You will get stressed

.You can't have getting everything done solely on your shoulders. Organisations have a vision and strategy. As part of that strategy departments have various objectives. Lots of these objectives overlap between departments. There are other people in your organisation who will want to help you, and at the same time they'll be helping themselves EXAMPLE. By collaborating towards each other's objectives you are much more likely to succeed. 

Succesion and buy in

Another reason why it can't all be you is because when you come to hand the project over for whatever reason, nobody else will know what the heck to do with it! If you change jobs, or are sick, or stop turning up for work, the project will fall apart. That project will be left on its own and it will die, and what sort of legacy is that for you? It doesn’t reflect well. You need to bring people in so that the project has longevity and is embedded correctly.

How do you develop a team?

In your organisation, you probably have an official team, which is a well-defined structure with job roles and the like. When you're rolling out any programme which affects the whole organisation, you've got to have people in other departments who can help you with your process. How do you find those people and get them to buy in? Well, you've got to clearly understand your objectives and be able to articulate them to others in a convincing way. If it's a reuse project, it might be something like, ‘we want to embed this facility and save £100,000 before the end of the year’. Here's our project, here's our list of objectives, here's how we're going to do it.

Look for where objectives overlap

Staff in other departments can help you when objectves overlap. So you need to understand their objectives. With regards to a reuse project for example: They might have savings targets. They might have targets for customer satisfaction. They might have targets for waste disposal or production. They might have policies for asset tracking or for having items cleared on a certain day. You need to look within their objectives and policies to find out where they overlap with your objectives, and then you can welcome a representative from this department to help you with your objectives. Here's another blog post about getting the comms team involved where the common objective is obvious. 

Procurement are your friends!

They will have an objective to complete purchase orders at a certain time or reduce the amount of procurement demand, so this directly links with reuse because if you've got a reuse programme, you will reduce purchase orders considerably. If you reduce purchase orders, that means that there are less purchase orders to get done, so the procurement office can get them done quicker, and may end up with less work to do, which they will be grateful for.

Daniel, Warp It’s Founder’s story

“When I first left University, I got a job as a sustainable development officer at a local council, this is back in 2001. There was a sustainability strategy and it had  fourteen main objectives, and under these fourteen objectives there was a dozen actions, and under these actions there were another 10 sub-actions. I remember in the first three months, I was just paralysed because there was all this stuff to do. To make matters worse, I was the only sustainability person and it was very stressful. I set about trying to do everything myself, and that was my first experience of proper office-style organisational work, and it really stressed me out.

Daniel continues, saying “That was the first moment on this journey that I realised I'm going to have to get other people to help me. Then I asked myself, ‘how am I going to get them to help me to do this?’. What I'm saying is, if you're trying to do everything yourself, you're going to end up stressed, overwhelmed, and you're going to actually spread yourself very thin. You won't do anything very well. You'll do 20 things very sub-par. Instead, focus your energies on what you're good at and that might be writing reports, building rapport with people and doing spreadsheets. You've got to focus on what you're good at and avoid doing what you aren't good at. Try and bring someone else in to help you, and that will make you a happier and more productive person in the workforce.”

Has this article helped you understand that you are not alone, and that your organisation is there with great human resources to help you achieve common goals? Great! The next stage is to download our action steps below, where we teach you exactly how to put this into practice.