Defining Long, Medium, and Short-Term Sustainability Goals
Start with the long-term goals – these are the ones that are going to take the longest to achieve, or the most work; they’re the ones that will tend to need to be broken down into pieces so they can be accomplished.
Long-term goals might be to:
- Become carbon neutral or carbon negative by 2030
- Have 100% renewable energy usage across the business
- Use only sustainable materials in product supply chain and manufacture
- Work only with suppliers and businesses that have proven sustainable practices
- Improve the local community with education sponsorship and funding
- Create a new product manufacturing process that reduces wastage
As you can imagine, all of these elements have a lot of different parts to address before they can be achieved – and breaking them down gives you medium and short-term goals that are directly focused on achieving your overarching aim.
Medium-term goals are ones that may take a year of more to come to fruition. Strategically, medium-term goals are actually quite difficult to achieve, mainly because any delays or changes in short-term strategy or direction can heavily influence whether they remain relevant or applicable.
It’s important to be flexible with your planning, because you might find that some of the medium goals are absorbed into other projects, become obsolete, or need to be reworked due to difficulties.
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Examples of medium-term goals might include:
- Sourcing and implementing renewable energy into X-number of sites by X-Date
- Replacing company cars with Electric Vehicles (EV) when they are due to be changed out
- Upgrading office space with eco-friendly lighting, fixtures, and fittings on the next update
- Evaluating processes put in place over quarterly and yearly basis for KPIs and data
Again, once you’ve got your medium-goals, you split them up – and get even more short-term goals, which you’ll need to achieve to make them happen.
Your short-term goals don’t have to just come from long and medium targets – there may be goals or things that you want to achieve, that are self-contained and yet pretty simple – so don’t forget to include these as well, as long as they offer value to the company in some form.
Some short term goals that you may aim for could be:
- Reducing electric usage in offices
- Becoming a paper-free company
- Reducing carbon emissions with online meetings rather than in person
- Setting up recycling in the office
There’s plenty that you can do, in order to make a start or push your sustainable practices forward – by breaking it up into parts, you can make it more manageable and truly get started right now.