In 2014 Hill+Knowlton Strategies unveiled its first U.S. sustainability report with two quantitative surveys – one for employees and one for clients – to learn about what issues those audiences wanted H+K to focus its sustainability efforts on and how they want that information conveyed publicly.

The results showed that H+K environmental footprint is of high interest to both audiences. Consider:

  • 96 percent of employees said they believe it is important to report on recycling and e-waste in company offices;
  • 94 percent of employees believe the firm should track and report waste management practices in offices;
  • 55 percent of clients believe it is “Very Important” to report on energy consumed in company offices; and
  • 53 percent of clients believe it is “Very Important” to report on recycling efforts in company offices.

Armed with that knowledge, the team developing the report began working with the finance department to learn more about the firm’s consumption of energy-intensive resources such as air travel, electricity, paper and water.

The initial assumption was that collecting much of that data would be fairly straightforward. Over the last five years, H+K and its employees have become much more conscious of the environmental footprint of the firm, and a number of efforts were put in place to reduce consumption of paper, electricity, water and so on.

For example, many offices established "Green Teams" where groups of H+K employees work to educate colleagues on ways to reduce consumption and improve the environmental performance of the office.

However, the team developing the sustainability report quickly realized there was not an overarching process across offices that allowed data to be collected and measured in a consistent manner. As a result, while we knew H+K was making strides to improve its environmental performance, we really had no way of knowing the effectiveness of those efforts.

More important, the lack of consistent data made it impossible to establish benchmarks by which we could monitor future performance and, ideally, set goals to help us further reduce our energy consumption.

At that point, we faced a fairly significant decision: H+K could either invest a great deal of time establishing a process to measure environmental performance, or we could find a team of experts to help us solve this challenge. With the firm's leadership, we opted for the latter course and enrolled in Environmental Defense Fund’s Climate Corps program.

According to managing director Victoria Mills, "EDF Climate Corps transforms the way organizations use energy by pairing fellows—top graduate students from the nation’s leading universities—with companies, cities, schools and public institutions to identify, measure and implement high-value ways to save energy, carbon emissions and money."

H+K was familiar with the EDF Climate Corps program, having represented it over the years. Similar to most every participant in EDF Climate Corps, we wanted to not only reduce our environmental footprint but also use the efficiencies from doing so to save money. The expectation is that the reduced consumption of overhead expenses such as paper, water and electricity will result in cost savings for H+K U.S.

This belief gets to the core of our own sustainability work with clients: If done purposefully, operating a business in a sustainable way – including an environmentally sustainable way – will have a positive impact on a company’s bottom line.

In recent weeks, H+K has been working with EDF to establish the type of fellow best suited for our needs, and some of our larger offices have begun the process of thinking through what information can be shared when the fellow arrives in summer 2015.

Without a doubt, there will be plenty of challenges in this process, but we are confident measures can be put in place to improve both H+K's environmental footprint and its bottom line. We will continue to report on the progress of this effort in the coming months.

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Robert Ludke is executive VP in charge of governance & sustainability at Hill+Knowlton Strategies.