Top 10 mistakes to avoid when measuring your environmental performance

Top 10 mistakes to avoid when measuring your

environmental performance
Effective ongoing measurement of your
10 mistakes to avoid
environmental performance is the foundation for 1. Not setting clear goals.
improving your bottom line, your reputation and 2. Biting off more than you can
your environmental impact, regardless of chew.
whether you're a small company with one or two 3. Sweating the small stuff.
sites or a large national organisation managing 4. Confusing campaigns or
hundreds of facilities. Too often, organisations engineering projects with ongoing
come unstuck when trying to reliably measure measurement.
and report their performance. 5. Confusing ownership with 'doing
it all yourself'.
The good news is that there are a few key 6. Not planning for change.
mistakes that cause failure and they can be 7. Inconsistency.
recognised and avoided. We got together at 8. Treating software as a panacea.
Planet Footprint to describe the top 10 mistakes 9. Compromising on independence.
that we regularly see organisations make. 10. Not progressing past
measurement, or diving into
action.

Mistake 1. Not setting clear

goals
Too often the goal of measurement and reporting becomes just that: measurement and reporting.
There is a great risk that your environmental reporting becomes just one more administrative task
for your staff to complete. The result is that they either won't do it well or won't do it at all. The
best way to ensure against this is to set performance improvement goals and measure only the
things that help you reach those goals.

Examples of business goals include setting improvement targets for individual properties or
divisions, or requiring that managers explain reported anomalies in consumption or charges for
energy and water. Setting goals helps you get and keep the attention of property managers and
other staff.
Environmental reporting
Large organisations, including government, are particularly becomes just one more painful
prone to making this mistake because they are often administrative task for your staff
driven by compliance. Even if your main reason for to complete.
reporting is compliance, the attentiveness you generate by
having even a few simple business goals gives you more complete, timely and accurate
compliance reports. If your staff are interested in what is being reported they will make more
effort and the results will be more complete and accurate.

Some symptoms of not setting goals are:

o Meetings devolving into a discussion of 'What does sustainability mean anyway?'
o Having Key Performance Indicators that are even more vague than those of the Human
Resources department.
o Including 'improved environmental performance measurement and reporting' as an outcome
of your project. (Life's a circle).

Lack of goals is a main contributor to the second biggest mistake ...

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 Top 10 mistakes to avoid when measuring your environmental performance

Mistake 2. Biting off more than you can chew

Many organisations embark on over-ambitious measurement and reporting regimes. The result is
usually that the project gets bogged down in the design phase because stakeholders can't agree
on the what, how, when of the measurements. If the system ever gets implemented it often fails
soon after because staff don't have the time or confidence to complete their tasks.

It's better to have a simple system that works reliably than a complicated one that doesn't
work at all. That doesn't mean the system will be so simple as to not be useful. There are
outsourced measurement and reporting services that can provide comprehensive and relevant
information much more efficiently than can be achieved using internal staffing.

Remember, the goal of any reporting system is to alert you to problems and opportunities and
make better and quicker decisions to overcome or capitalise on them. Even if you are ambitious
about the range and depth of issues that you want covered it still pays to start off simple. People
in your organisation will accept incremental improvements to a simple system that's already
running smoothly because they will trust that you aren't wasting their time.

Some symptom of "biting off more than you can chew" are:
o Remaining in the 'design' phase, even after several rounds of committee and management
meetings.
o Overhearing someone calling you to Kevin Costner and referring to your project as
'Waterworld'.
o Requiring daily or weekly data gathering and reporting, when monthly, quarterly or even
yearly data would be just as effective
o Complex data gathering and reporting templates that no-one completes.
o Out-of-date environmental reports on your intranet or internet site.

Mistake 3. Sweating the small stuff

No matter how well you've designed your measurement regime there will be times when you can't
get all the data or you can't get it on time. A common mistake that environmental professionals
make is to stop everything and dedicate all resources to rectifying the problem. This is akin to a
company refusing to release quarterly profit figures because there's a box of pencils
missing from the stationery cupboard. The flow of information to decision-makers stops and
stakeholders lose confidence in the reporting regime.

A colleague sums it up well, if not too elegantly. "Too many people are hung up on measuring
the greenhouse impact of a cockroach farting in the corner of their office, while ignoring that their
HVAC system is left on all weekend".

If there is a problem, spend a little time considering whether the problem really matters before
you hit the panic button. (In compliance speak, they call this materiality). Is it worth missing out
on all the other useful outputs of your system just because a few pieces of data are missing? It
is important to address problems but it's vital to understand that, especially when it comes to the
completeness of large data sets, there are diminishing marginal returns. Trying to collect the last
2% of missing data can take a lot of time, has no guaranteed outcome, and probably has little
effect on the accuracy of your reporting or the soundness of the management decisions you base
on it. It's also useful to keep in mind that some problems are solved more easily with the
passage of time.

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 Top 10 mistakes to avoid when measuring your environmental performance

Good environmental scorekeeping means being transparent about completeness and

accuracy, and involves making sensible estimates to cover missing data.

Some symptoms of sweating the small stuff are:

o Being told you are solely responsible for holding up the publication of the annual report
o Missing lunch because you haven't finished counting your paper clips.
o Perfectly measuring the electricity consumption of your head office but then completely
forgetting to measure your regional offices at all.

Mistake 4. Confusing campaigns or engineering projects with

ongoing measurement
Energy and water audits, engineering assessments and behavioral campaigns are great ways to
improve environmental performance, but they don't provide fundamental ongoing measurement.
Even small organisations must monitor performance independently of individual campaigns and
projects in order to ensure that equipment is maintained and that improved staff procedures are
sustained. Large organisations have the added challenge of understanding the relative
performance of dozens or hundreds of assets or properties.

Some symptoms of confusing campaigns or engineering projects with ongoing measurement are:
o Having interval meter electricity data for your swimming pool, but no information about how
the pool performs overall.
o Having data for a few interesting properties over a short period of time but having no idea
what's going on overall.
o Not being able to easily ascertain the financial implications of asset performance
o Being told that you're saving $583.67 on your yearly office electricity only to discover by
accident that you're paying $2,500 per year in water due to a leaking pipe.

Mistake 5. Confusing ownership with 'doing it all yourself'

Owning and improving your environmental performance does not mean having to do every little
thing yourself. Measuring performance in particular can be very time consuming and harrowing,
leaving little time or energy for actually improving what you measure. Some organisations hire
and manage temporary staff to key in data from reams of paper invoices into software developed
by their engineer in his spare time, believing that this helps them keep ownership. In fact, it does
the opposite. They spend a lot of time managing the temps and the developer, and very rarely do
either leave sufficient documentation for the system to survive in their absence.

In the past you may have done this because the only alternatives were to trust contractors to
verify their results or to engage expensive consultants to do one-off 'inventories' of issues such as
energy, water and greenhouse. This has now changed. These days even small organisations
can afford to outsource their environmental scorekeeping. They own the results and have
more time to act on them to improve performance and reduce costs. It's really no different
to outsourcing your book-keeping so you have more time for planning and managing finances.

Some symptoms of confusing ownership with 'doing it all yourself' are:

o Archive boxes full of electricity, gas and water invoices under your desk
o Attending meetings where people talk about 'XML' and 'CSV' with an evangelical look in their
eyes
o Humming the on-hold music of your electricity, gas or water retailer during your lunch break.

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 Top 10 mistakes to avoid when measuring your environmental performance

Mistake 6. Not planning for change

These common changes are sure to affect your environmental reporting:
- Staffing changes
- Changes of supplier. For example, your organisations changes electricity retailer or
your water authority merges with another one.
- System changes by your suppliers. For example, new billing formats for electricity
and gas.
- Regulatory compliance changes. For example many greenhouse programs are
changing from Scope 3 to Scope 2 emissions for stationary energy.
- Property portfolio. Many organisations open, close and move several branches and
facilities during the course of each year.

A good measurement and reporting regime will tell you when something has changed, for
example, when you've stopped receiving electricity bills for one of your properties. It will also
make it easy for your staff to adjust to that change, for example, by prompting your Accounts
Payable staff to identify a new account.

Poor handling of change is the biggest failing of in-house and software-only systems.
Lacking experience, the in-house project team (or more often than not, sole developer or
'champion') bite off too much by building in lots of functionality with scant regard for how the data
will get into the system over the coming years. Too often, managers don't pre-empt what will
happen if the developer or 'champion' loses interest in the project or leaves the organisation
altogether.

Some symptoms of not planning for change are:

o Having no information about new properties even though they are the most important ones to
track.
o Waiting 3 months to get a report because the guy in IT that wrote the system is on long
service leave
o Reporting system grinds to a halt because Finance have changed half of your electricity
accounts over to a cheaper retailer.

Mistake 7. Inconsistency
In general there are two types of inconsistency: inconsistency over time and inconsistency
between facilities. Both play havoc with your results, making it hard to confidently report your
performance or make good decisions about improving it.

Inconsistency over time is caused by either changing your methodology or not following your
methodology. It happens a lot in organisations that have either not set goals or have bitten off too
much (see Mistake 2).

One approach that can help achieve consistency over time is to ensure your system can always
provide the 'latest version of history'. Accept that standards and methods will change (for the
better). Good systems and services can easily recalculate a range of reports using the same
base activity data and an updated set of factors and methods. It means your environmental
performance reporting can evolve without you having to go back to square one.

Inconsistency between facilities means that you can't put performance in context because you
have nothing to compare it to. It happens largely because there has been a lack of standards. It
pays to ask yourself whether you peers (for example another school, another retirement village or
another local government) would accept your reported performance in comparison to theirs.
Look for a standard that applies to your specific property or organisation type (eg a primary
school or a local council), takes into account other factors such as climate and available

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 Top 10 mistakes to avoid when measuring your environmental performance

infrastructure, and compares performance based on a fair measure of utility (eg energy
consumption per student per day). The standard should also apply some rigour as to data
completeness.

Some symptoms of inconsistency are:

o Not having a clear idea about basic performance indicators, such as whether your
greenhouse emissions are going up or down.
o Being afraid to add your organisation's water consumption to the annual report because you
can't remember how last year's figures were derived.
o Knowing that your office building is a top performer but not having enough confidence in your
numbers to publicise it.
o Knowing that your pool and gym needs upgrading but not being able to prove it.

Mistake 8. Treating software as a panacea

Software can save time and has some powerful features but it is actually a small part of the
environmental reporting puzzle. A great many organisations get drawn into developing their own
software, adopting so-called 'free' software or paying large amounts for commercial software
without planning other aspects of their system. The result is a failed project. Few software
packages remain in use for more than a year and many never provide any benefit at all.
This mistake commonly occurs when the organisation has not set goals, is biting off too much, or
is confusing engineering with management. Why does this happen?

It happens because people love features. Environmental software demonstrations always show
screen shots of nicely formatted rows of detailed data and dozens of different reporting options,
all available at the click of a mouse. Look at all that detail! Look at those lovely pie charts! It
seems as if life will be very comfortable from now on.

Experienced environmental managers and seasoned engineers know that life in the trenches of
environmental management is not so simple. They ask, "Where does the data come from and
what if we are missing some data?" They know that as soon as they produce a real report their
CEO is going to take one glance at the first pie chart, gently put down his glasses, look them in
the eye, and ask, "So our buildings need new HVAC controllers do they? Are you sure? I
thought your engineer had done that already?"

Like any software, environmental management software does not exist in a vacuum. It exists in a
culture. Rather than learning how to generate 27 different types of bar and pie charts (all saying
the same thing), you are better to spend your time questioning how you will get good clean data
into the system and how you will consistently apply a handful of simple reports to meet the
compliance requirements and improve the environmental performance of your organisation.

Whether it's free, commercial or developed in-house, using environmental reporting software has
real, but often hidden, costs. Organisations typically spend 10% of their IT budget on hardware,
20% on software and 70% on services. Services include installation, testing, upgrading,
maintenance, support and training. And that's just the IT budget. If you count the time that your
departmental staff spend using the software - for example to collect, enter and upload data - then
the cost of software could easily be as low as 5% of the total budget required to run it.

"No problem", says your software vendor. "Our software can upload data in a range of standard
formats." That sounds very good, except that there aren't any standard formats for electricity,
gas and water consumption or costs. Every retailer uses a different format, and each individual
retailers uses multiple formats depending on your location, account-type and other factors. In
most cases you will be faced with the cost of adapting the software to manage each format you
encounter, or worse, your staff having to regularly key data into the system from paper invoices.

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 Top 10 mistakes to avoid when measuring your environmental performance

Many organisations are turning to services that provide an integrated environmental scorekeeping
service, rather than just software. This approach can ensure that data is collected, managed and
reported accurately and efficiently and that consistent, relevant reports are produced.

Some symptoms that software is being treated as a panacea:

o Attending meetings where people talk about 'XML' and 'CSV' with an evangelical look in their
eyes.
o Being told not to worry about data input because it will be 'automatically uploaded' by the
software
o Believing that you are going to be able to extract and export useful performance information
using the software's 'built-in flexible reporting engine'.
o Not seeking a budget for your project because the software is 'free'.
o Not spending at least half of your software evaluation time asking about exactly how data
gets into the system and how the resulting reports can be directly applied in your
organisation.

Mistake 9. Compromising on independence

Increasingly, funding and compliance programs, whether government funded or not, require a
higher standard of independence in the measurement of energy, water and greenhouse
performance. There is quite rightly contention about whether energy and water contractors, or
even companies that sell carbon offsets, should be authorised to measure energy, water and
greenhouse performance. Even if you do the measurements yourself internally, you may be
subject to a verification audit, a process which will be easier and cheaper if you can show that
your environmental performance is tracked by an independent third party.

Compliance aside, do you really want your energy contractor to verify their own
performance? If you've entered into an Energy Performance Contract (EPC) for one or more
properties you will be contracted to pay the contractor the first few years of the estimated savings.
It makes very good sense to independently verify these claimed savings against what you are
actually saving. The difference can be alarming.

In the past your energy contractor was the best alternative to using expensive consultants or
time-consuming software to measure environmental performance. There is a new type of
service provider: the environmental scorekeeper, that can perform this service efficiently and
independently.

Some symptoms of compromising on independence are:

Mistake 10. Not progressing past measurement, or diving into

action.
The culmination of many of the mistakes described here is that nothing really gets done. Here
the organisation measures and measures and measures but never gets around to actually
improving performance.

While it's true that this is often the result of generic organisational barriers to improvement (such
as limited resources and resistant management) sometimes the environmental reporting itself is
the barrier. You can't drive change if reporting is sporadic, inaccurate or irrelevant, or if it simply
takes up all of your time, all problems that result from not having goals, biting off too much, and
trying to do it all yourself.

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 Top 10 mistakes to avoid when measuring your environmental performance

In any case, there is no reason for not acting. The availability of independent environmental
scorekeeping and a range of no-cost or low-cost improvement measures mean that any
organisation can improve its environmental performance and save money at the same
time.

Just like non-action, diving into action is really a symptom of other mistakes. Lack of good
environmental and financial performance information drives even large organisations to dive into
poorly-considered energy and water savings actions. The return on investment or pay-back
period differs enormously between different improvement actions, so there is a real risk that the
organisation isn't getting value for money. This is often the result of exuberance by engineers,
political pressure, or even the good salesmanship of an energy contractor. If you have no
environmental performance management in place, or your system is producing irregular,
irrelevant or inaccurate results, then senior managers have no choice but to accede to pressure
from the board or community whenever they demand that 'something' be done.

Symptoms of not progressing past measurement:

o Sitting under 16 halogen down-lights in the CEO's office asking for budget for some more
energy audits.

Symptoms of diving into action:

o There are solar panels on the roof but no insulation in the ceiling.

About Planet Footprint

Planet Footprint is the world's only full-service independent environmental scorekeeper. Planet
Footprint's Environmental Scorekeeping service:
• Continuously measures your energy, water and greenhouse performance - consumption,
costs and emissions.
• Presents your performance in a simple set of eye-catching reports that are updated
continuously and made available to you online 24/7
• Provides complete data-sets, should you require them for further analysis of issues.
• Compares and benchmarks your performance nationally (and soon, internationally).
• Alerts you to anomalies, such as large increases in electricity or water consumption
• Supports you with case studies, guides and professional phone and email contact to help
you put information to use to save energy, water and money.

The service is available to any sized organisation based on an affordable annual subscription.
For more information, call us on 1300 721 113 or email info@planetfootprint.com

www.planetfootprint.com

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