Our Work

We bring together strategic consultancy and communications skill to tell our clients’ sustainability stories in the most impactful way.

Our sustainability strategy work helps clients prioritise the material areas to focus on, manage risk and opportunity, and align commercial success with making a positive impact.

We then create and deliver corporate narratives that are aligned with sustainability action on the ground, guarding against the risk of green washing.

For insight into our recent work - scroll down.

Building a sustainability strategy to drive commercial success.

Background

In early 2022 Arco, the UK’s leading safety products and solutions company, commissioned Just Communications to review and refresh its sustainability strategy and approach. A year-long partnership has seen Just Communications work with Arco to put in place a new sustainability strategy, narrative, and organisational structure. The new approach is now being operationalised throughout the business to deliver more sustainable ways of working, secure new green growth opportunities, and deliver greater commercial success.

Arco is the UK’s leading expert in safety products, services and solutions with revenue of over £300mln. Its reputation for delivering the highest standards in safety means that the UK’s largest organisations from the NHS to BT rely on Arco to keep their people safe at work every day. Arco’s head office, distribution, quality testing and retail operations in the UK employ 1,600 people who work with a global supply chain.

The challenge

At the beginning of 2022, a number of sustainability initiatives were already underway at Arco. Progress was being made on reducing Scope 1 and 2 emissions, there was an excellent track record supporting the communities in which Arco operates, and a sector leading approach to ensuring ethical trading in its supply chain. Arco had also taken action to back an innovative start-up, Stuff4Life, that is developing a circular system for raw materials used to make safety work-wear. 

While these programs were delivering positive results there was an ambition amongst the leadership team to;

-       develop a more holistic strategy and approach,

-       embed sustainability across Arco’s way of working, and,

-       articulate the sustainability story more clearly to all stakeholders.

“The Just Communications team has been a pleasure to work with throughout. They not only bring expert knowledge of sustainability and ESG issues, but also a commercial awareness that sets them apart. We are already benefiting from their work in terms of the sustainability leadership we can now offer to customers, colleagues and suppliers. With a clear and compelling sustainability strategy in place we are looking at every business process and behaviour through this lens which is  creating positive outcomes for our people, customers, suppliers, communities and ultimately the planet.”

 — Jim Harbidge, Head of Sustainability, Arco Ltd

Discovery phase

The project commenced with a gap analysis of Arco’s sustainability performance and positioning compared to sector peers and best practice. This included a desktop exercise to review all Arco’s existing initiatives, policies and processes, and how this activity was being communicated to stakeholders.

A materiality audit was then completed in collaboration with Fit For Purpose Consulting to gain a clear perspective of stakeholders’ views and expectations of Arco in relation to various aspects of sustainability. Using qualitative and quantitative research techniques we asked customers, suppliers, employees, community groups and industry experts about:

-       their level of familiarity with Arco

-       how they view Arco’s current sustainability strategy and activity, and,

-       to rank by importance a set of material issues covering governance, social impact, environmental impact and workplace.

Working with Arco’s leadership team we cross-referenced the stakeholders’ most important material issues with the issues where the company believes it can have most impact. From this a Materiality Grid was created to guide Arco’s priority sustainability areas.

“Just Communications’ collaborative approach to the whole project has been the highlight for me. Whether working with the Board or front-line teams the experience has always been positive and highly productive. That has ignited a real enthusiasm in the business to now make sustainability core to everything we do.”

 

—  Jim Harbidge, Head of Sustainability, Arco Ltd

Strategy and target setting

Armed with the gap-analysis and materiality research a series of workshops were held with teams selected from the business. These workshops established the level of ambition across key areas, explored the barriers to overcome and the opportunities to grasp in order to deliver, and built a targets framework to measure progress.

Narrative and launch

A refreshed sustainability narrative was developed under the proposition of ‘A safe tomorrow’. Beneath this overarching narrative three pillars were defined:

-       Safe Business – working to provide customers with sustainable solutions,

-       Safe People – delivering social value for people across every community touched by Arco      

-       Safe Planet – tackling climate change by reducing carbon and waste

This new strategy was launched to the market through an ‘Approach to Sustainability’ report and new website pages that outlined the approach to all stakeholders.

Looking ahead

Just Communications continues to work with Arco to advise on the team structure, processes and behaviours that will see the strategy implemented. As a result sustainability is becoming embedded in Arco’s operating model and driving positive environmental and social impact in the years ahead.