An executive team of a facility service company was enabled to reposition sustainability as a strategic advantage. Through tailored workshops combining the latest knowledge and strategic conversations, the leaders gained an updated vocabulary to meet new customer and regulatory demands with confidence. The workshops and collaboration with Mannaz also created a shared foundation for scaling sustainable solutions across the business.
A wellestablished facility service company in Denmark, specialising in cleaning, property, and damage restoration services, experienced a need for increased sustainability focus to maintain their competitiveness.
The company was already following well-established and recognised sustainability standard but as the regulatory landscape had changed, so had their customers’ demands. An increased expectation was emerging for the company to not only deliver services but to advice and co-create solutions for the bidding phase and when finding new solutions as part of the operation at the customers’ sites.
To increase their fluency in the different sustainability standards, the company approached Mannaz seeking workshops for the management team, including the executive leaders from finance, administration, operations, and sales. The goal was to strengthen their leadership-level understanding of sustainability. This would enable them to lead pilot projects and implement strategic initiatives with suppliers and customers.
We designed 2 x 1-day, tailored workshops to strengthen the managers’ understanding of core sustainability concepts. We covered EU reporting standards and requirements, bestpractice guidance for avoiding greenwashing, and practical approaches to embedding sustainability across an organisation.
Throughout all topics, the workshops were designed to familiarise with sustainability languages of both customers, authorities and partners. The sessions were highly interactive, creating space for the managers to reflect on their own experiences, needs, and key drivers.
As an example, we investigated what primarily drives the demand for sustainability among their customers. As we covered the EU regulations, we discussed how the reporting obligations of the customers would shape their expectations of suppliers and how this influenced the positioning of their company. Furthermore, we discussed examples of what their competitors are doing in this space.
The workshops were designed to be cost-effective, mixing content from existing Mannaz courses and combining it with the right conversations to match the need of the management team.
As a result, the management team was not only equipped with the updated regulatory standards and ratings, and comfortable in entering customer dialogues. They were also updated on the projects already underway across the business. These projects both strengthened the company’s own sustainability performance and helped customers onsite to succeed with their sustainability targets.
By sharing customer pilot projects and discussing the related challenges, opportunities, and benefits, the management team reached a common understanding and foundation. This made it easier to scale the projects to other customers.
In this way, the workshops created a common ground for the management team to support each other in executing initiatives across the business and scale solutions to defend and increase their competitive position.
