professional and highly skilled consultants focus on delivering engaging, results-focused and flexible solutions that help our clients achieve their business objectives.

Find out more at https://distinction.live/how-we-can-help/

💡 Stay Connected:
Looking for a consistent source of leadership & OD tips? Subscribe to our weekly newsletter by clicking the link below and receive valuable leadership tips directly in your inbox:
https://distinction.live/keep-in-touch

We'd love to connect with you on Linked In:
linkedin.com/in/danibacon478
https://www.linkedin.com/in/garinrouch/

Transcript

(00:00) hi and welcome to the org Dev podcast we're running out of time to save the planet so our organizations need to act now and one of the major challenges how to make business sustainable now traditionally the focus has been on Tech hardware and investment but what if the answer is through its people Dr Tara shine our esteemed and engaging guest believes that the people people of the business HR OD Talent L &d have a critical role to play and Tara believes that everyone needs to change we're going to tackle the real climate issues
(00:33) Tara has dedicated 20 years of her life to the pursuit of fairness between people and between people and the planet and Tara's passion and knowledge of climate change the environment and development issues has taken across seven continents of the world in many different capacities from science and policy advisor to public speaker to Explorer to TV presenter social entrepreneur and author as well and she's even deliver the atena Christmas lectures on BBC 1 Tara is a co-founder along with meline Murray of an
(01:00) award-winning social Enterprise Changed by degrees as a sustainability skills platform that helps every person to have sustainability as a superpower she spent 20 years as an international climate change negotiator and advisor to governments and world leaders on Environmental Policy now I know Tara through her Antarctica Expedition Iowa tasting playing a very small part in supporting her get ready for the Homewood bound Expedition with 90 female leaders in stem which is a fascinating story in itself and she has the book how
(01:27) to save your planet one object at a time which is out now and and you'll find a link to the book in the show notes today as well and it's all about finding a solution to the crisis making sure that we have to change everything even the objects we use on a daily basis all of her experience is underpinned by an extensive academic background she has a PHD environmental science and geography from the University of oler and she's also a regular sea swimmer so that's endurance in itself as well so so Tara
(01:52) thank you so much for joining us we're absolutely honored to have you join us just on one of our last sessions Before Christmas [Music] let's kick us off just so just tell us a bit more about the work that you do so I've worked in sustainability climate the environment all my life but the way that I do that now is as co-founder and CEO of Change by degrees and change by degrees is all about building the skills the confidence and the motivation in people to play their part in making their organization more sustainable but
(02:28) also taking that out into their life into their home and into the community that they work so I'm a real believer in empowering people to create a sustainable future so you know if you boil it back the only reason we have a climate change or nature problem is because of people so people are the problem they're also the solution and that's what we want to dial into and can you just Define sustainability for us because everyone will have a slightly different version of what they think sustainability is first thing Danny that
(02:53) we try and help people to understand when they come on to the change by degrees uh skills platform and they come there to learn and to share is that sustainability is so much more than being green so this not an environmental issue only for people who are interested in the environment or vote for a green party or buy eco-friendly things sustainability is about the way we live life now and what we're going to pass on to the generations that come after us so it's about being a good ancestor and who doesn't want to pass the world on to
(03:25) their kids in a better condition than they inherited from their parents and so sustainability is about trying to get a balance between the environmental social and economic components of life or running a business and kind of saying it isn't all about the bottom line in the money it's also around our people and how we treat them and the conditions they have at work and how they're paid and the benefits we give them and it's about the environment that the business operates in and relies on in order to
(03:50) even have a business and that matters as much also as the bottom line and trying to get a better balance and see the interconnectivity between those things and what's your ultimate Vision what would you like to see things change or things be oh well I would just like people to get excited about sustainability so if you look around us right now there's a whole lot of things that are broken we have unprecedented levels of conflict we've just lived through a pandemic um inequality is growing there's homelessness there's
(04:18) people dying of a non-communicable diseases like we're not really doing that well at the moment we have a huge divide between the wealthiest and the poorest people in the world so what I want people to get excited about is imagine what it could be imagine if we were creative and Innovative and we cared about people and we cared about nature and we cared about our communities and we designed a better life on Earth where there was clean water and clean air and everybody had access to food that was really good for
(04:45) them and affordable everybody had a home to live in you didn't need to have two cars to function you didn't need as money as you need now you could have four work a 4-day week you know imagine what it could be better so I want us to get to that where um we aren't talking about human beings being a threat to our planetary home anymore but where human beings are kind of nice caring residence of their planetary home and reaping the benefits of that I mean I mean on know that did you have a question Garen no I
(05:18) didn't I just I'm mean yeah like just could be so much better than it is now like why are we I feel like there's a paralysis like we're scared to change things but they're not so great right now so imagine if we just weren't scared and we allowed ourselves to dream big and we created something better like that's the invitation come with me let's create something better but but that's that's a really interesting thing is because you often see it with change in organization it
(05:43) just feels overwhelming like there's so wherever you look there's something and who is little me to make a difference in it how how do you sort of break that that challenge down for people that's why it's changed by degrees Garen um cuz it's all about like yeah if you if you present people with the totality of the emergency and crisis we Face they they they just freeze right you either run away from it or you freeze and you go well it's too big for me nothing I can do so we have to break it down into
(06:11) pieces and also fill it with hope and opportunity and so you're better doing something to nothing like if you think back to the beginning of the co pandemic for example the worst bit was at the beginning when it was really big and scary and you didn't know what to do right and everybody was just stuck at home looking at the television waiting for someone to tell them what to do and then when we were told there was rules and there was masks and there was social distancing and we could live life but by
(06:36) these certain rules then you're like okay well I know what to do I can play a part and now there's something I feel better I don't feel as anxious and so in helping organizations make change yes I'm not going to lie to you we need to completely transform the way we run businesses and do business completely from the way it is right now so that sounds scary but we can do that in steps over time not a lot of time cuz it's kind of an mergency thing going on but you know we can break it down into steps
(07:03) and it's not all your job so youve a role if you work in HR or organizational management but you also have a job you also play a part if you work in procurement or if you work in corporate finance or you work in I don't know the operations so it's not something that any one person has to do on their own it is a team sport all of this just as any change process having a plan setting some kpis ticking those boxes off as you go it's just the same with this project it's just more ambitious so what can
(07:31) given our audience is predominantly HR OD L and D kind of the people people what role can they play what what do you see the specific role of those people in making the change in their organizations yeah so I think there's like two main areas so one you are the custodians of the s in ESG so I said that sustainability has three pillars and one of them is social and uh in terms of like it's sustainability reporting where you're having to tell the world what your company is doing about sustainability we call that
(08:01) environmental social and governance reporting and there is a big S as well and that's you as well so you're the social you're the people part of that so you need to have a seat at the table anytime someone is talking about sustainability because they cannot do it without you so that s is where you're going to have all of your policies and procedures disclosed to the world it's about your how you play your employees how you look after them the terms and conditions how you onboard them all of
(08:26) that falls under under that s and then it stretches out into your connection ction with your community so it's your corporate sustainable Corporate social responsibility um work that you do as well and then it's all the people that you interact with in your supply chain um so you might be working with colleagues there on procurement but it's still a human beings human rights terms and conditions that you would be looking at along that supply chain so number one is your the S so you're really really
(08:50) important and the other thing is that because sustainability and making businesses sustainable is an enormous change program and a transformation process we can't do it if we don't bring the people with us and help them change so this is about Behavior change it's about mindset change it's about doing your job differently a year from now than you doing it today so that is fundamentally the job of HR of L&D and of orev people so and and I think that's overlooked all the time I think for the
(09:22) people who lead on sustainability they think this is like a technical challenge it's an Energy Efficiency problem it's a I need some BAS data on our carbon emissions problem that's part of it but in order to change any of those metrics and Achieve any kind of kpis around sustainability you have to bring people with you and change their behavior so you are at the center of it all and this isn't just necessarily a nice to have is it this is something that actually delivers value on the bottom line
(09:48) because I think sometimes that they're kind of decoupled aren't they one is profit is over here and over here is like just nice like things that are good for the brand over here as well but they're they're interl aren't they yeah yeah so I would say if you if it feels like in your business that sustainability is an add-on you're in trouble well if it's not there at all you're in trouble if it feels like an add-on or a sort of a an optin nice to have you're also in trouble so
(10:12) sustainability has to be at the heart of your corporate strategy it has to be sit in your corporate purpose and that's because you won't be around 5 to 10 years from now if it isn't okay because you are either going to be forced into this through regulation and compliance around primarily like reporting and disclosing your your non-financial data in the same way as you do your financial data your audited accounts that type of thing but also people won't want to work to for you so the most sought-after
(10:40) skills on in the world right now are green skills and the most sought-after companies are companies with a strong purpose and with a strong commitment to sustainability so if you want to attract and keep the best people it's really good to have a very clear sustainable purpose and for that to be credible and that when people step in to work for you so they come in and they do their own boarding that they're told about the access they have through to sustainability on sustainability learning on an ongoing basis that
(11:07) they'll be encouraged to develop their sustainability skills no matter what function they work in in the organization that there's employee resource groups or green teams where they can get involved in sustainability projects um that there's incentives and bonuses for people who develop their sustainability skills and that their performance review will evaluate what their contribution is to delivering on the sustain ability goals of the business so it's really important from an employee in attention thing and
(11:34) another way that I see a lot of people really focusing their minds on sustainability now is they can't win work unless they can show their sustainability credentials so if you're in the supply chain of any larger organization with significant sustainability commitments in order to do business with you they are going to need to know what your sustainability plan is what actions you're taking what your data is and you're not going to win the work without that so there are so many levers yeah it's absolutely
(12:00) business critical there if somebody is working in an organization where they've got that minimum minimal compliance attitude so where do they where do they start how do they start making change what can they do realistically to to shift the dial yeah so I think there's lots of things you can do so one is it's hard being lonely in that position feeling like the the only one so if you're the only one that's frustrated at the state of the bins and why can people not put the dirty cold slow containers
(12:24) in the wrong bin you know this type of thing so one get a group of people around you cuz then that's easier so you could you could set up your own sustainability team of people who just want to try and push for that within you first thing you might do is create a business case that you might take to perhaps the senior sponsor that you think is most likely to listen um or you can start by going finding that senior sponsor who you think is most personally engaged and working with them to figure out how to bring the business case to to the
(12:51) leadership team or or to the board um you might also want to build your own skills so increase your own knowledge because then you're going to have more confidence in challenging when these things come up so upscale yourself in sustainability um so I think yeah there's quite there's quite a lot you can do but don't be on your own it's hardest to make change when you're on your own so find a team to work with what do you see the role of senior leaders in in this because there's a skill um there's lots of senior managers
(13:15) that have the role of sponsor but there's very few good sponsors out there because it's it's not clear what sponsor should do it's not a symbolic thing is it they've got to really get behind Haven they oh I mean 100% and it can't be one sponsor either like your sponsor is just your gateway into the key decision makers if they're not already all over this so if the board and the executive team are not leading on sustainability yes you have a problem they need a different mindset so if your
(13:42) leadership are running the organization today the same way they did three or five years ago you're in trouble right because they're not ready they're not ready for AI they're not ready for sustainability your organization probably isn't digital and lean okay so your your your your leaders need to be really aware around what's happening in the world and that includes what's happening in sustainability it's a massive business agenda and they need to be setting themselves ambitious goals
(14:10) and having a strong plan to make sure that the business is still fiable 5 to 10 years from now so if if they don't have that if your leadership doesn't have it no amount of green teams of Volunteers in the business can change anything they might get people putting the right thing in the bin in the canteen you might change away from paper to digital but you're not going to transform the business it's not going to be material to the business so to make material changes to the business the leaders are absolutely essential so yeah
(14:36) you don't need a tokenistic sponsor but you need a strategic sponsor who might be able to get the rest of the the board on and I mean really they'd have to be living on the moon at the moment not to understand that this is business critical it should be popping up on their LinkedIn it should be in every conference they go to it should be a discussion in their I don't know in their rounds of golf with other Business Leaders on a weekend like it should be in their conversation or they're really
(14:58) uh not that tuned in for the majority it is on there it is seen as business critical yeah I think it's I think it's on most people's agenda but I think there's a risk there I think some some are looking at it now as a kind of oh this is a new set of kind of regulations or compliance or legislation that we have to we have to deal with and like we'll just do the bare minimum to be compliant okay do that if you want but you're missing a massive opportunity yeah yes you're evading the risk of
(15:27) getting in trouble for not being compliant but you're missing all of the potential upside of being a sustainable organization so all of the business growth that comes with that all of the Innovation and opportunity you're they're missing yeah I mean I have leaders say to me oh is this just is this sustainability stuff is that is that like that data protection stuff we had to do like is gdpr yeah like gdpr I'm like well no it's about whether or not you have a planet that's viable to run businesses on in you know the next
(15:55) couple of decades so yeah I think there's yeah it can be on your agenda and you're not taking it seriously you can be aware of it and be doing nothing about it you can be aware of it and be just doing lip service to it so you can have a fancy Net Zero statement and nothing have changed and I mean that's the thing for people to look out for if your job is the same as it was last year or two years ago and your company has a big flashy Net Zero or sustainability commitment there's something wrong your
(16:20) job should be changing and you've spent a lot of time in the boardroom haven't you actually sort of presenting two leadership teams and and you've obviously seen the dynamic and how you can work with the Dynamics to make sure that point lands and so what's been some of the things that you do see and what can senior leaders that maybe get it but there's other leaders in there that don't get it and it's even harder when it's the most senior person that doesn't get it what what tactics do you have
(16:44) there to deploy to to try and get those people on board yeah so I think with leaders you've got to be very honest with them around the facts so like the facts around climate change and the risks it posed to to business are very very real and there's so much evidence like you know we could be here talking about facts all day in terms of um the material risks that it poses to business so you have to be clear about that but if you just stay on risks and bad news you lose the room so then it's like okay
(17:10) so those are risks that you know increasingly under new regulation you will have to disclose those risks how your business is at risk to the whole world so that doesn't feel very good so then you need to be able to say well what are we going to do to manage those risks and that's where the action to be more sustainable comes in um and that's an opportunity so that when when companies and leaders look at it in that way they find lots of opportunity another thing I see with leaders and in boards in particular is there tends to
(17:38) be a very small Focus so the focus is on can we make the business the immediate operations of this business more sustainable oh my God this can you hear the dog snoring hang on snoring but um yeah another thing I see with with with leaders is that they think too small so they think thinking about how do they make the operations of their business more sustainable like and what's in IM their immediate gift but what they miss then is they miss out on their influence so all of their suppliers everyone that buys their
(18:13) product or service is in their value chain um they also are a business with a seat at the table on a chamber of commerce perhaps nationally they can even get access to an elected Member of Parliament like they have influence they have access to power they run large organizations and so when you then ask what their role is in not just making their business sustainable but in making Society their Community their City their sector sustainable now you're asking very different questions and that's where the
(18:41) gold comes because that's where you're looking at the influence of the organization and if you have strategically minded board members they should get excited about that so it's a lot of what you I have find myself doing is opening people up to this bigger this bigger uh agenda this bigger opportunity I guess have you got any examples of organizations that you've worked with that have been on the journey so from uh tick boox exercise treated like gdpr to actually this is front and center and it
(19:07) creates value for us on the bottom line but it also makes our work more meaningful for our people as well the the tick the Box people they they don't Su they don't hang around as our clients for long because they they don't continue to invest in sustainability they can think they can do one thing and take the box and disappear right so the the longer term clients people who work with us in the long long term the benefits they reap are around finding the Innovations and the opportunities so if you if you're a business and you are
(19:37) trying to think about how to be more circular as a business and I'm thinking about a particular business here but I won't name them so they're trying to think about how to be more more circular how to bring circular economy more into their business and they're again they're they're thinking small about the operations of their business and the the products they buy and the things they make and the services they provide so that means that they're asking small questions about where they fit in a
(20:00) circular economy then if you if they start to say well how do their goods and services help Society be more circular now they're asking a very different question and when they ask that question and when you're ready to ask that question and you see the opportunity and then you're ready to invest in sustainability not as a box to be ticked every second year but as something which is an is a transformation organizational development project which is ongoing where you're continuously learning challenging revising improving then the
(20:30) business opportunities are massive then you create whole new products and services that drive business value that you never knew were there until you asked the bigger question so what was your journey into doing this work so it's obviously been you know a passion and a career how how did you get started oh so like as a kid I was very infused about it was a so I grew up well I'm a child of the 70s and 80s and it was a time of uh for me it was a time where like whale remember there was the time where the whales were endangered and we
(20:59) were about to obliterate them from the planet and I really cared about animal rights my dad was a geography teacher and the house was full of National Geographic so I had all this like curiosity about the natural world and so when I was coming up to like finishing secondary school with no idea really what I wanted to do um I found I found a course called environmental science and I was like that's it that's the one so I studied environmental science in the University of wer in Northern Ireland and that was the gateway to what I've
(21:25) done literally for the rest of my life in in so many ways but but I've done it in so from so many different directions so I've worked in International Development so I've lived and worked um in Africa for years I've been a an adviser to large organizations like the oecd and the World Bank that took me to Mongolia to work that was fantastic I've worked in research and Academia I've worked advising governments uh as a climate change negotiator uh and then for eight years alongside Mary Robinson in the Mary
(21:58) Robin foundation for climate Justice working on um trying to embed climate Justice in the international processes around climate change human rights and sustainable development and then somehow having gone from all that thought or leadership advisory stuff I I set up a business and now I'm CEO of a business so but it's always been it's always been in this sustainability field and from a very young age really being passionate that the way that we could look after nature wasn't by excluding humans even
(22:29) though we're the cause of the problem but it was that we had to find a way to make humans care as much about their natural environment as they did about the other humans in their life and that it was really around trying to get the two to work in harmony was going to be the long-term answer rather than simply nature nature without humans nature with with humans one being pristine and the other being in very poor shape so um but I think that's really it I I I kind of like looking back over the journey I've
(22:56) been on because when I went to school you were sold a career you you were sold straight Pathways to having a career and there was very clear entry points and education you had to have and I think nowadays luckily that's nonsense and there are many ways in which you can you can weave a career and again if people are passionate about sustainability or climate change you have as much of a role to play on that whether you're a philosopher or an artist a HR professional or a climate scientist you don't just have to be a climate
(23:27) scientist there's a way for every body to be active and influential on these issues regardless of what your talent and skill is when the stakes some when we're really passionate about what we're doing and the stakes are really high what does it take to do that work and kind of be sustainable for yourself and kind of continue to have the passion and the energy to to keep driving yeah so I'm lucky that I have loads of energy but it has a limit like everyone's and this is hard work like when you are
(23:54) confronted by some of the stats and the data and how slow our progress is it can really it can really be full of grief like it's a work in some ways is full of grief because in all the years I've worked on it the problem has got worse so I'm a failure like that's a disaster we're failing every one of us that works on this issue is failing but at the same time I do see the opportunity I really see the potential for human beings to create something better than we've created to date and what's I think a
(24:23) really important point that you touched on there Danny is at the at the essence of everything is we have to have sustainable people people so if You' have an organization with great sustainability goals but everybody in it is burnt out you're it's not going to work so you have to have sustainable people to have a sustainable organization and that's really important for I think the types of people that might be listening to this podcast to know like a focus on sustainable people is at the heart of being able to make a
(24:49) sustainable organization because if people aren't well if they aren't well-looked after if they aren't encouraged to think creatively if they don't have the psychological safety to challenge then the organization won't reach its full potential and therefore will never be be a sustainable organization so looking after yourself finding that balance is important I'm not going to pretend to you that I have found it or gotten near to it but it's where you have to find a few things the things in
(25:16) life that give you Joy and like that's where for me the sea swimming comes in not for endurance or to test myself but because it makes me feel good and it's good for my mental health and it's the best stress reliever I've come up with and and that's where nature is our friend I mean I know no better stress reliever than than nature so if you want a reason to care about nature it's self-interest you know it helps us all regulate helps us all feel happier I was going to say swimming in the ant
(25:40) Atlantic Ocean in winter off this off the coast of cork it's going to take your mind off things is it does yes completely and one of the things in your career that we didn't because your introduction like we we edited it right down one of the things that you do is your co- facilitator of the structured expert dialogue uh for United Nations framework so that's the ability to hold dialogue with people with opposing views and actually be able to get people that potentially feel very passionate or defensive or that and then to engage in
(26:12) conversation what are some of the lessons you've learned along the way around that how can you hold spaces where people can talk about things that really matter I think it's not as easy is it as it sounds sometimes to get people talking and I think particularly when the disciplines are very different so every each discipline every sector has its own acronyms and lingo and they're completely exclusionary of everybody else because nobody know nobody else understands that language if you're not in that group you don't
(26:39) understand and climate change is one of the worst areas for this so the climate change negociations take place in this like legal e language with a thousand And1 acronyms and it's all very technical and complicated and all that does is exclude people from it in for example this um science policy Dialogue on under the climate change convention that I was involved in for a few years you were getting policy makers so the people who are trying to decide these are civil servants right civil servants in a country trying to decide well what
(27:09) is it this that this climate science is telling me what do I need to change in the way we develop policies where do we need to invest money what do we need to start doing what do we need to stop doing they need to know that and the scientists have all these have all this research and data and projections of the future around which they have great certainty now and scenarios that they've run and so they can answer these really important questions that the policy makers about how should I plan for the future what should I what should I
(27:37) invest in what should I not but because they speak two completely different languages they don't understand each other so it is sometimes as simple as being a creating different spaces safer spaces where maybe you don't have to stick up your hand in a big theater of theater room of people to ask the guy on the panel up there the question cuz how intimidating is that but what if you create smaller spaces smaller circles where people can ask their questions in a way where they're not going to feel so
(28:05) silly for asking their question and where if they don't understand they can ask again for it to be explained or where you set out the rules within that room where you say this is an acronym pre Zone and everybody is allowed you have to speak as if you're speaking to an 11y old everybody speaks as as though they're speaking to 11y Old so there's no acronyms and it's not because acronyms do not make you clever they just exclude other people from understanding what you're on about so I think the way we design conversations is
(28:33) really important when I worked in the Mary Robinson Foundation we brought a lot of Grassroots women into the formal un negotiations on climate change and that there we had to insist on this if the negotiators and the ministers came into a room with these grassroot women leaders and they spoke in their un mumbo jumbo the women would have been totally excluded from the conversation so they had to speak in English but then they also had to respect the fact that these women communicated through stories so they didn't communicate through four
(29:03) bullets on a on a PowerPoint slide they don't don't they don't talk like that they tell you a story so you need to respect the process take the time and listen to the story that's what and and that's the rule of entering into the space if you don't have time to listen to someone else's story that's completely different to you then don't come in the room but if you come in the room then these are the terms and conditions under which you you you enter so I think we could do so much more on
(29:28) that even within businesses thinking how Finance speaks a different language to HR speaks a different language to the people who work down in operations or run a plant so um you know again creating the spaces and the rules and bringing people together in smaller safe places I think really works you're an honorary organization development practitioner did you know that you are officially anointed absolutely and I I guess one of the things that you're really focusing on the moment uh with your organization
(29:59) is to make it super practical for people you know and so you invested in a tech platform and developing really practical courses for people to can you just tell a little bit more about that's okay oh I would love to yeah so we um we've created a an online platform to help people interact with us and build skills but also get inspired and motivated to take action um in their own life and most particularly at work and so uh the the platform is about one year old now so it does lots of things so at the
(30:32) moment you can go in there and you can learn about how to be a sustainability leader or you can get all of your all of your organization learning the fundamentals of sustainability through a sustainability 101 and you can get them gamified competing with each other to see who can take most actions that benefit people on the planet all this kind of stuff or you can come in and and and learn about HR so you can come in and say okay I'm a HR professional what do I need to know to be a sustainable Human Resource Management professional
(31:01) and so there's a course for you two hours knock yourself out you're going to know all the key things you need to know about how to integrate sustainability into the employee life cycle and figure out how it fits into strategic HR we've went for procurement we have other great things that you can learn like for green teams so lots of green teams are very unsuccessful because they're groups of volunteers with no CLE clear mandate or Charter or purpose no tools nothing to help them so uh a one hour how to run a
(31:30) successful green team gets you everything you need to know to make your green team more successful so we're really trying to make it accessible and action oriented and Uber practical like so so so practical you will learn how to do things not just Theory with us and then in this year what we're building is we're building the community around our platform so that if you're the lonely Soul person in your organization who understands that HR needs to be doing more about sustainability come through
(31:56) our platform and meet other likemind people share your story hear their story because it can be lonely doing this this is hard work to do it's really hard work so you need support and we hope then that by building the community and allowing people to tell their sh stories and share their stories I'm a big believer in the power of stories so although I come from a science background there are very few people who are moved by a graph but people are moved by story so if we can help people create a space for people can hear
(32:23) stories we create stories and then they tell their own stories I hope we can kind of get things moving a little bit faster anybody can check us out hopefully it's in the show notes it it absolutely will be and it's and it's really worth exploring isn't it on the site so what's the link for people to go to www. changeby degrees.
(32:40) com easy you do so much bits of your the work that you do really bring you Joy what do you do you enjoy most I love it when you see the little so I love if I if it's something that I'm doing live like this even with a room online I love seeing the little moments of light bulb moments when when people get it when they go oh there's something in this sustainability thing for me I belong in it so I I love that and I love it I love now when we're using something that's online for people so it allows us to reach way more people
(33:11) than we can you know talking to everybody one by one or going into rooms with them but where you get the feedback that people have you know not just done like not just used our platform to build their skills but built their own skills and used it as a way of bringing their team together their organization together to use the learning to change things in their organization and when they come back and they say we never we never thought about it this way before but now that we've learned this and sat down as a team and thought about it we
(33:38) found X Y and Z opportunity and X and Y risk that we're now managing better so it's all around the impact when people take what they what they learn and start to feel empowered and like oh it can make a difference I think that's my that's my favorite part right and what what do you find most challenging being a CEO I'm a scientist you know I didn't I didn't do business studies for you know o levels or a levels uh so I I I you know you get a little bit of impostor syndrome being the CEO of a business
(34:12) when you know you never you never there was nothing you ever learned about um it's it's not what I ever imagined myself at you know scientists it's this weird thing where if you study science nobody ever really equips you for for the fact that you could run your own business that you you know that you could run a social Enterprise that you could be a bore company all of you just never well in my day anyway you weren't brought up with that as being a um a possibility so yeah that that's my area
(34:39) of learning right now is how to run a successful business how to raise investment how to grow into new markets it's all really really exciting and I think for me the excitement of that is is because we're an impact driven business I want more people in more organizations to be you know making change so that their organization becomes sustainable and so the exciting part about the business is the fact that it can help us to get our message and bring so many more people into the conversation but yeah I guess I'll still
(35:09) feel like an imposter of a CEO uh 5 years from now even though I have learned a lot more so leveraging the fact that you have two one foot in both worlds so on one foot you are the person who's advocating For A Cause towards the CE and on the other foot you are the CEO so and like many CEOs you've got a lot of priorities there's so much to do not enough time to do it and you have a team around you so when your team come to you with a proposal what what is the right way for them or the optimal way for them
(35:38) to come to you and say look I've got this idea I really want you to I need a lot of things on what what what how can people present it in a way that it does get the CEO's attention and it can get acted on yeah so I'm always impressed like I'm really some CEOs aren't I'm really impressed by creativity so and someone who has taken the time to question the way you've always done something and say well maybe there's a better way to do it or a faster way or a cheaper way or a more impactful way or
(36:04) what about instead of thinking it like this we thought about it like this so I think creativity is a great way to to get my attention um uh yeah if I can save us money or bring us new business so like I'm also interested in ideas that can help us break into new markets so change by degrees is expanding into the UK in 2025 so anybody who came to me with an idea that was concrete about how to make our cont I'm more relevant to a UK Market I'd be I'd be all years so I guess it depends on the the the point in
(36:33) time but again that's a creativity thing it's your it's making sure that your employees have enough confidence to know that they should be and you want them to be having new ideas you want them to be questioning and I think to do that and this is something I talk a lot to to to boards about as well is to do that you have to give permission to get things wrong so they have to give this permission to fail so there is no 100% sustainable business out there in the world it doesn't exist we don't know how
(37:02) to be fully sustainable as businesses but the only way we're going to get there is by Innovation trying and failing so if you're a company and you're not you're not failing in some point it means you're not trying hard enough so and creating an atmosphere in your organization where you say it's okay if you make a mistake but let's learn quickly from it let's not waste a lot of money and time on it and let's move on to the next thing but yeah take we have are going to have to take risks
(37:29) if we're going to change so I want to create an atmosphere in our business whereby we can experiment take risks learn fast because I think that's how we'll innovate and that's how we'll have more impact question for you so you're a social Enterprise which means you've got you know got a particular Outlook in a particular how challenging has it been to get investment and find the right kind of investors to support your organization as a social Enterprise so the social Enterprise Title is a is a
(37:53) tricky one some for in some geographies it's well understood and it's very attractive to people in other geographies it's poorly understood and people think you're a charity and you'll work for them for free so that's a problem in terms so I think possibly we lean more into being a bore company now so again what it is really a social Enterprise you're about creating benefits for society and that's what bore is all about too and has the added value that we've been externally
(38:19) verified as being this type of company I think we should be so we've we've proven to be attractive to investors because we have this strong purpose and because we have paid attention to the way we show up in the world across these different pillars from how we treat our employees the impact we have on our clients how we look after the environment how we look after the communities that we operate in how we're governed and the legal form of the business we have yeah so like all of that is attractive it's almost like by
(38:51) being a bore or a sustainable Enterprise that you've done a lot of the the due diligence already for an invest before they come in and so you should be less risk and more attractive and then if they're looking to the world and how it's evolving it's clear that these are the types of businesses that will be around 5 10 15 years from now um and again lots of research coming through from bore Europe research around the fact that bore companies are more financially viable they're attracting retaining more staff they're getting
(39:25) attracting higher levels investment than they're not be core counterparts there's a lot of evidence to show that it it makes strong business sense and it's it's a strategic move for your business and I guess you're really clear and upfront about what you stand for and you attract investors who who get that as well it attracts investors it attracts employees so that's amazing so there's a real you know there's a real lack of talent out there at the moment and but people want to work for companies like
(39:51) ours they want to work for a company with a clear sense of purpose and where they know why they're showing up for work every day and what the benefit of that is is going to be and increasingly then it's going to attract customers and clients because they want to be associated with they want their brand to be aligned with other brands in their supply chain who who hold the same values as they do so yeah we we want we tie our reputation to our clients when we put our two Brands together but likewise they do that with us and that's
(40:19) an important relationship all of the different things you've done from and we've actually learned today before the call started that you've actually done expeditions to Borneo and to West Africa and places like that as well you've done so many things what have been some of the biggest lessons you've learned along the way oh one of the biggest lessons goes right back to when I was living in morania for three years so morania is a vast country two and a half times the size of France in West Africa between
(40:46) Morocco and Sagal but you probably never seen it on a map um three 80% of it is Sahara Desert and I lived there for for 3 years and it was a an amazing learning experience and ALS Al a very humbling experience because people defined wealth and well-being in a completely different way than we do in Western culture there and I was also very welcomed by a very different culture who put up with me being uh a rule breaking young Irish woman who was like running around sticking her head under every Rock and interested in everything but one of the
(41:17) things I learned there was was humility because I was working in these in these wetlands and what turned out to be collecting the data for what turned out to be my PhD and and uh local people local people hurting goats local women collecting wild plants for medicines told me that there were crocodiles living in these wetlands and I was like oh bless you're wrong all the books say there are no crocodiles here the crocodiles were hunted out of here years ago there is no documentation of crocodiles in this country they're gone
(41:51) and I think it must to be a monitor lizard and they were like Tara we know the difference between a monitor lizard and a crocodile then they're like this is is the local name and it has a long mouth and lots of teeth and whatever and so I finally listened and uh I camped out on a rock for three nights uh in this place where dbah who worked with me told me to go and sure enough on the third night uh crocodile came out from a a cave onto a dry riverbed that hadn't had water in it for over a year and sat
(42:20) there like some prehistoric creature and of course they were right why would they not be right so like why would they right so science is not always right you know um and the humility to to listen to people who are not the experts but who have lived knowledge who have real experience is really important and you might find that in work in that some of the best ideas for sustainability action might come from an operator who works down the back of the plant but knows that Machinery inside out um and I heard of a story recently the other day where
(42:55) one valve one change to one valve changed the comp sh save the company €200,000 a year in energy Oneal the person who will know that will not be an engineer sitting in an office it will be the person with the lived experience of working every day with the machinery and so if we don't have the humility to listen to the people who who know all of this we will miss opportunities and we will get things wrong so and I just think there's so many ways like humility that was an exercise in humility it was an exercise in listening really
(43:25) listening to people giving them my time I'm taking the time to actually go and figure it out but I would have missed an amazing thing which was then a whole journey of Discovery I went on with these crocodiles if if I hadn't listened if I just written it off if there's somebody who sat here thinking this sounds like a fascinating career I want to's footsteps where did people start what advice would you give people so I always say that people should follow their passion so if you want to work and
(43:51) play a part in making the world a better place because you care about the environment or you care about people or you care more you care about animals I think the the starting place is is that you don't have to be an environmental scientist to do that you don't have to be a climate scientist you there are so many Pathways to it you might do that because you love art and you might connect people to those issues through your art or you might be a musician you might be a philosopher you might be a chemical engineer I mean you might be a
(44:17) HR professional but if it is if you do care about this stuff you can bring it in with the talents that you have but I I think the worst thing you can do is pick something to study because you think it might be the thing you have to do to get a certain career I None of the jobs I've done in my entire life were invented when I was in school none of them even when I was in college they hadn't really been invented so this notion that you're kind of picking your career and going for it I think is a total load of nonsense but what if you
(44:46) if you pursue jobs and study that is around issues that you love and you're passionate about well I just don't think you can go wrong um and that will bring you work brilliant well I want to say a huge thank you Tara it's been a really inspiring conversation if people want to follow your work if they want to keep up to date with your insights and also you know to learn more about the course what's the best way for people to to stay in touch with you yeah so probably LinkedIn so follow change by degrees and
(45:14) myself tar shine and Linkedin I'd say that's the best way there's so many different takeaways Danny what are you taking away from today's conversation where to start I think the thing is really sticking me we need sustainable people to have sustainable organization so loud and clear really on board with that the fact that you know doing doing something is better than doing nothing just start somewhere and I really enjoy the Practical tips he gave for people just to kind of get going and kind of
(45:36) make a difference in the way that they can yeah I think some of the things that stood out for me is don't be the lone nut it's just there's a very seductive invitation for HR to be the sole Ambassador for this but you have to recruit other people onto the mission don't you and you need that support and you need to have the courage to ask the senior people and you need to be explicit about what you ask need for them as well I think there there's some really good practical tips and everything that you shared with us in
(46:01) the service of sustainability can actually be just transferred to other change projects as well but what we really want people to do is take away from this is you know get involved in the sustainability programs in your organization make it your business insert yourself into and people people have inherent skills to make this work that others don't so really s off that invitation um any final thoughts you want people leave people with today Tara yeah just I would say look if if this convers ation has made you more curious
(46:29) about sustainability and what you can do then do come onto our website and change by degrees because we have a fabulous new course that we created with kite insights on sustainable Human Resource Management that's the one I mentioned earlier it's just two hours long really interactive super practical um but build those skills and then you will be able and more confident to integrate sustainability into every step of the employee life cycle but also turn up at that strategic decision- making table and be able to be the voice for the
(46:59) social uh side of sustainability and really advocating for it as a as a as a change process so I can send you all the links so people can find that easily please do and all of everything that Tes talked about today will be in the show notes so please go forward and check that out as well thank you so much it's been a brilliant conversation we've really enjoyed it it's been great thank you so much for your time we know how busy you are so happy 20125 yes [Music] he [Music]