Siemens Sustainability Strategy Review

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Technology company Siemens wanted to support its sustainability team to create a strategy that aligned community investment with chosen material sustainable development goals (SDGs) and sustainability goals.

With the desire to ‘stretch and challenge’ its approach, Siemens engaged with Business in the Community’s (BITC) advisory services, who delivered an interactive workshop to capture thinking and provide best practice advisory support around sustainability and strategy.

The support we received from BITC Community Adviser, has
given us an external sounding board to test and refine our ideas.

Olivia Whitlam, Head of Sustainability

How Business in the Community Advisory Services Supported Siemens

Within the light touch advisory support package (consisting of two days), BITC supported Siemens’ Sustainability Manager in setting their priorities and desired outcomes for the workshop, designing a bespoke agenda, content and question set.  Desk-based research explored themes around Siemens’ chosen SDG impact outcomes and emerging work in the climate justice space.

A two-hour workshop with four colleagues from its sustainability team was delivered, and a written report was produced that captured thinking and pulled together BITC’s recommendations on how the company could take its sustainability work forward.

Impact

Following its engagement with BITC’s Advisory Services, Siemens went on to produce a new strategy for a direction that defined all its sustainability goals going forward. This established clear overarching sustainability themes of Decarbonisation and Digital, Sustainable Jobs and Green Skills, and Social Mobility and Equity.

Siemens is now working on how these themes are translated throughout the business. Changes include moving to a community hybrid approach, scaling down support for charity partnerships that fall into these themes and recognising that the company can have a more significant impact on the direct community through its own influence and thought leadership with its core business and supply chain.

Olivia Whitlam, Head of Sustainability, Siemens plc said:

“The support we received from BITC Community Adviser, Jodie Cross, has given us an external sounding board to test and refine our ideas. Despite having a number of experienced Corporate Citizenship professionals in house with a strong understanding of the landscape and our impact, having Jodie question our approach, facilitate our conversations and stress test our thinking as well as bringing fresh ideas and insight to the table was deeply beneficial to the development of our new strategic direction in this space.”