Sustainability for Eaton Peabody an 'evolving process'
Photo/Jason P. Smith
Eaton Peabody's Tamrah Brown heads up the law firm's sustainability initiatives
More than a year ago, Tamrah Brown did what scores of business people are doing these days. She started looking into sustainable business practices and ultimately established a new sustainability policy for her employer, Bangor-based Eaton Peabody, in March 2009.
More recently, the law firm has taken another step toward improving its sustainable practices. The law firm is part of a pilot group, including six businesses, testing out a new 100-question assessment tool developed by Maine Businesses for Sustainability and Massachusetts-based Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences. Other businesses that participated in the pilot are Planet Dog in Portland and Idexx in Westbrook.
Though Brown, Eaton Peabody's human resources manager, performed lots of research on sustainability practices, she was still surprised by some of the tool's questions, like whether the company has a wellness program (it doesn't, but Brown says it's in progress) and if it buys products from other sustainably minded vendors (the company is limited at this time, Brown says, but hopes to once other area businesses become more focused on sustainability).
For Brown, the assessment was "an eye opener." "I didn't really think that those would be part of an assessment, or part of a sustainability-type initiative," she says. "It took a little while to get my head around it, but I'm glad I looked at it and got a broader view of what I had before."
The policy Brown put in place last year includes recycling materials like batteries and cardboard, training employees to print double-sided to save paper, implementing an alternative transportation program that offers incentives to employees who bike or carpool to work and installing video conferencing equipment in its two largest offices to reduce the need for employees to commute back and forth. The firm has offices in Augusta, Brunswick and Ellsworth.
Sustainability means different things to different people, though most would say it has something to do with the environment, being green or reducing waste. "You ask 10 people on the street what sustainability means and they'll all have a different answer," Brown says. "But what we all need to focus on is what we do now affects the future. We need to stay focused on that and make sure that's part of our decision-making process as businesses."
Sustainability is more than starting recycling programs and encouraging employees to switch off their computers at night, says Merritt Carey, a consultant for MBS. Being sustainable involves employee benefits, community relations and even finances. "So many businesses focus on being green," she says. "All your green businesses don't do any good if you don't pay your employees a livable wage. All this stuff is interconnected."
A sustainable company may see a competitive advantage when it comes to recruiting talent, Carey says. At Eaton Peabody, Brown believes its sustainability initiatives -- the alternative transportation program and focus on energy conservation -- will give it an edge when it comes to hiring the next generation. "We find that each generation weighs those types of things more and more when considering where they want to work," she says.
Keeping that competitive advantage is where benchmarking comes into play. Benchmarking - measuring a company's policies or products against a standard or a recognized leader in the field - offers a company the ability to see where it is today, what direction it wants to go in and how to get from point A to point B, Carey says. "The word ‘sustainable' is thrown around all the time," she says. "You can't go out as a company and claim to be sustainable without some ability to back it up."
Maine Businesses for Sustainability is planning an official launch of the assessment tool in the fall, says Carey. The group also plans to set up a Maine-specific resource guide so that if a company answers ‘no' to an assessment question, an automatically-generated list of local resources will help that company progress.
And progression is really the focus of Eaton Peabody's efforts, says Brown. "This is an ongoing thing. It's not like one day we hit all the goals and it's good. It's an evolving process."
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