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It starts with people, not policy
The piece opens with a shift in the questions clients are now asking. It used to be enough to confirm you paid the living wage. Now, the question is what you’re actually doing for the person doing the work: how they’re treated day-to-day, whether there’s genuine welfare support on site, whether the incentives on offer go beyond the bare minimum.
That distinction matters more than it might sound. A living wage tells you what someone is paid. It tells you nothing about whether they’re supported, listened to, or treated with any dignity while they earn it. Alex and Roz’s argument, and one I’d back without hesitation, is that the organisations getting this right aren’t just doing the decent thing. They’re also the ones holding on to good people, which shows up directly in the consistency of the service a client actually receives.
There’s a persistent assumption that doing ESG properly means spending more, or wading through more complexity, than doing the bare minimum. The piece argues, convincingly, that it’s usually the opposite, provided the approach is rigorous and the data is real.
The example given is a good one: gumdrop bins installed across a high-footfall retail site to capture chewing gum waste, saving over £6,000 a year that would otherwise go on scraping gum off floors and surfaces. Add refillable soap dispensers, eco-certified consumables and the removal of single-use aerosols, and that’s another £2,000 a year saved across the wider contract portfolio, alongside more than 2,000 aerosols eliminated annually and over 1,000 batteries kept out of landfill. None of that is a coincidence, It’s what happens when ESG is treated as an operational discipline rather than a compliance exercise.
The bit I found most useful, from an industry perspective rather than a personal one, is the case Alex and Roz make for FM sitting at the centre of ESG delivery. When a landlord is managing service charge obligations, or an occupier is working through a BREEAM assessment or a Green Apple submission, the last thing they need is five different providers with five different sets of standards and half-complete data. One provider, one set of credentials, one chain of accountability, and suddenly the reporting problem that keeps sustainability teams up at night gets a lot smaller.
That’s before you even get to the wider community and environmental work built into the same integrated approach: tree planting around retail centres, urban beekeeping, vegetable growing schemes, all of it adding up to something a single set of KPIs on an ESG dashboard doesn’t fully capture.
Making ESG business as usual
The line that’s stuck with me most, though, is this one:
“Frontline operatives, are the ones who deliver ESG in practice every day.”
Not the policy document, or the pitch deck but the person actually on site, every shift, doing the work. Alex and Roz’s point is that sustainability only holds up under real operational pressure if it’s built into how a business runs day to day, rather than something bolted on for a client review. And that only happens when the people doing the work understand why it matters, not just what’s expected of them.
It’s a good piece, and I’d encourage anyone in FM, property or facilities procurement to read it properly rather than take my word for it. You can find it in full on the FMJ website:
https://www.fmj.co.uk/beyond-the-tickbox/
Proud to work alongside people who think about this properly, and prouder still that it’s the standard we hold ourselves to across every site we run.
