WSP's 'future-ready' training gives company huge influence
WSP is helping clients in lots of sectors to make progress on complex environmental challenges by combining a unique set of technical and business expertise with a clear focus on preparing organisations for the future.
With around 32,000 employees in 39 countries, the global professional services firm delivered thousands of projects in 2014. The company is steadily building its business by helping clients to fulfil their sustainability ambitions.
It provides advice that considers how clients can reduce their environmental impact and save costs in the long term. At the same time, it is living up to its principles on sustainability by managing its own impact, and supporting the communities in which it operates.
For every project, WSP assembles an experienced team of scientists, management consultants and engineers to accelerate and increase the impact of its work. It has around 3,500 specialist environmental scientists and managers in its ranks.
Importantly, the company helps clients to plan for resource scarcity, climate change, new technologies and social trends by training all its employees to think in the long term.
For example, the company developed a strategy to help Pantaleón, Central America’s largest sugar producer, to address its difficulties around water and improve the resilience of its business.
WSP’s agronomists, hydrologists, water engineers and management consultants addressed every aspect of the issue, from rising sea levels to water scarcity and pollution. Its practical plan is helping Pantaleon to cut water use by 30% at its biggest mills, and to support their small suppliers in managing water more efficiently on plantations.
Similarly WSP worked with one of the world’s largest retailers to develop a store refrigeration strategy covering 12,000 stores in 27 countries. Its technical refrigeration engineers worked side by side with their management consultant and scientist colleagues to deliver a plan to cut the equivalent of more than 1m tonnes of CO2 and save $250m (£168m) per year by 2020.
The technical teams created a future-proof science strategy, while the management consultants explored how the strategy could be delivered.
The company has also been instrumental in helping cities, including London and Birmingham, tackle housing, transport and air pollution challenges, with an eye on population growth.
Working with Birmingham city council, WSP produced a 25-year plan to help tackle the city’s predicted 83% rise in congestion by 2035. In London it has funded and produced two pieces of research challenging the city to be all-electric by 2035. Its recommendations include ideas to tackle air pollution, noise and greenhouse gas emissions, and to build 630,000 new homes above existing public buildings.
The Guardian judges crowned WSP Group the “impact” winner because they believe it is laying the foundation for large-scale change. “We need heavyweight consultancies like WSP Group to work on the non-glamorous aspects of sustainability, to do the engineering work as opposed to the experimental,” they explained. “They’re integrating sustainability into the DNA of business, and they’re future-ready.”
Indeed, WSP’s “future ready” employee training programme has gone from strength to strength. Launched across the business in 2014, it is the first training programme of its kind in the consultancy sector and has already made considerable progress helping teams to design more robust, “future-proof” and cost-effective projects for clients.
WSP made sure that the programme gained credibility throughout the business by seeking the support of its own senior management and consulting with technical committees at every stage of the process.
In addition to this technical leadership, “future ready” also challenges all WSP employees – not just its sustainability specialists – to consider projects in this way. It has been described by the UK Green Building Council as “an exciting and incredibly timely initiative”, while clients including BT and the Green Investment Bank have described the programme as “compelling”.
As one of WSP’s directors puts it: “‘Future ready’ encourages teams to think, rather than just follow a codified approach. It’s an approach that makes work more interesting and produces better solutions.”
WSP is the 2015 winner of the impact award in the consultancy of the year category of the Guardian Sustainable Business Awards.
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