Addressing sustainability: setting and governing sustainability goals and targets

Abstract

Businesses in all kinds of industries, including facility management (FM), are increasingly integrating sustainability into their practices. The integration of sustainability practices involves expanding beyond economic targets to include environmental and social ones. However, this process is challenging for businesses and has not been fully explained by existing research. Consequently, this paper investigates how organizations set and govern their sustainability ambitions and targets. Specifically, this research focuses on identifying relevant goals and targets, selecting and integrating the goals and targets into business operations, and tracking the progress toward them. A case study approach was employed to achieve the paper's intended purpose, and a multinational company from the service industry was analyzed. Ten interviews were conducted, and more than 50 pages of archival data were collected. The results of this study elaborate on the setting of sustainability ambitions and targets and provide a roadmap for this process. The proposed roadmap includes defining sustainability, materiality analysis, goals and targets, and sustainability governance as crucial stages. This study's practical contributions include the process roadmap, which can facilitate organizations' journeys toward reasonable sustainability goals and targets. This outcome benefits all kinds of organizations, including those operating in the built environment and the FM domain.