BrazilHow Möbius helped Barco build its Sustainable Impact Programme
Sustainability efforts can often be hampered by cultural hang-ups, such as the belief that sustainable business practices reduce business performance levels. As a result, cultural change was at the heart of a sustainability change programme which consultancy Möbius designed for technology firm Barco.
Founded in 1997, international business consulting network Möbius works with clients across Europe to help businesses realise their transformation plans. Headquartered in Belgium, the firm also has offices in France, the Netherlands and the UK. One recent engagement has seen the consultancy work with technology company Barco to fully integrate sustainability into its corporate DNA.
Barco is a technology firm which focuses on the enterprise, healthcare and entertainment markets, working to develop collaboration solutions to help professionals work together, share information, and project images in cinemas and elsewhere. In the last few years, the Belgian-origin company’s strategic focus and efforts have increasingly shifted towards sustainability. In an effort to further strengthen these commitments, Möbius was asked to assist Barco to start building an air-tight sustainability programme, which could deliver business value to boot.
The transformation programme was built around Möbius’ four-step criteria for change management. These are a clear sustainability strategy, translating the sustainability strategy into key targets, seeing programmes driven by senior leadership and middle management, and remembering that the purpose and return on investment of a sustainability programme is identified and clearly understood within the organisation.
One of the most important success factors for any change management initiative is to focus on a limited number of key domains. First, Möbius worked with Barco to whittle its goals down to three material challenges to benchmark: planet (climate change and circular economy), people (diversity and development) and communities (community engagement and business ethics). In order to ensure these targets could then be acted upon, Möbius introduced tools and principles to ensure effective commitment to the project.
Mathias Fahy, a sustainability and circular economy consultant at Möbius explained, “We installed clear objectives on KPIs across several core domains… to track and report sustainability progress. For example: Barco cooperated with CO2Logic to consistently measure and manage its environmental impact within the programme. In order to deliver on the identified objectives, we helped Barco in translating key priority domains to tangible projects ranging from smaller over medium-sized to bigger ones... Finally, we started to build a clear governance structure at both the directive and executive level to ensure proper programme management.”
Circular thinking
Change management programmes hinge upon a successful adoption of cultural change, often even more so in sustainability programmes. This is because sustainability is often wrongfully thought of as a sacrifice of performance or competitiveness, rather than an opportunity to innovate and streamline. As a result, special attention was given to introducing key principles of the circular economy, a business and sustainability framework ideally suited to hi-tech value chains, with a mix of different tools deployed to translate this concept to Barco’s world, ranging from serious gaming.
Overall, the project provided Barco with some effective tools and insights, according to Fahy. He also revealed that Möbius trained and inspired more than 200 employees in key sustainability topics such as circular economy, green logistics and sustainable procurement, while the whole programme and strategy commitment was supported and underpinned by a sustainability progress report.
Fahy concluded; “They can now rely on healthy fundamentals to advance their sustainability programme with key initiatives defined across all relevant domains (planet, people and communities), and a clear carbon reduction roadmap towards -20% in 2020 with a 1-year carbon emissions reduction of 15% (relatively) across the supply chain.”
