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Making ESG matter

ESG should be a core pillar of any organisations’ commitments. However, it’s not easy or realistic to make full-scale change overnight, nor will employees and stakeholders get behind your vision simply because you tell them too. While the idea of making ESG a priority across all areas of the business can be a daunting task, ultimately businesses will see benefits when they put addressing these issues at the forefront of strategy and decision-making.

What is ESG?

Conversations around ESG tend to focus on sustainability, however this is just one pillar of three. With Environmental, Social and Governance considerations, it gives businesses a framework for evaluating their impact on the planet, community and stakeholders.

How can businesses benefit from ESG practices?

While ESG is designed to benefit others, such as the planet, stakeholders or communities, the commercial benefits for businesses are less talked about. The reality is that many ESG initiatives offer a financial, strategic or reputational return. For example:

• Sustainability initiatives obviously have a positive impact on the planet and its wildlife, but can also be financially efficient, with business leaders in a recent Deloitte report citing revenue generation as the number one benefit of implementing sustainability strategies.
• Diverse recruitment is key to the ‘social’ pillar which focuses on businesses supporting stakeholders and communities, but also ensures businesses benefit from additional talent, a variety of opinions, diversity of thought and a richer company culture.
• Social value programmes help to embed the business in its local communities, forming connections, which in turn can support employee engagement.

The list is endless.

We’re proud to say ESG is now truly baked into every area of our business. Over the years, we’ve refined our approach for implementing successful initiatives. So, we’ve put together a cheat sheet for implementing your own.

Embed rather than add

While some companies may have initiatives or policies that fall under the ESG umbrella term, it’s vital that there is a comprehensive, holistic approach to the implementation. This means embedding it into every part of the business, from employee attitudes to processes to decision-making, rather than add it as siloed activity or focus area. This prevents it from being de-prioritised in favour of other business aims.

A comprehensive approach should comprise of goals, strategy and tactics:

• Goals – give your stakeholders an aim or a purpose, as well as giving the company a yardstick to measure itself against.

For example: Premier Modular is aiming to be net zero by 2040.

• Strategy – the big picture plan for how to achieve your goals.

For example: we are embedding sustainability into your culture so that all employees are invested and actively working towards being a greener company.

• Tactics – the actual methods used to implement your strategy and achieve your goals.

For example: we’ve had our employees undertake nearly 100 hours of sustainability training with Supply Chain School.

It’s also crucial to have a designated team or person, depending on the size of the business, responsible for monitoring and implementing ESG activity across the business. Whether this is an additional responsibility for an employee or a specific role within the business, making somebody accountable will ensure that it always remains a priority.

But how do we practice what we preach?

Well, we have a multilayered approach to ESG. We deliberately align our goals with the UN Sustainable Development Goals, in fact, our 2025/26 goals aligned with 12 out of the UN’s 17. We also have a designated committee made up of senior leaders and two inhouse ESG coordinators at the helm. It’s their responsibility to measure, implement and accelerate our ESG goals, ensuring it’s always a key focus for the company.

To keep things simple, we’ve broken down how we achieve our ESG goals into three key areas: our product offering, our culture and our community. Here’s how we’re actively implementing ESG strategies into every area of the business.

Our product offering:

• Promoting a circular economy.

Prioritising sustainability in the manufacturing and construction sectors can be particularly challenging. That’s why our rental division is based on the principles of the circular economy. Our fleet of temporary modular units can be easily adapted and redeployed, transforming from a classroom to a laboratory to an office with ease. This not only minimises waste and the amount of embodied carbon released into the atmosphere but also helps our customers keep their costs down as they are only paying for facilities for as long as they need.

• Advocating for sustainable design features.

We offer a number of sustainable design features that can be incorporated into any project we work on, such as rainwater harvesting systems or solar panels, although we don’t just mention them, our team actively advocates for their inclusion. We use a carbon calculator that allows customers to see for themselves exactly how much carbon will be saved and shows that small design changes that can make a massive difference.

Our culture:

• Helping employees to make ESG a priority.

We understand that fitting ESG into the workday can feel enormous to some employees, so we make it as easy as possible for them to do their bit. We rolled out a wellbeing app which offers employees a number of benefits, including 24-hour access to doctors’ appointments, fitness support and rewards. The app also includes an offsetting scheme. To date, our employees have planted 1,200 trees, removed 77kg of plastic from the ocean, donated 350 meals and 231,000 litres of drinking water, quite literally at the click of a button.

• Focusing on inclusive recruitment.

To ensure we’ve got comprehensive social and governance practices, we measure equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) and update our policies accordingly to ensure that we are an inclusive employer. Construction is a traditionally male-dominated industry, so we’ve made changes to our recruitment processes, for example, we’ve designed targeted campaigns featuring our female employees offering advice for women entering industry. As a result, we doubled the number of women working in our factory last year.

Our community:

• Supporting our suppliers.

We don’t just stop at our internal policies, we also help to engage our suppliers and partners. Based on our own success of reducing our Scope 3 emissions by 72% last year, we created an ESG handbook, which outlines steps, processes and a ‘how to’ so our suppliers can work towards doing the same.

• Educating the next generation.

We have longstanding partnerships with a number of local schools, where we attend careers fairs, talks and workshops with secondary school and college pupils We also have a flourishing apprenticeship programme, which recently had a record-breaking year, training 18 apprentices – our highest intake to date – and expanding into three more business divisions. More importantly however, we’ve maintained our 100% pass rate and 100% employment once they have graduated.

To learn more about our ESG efforts, click here.