Supporting the adoption of improved sustainable processes across all functions of a geotechnical company
Creators: name: Deamer, Luke Rhys
Publisher: name: University of Surrey
Year: 2023

description: Based on the research gaps in the existing literature and the priorities of the geotechnical sector, this research focuses on supporting the adoption of improved sustainable processes across all functions of a geotechnical company. This is achieved across three research objectives.<br>
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description: The first objective identifies the sustainability impacts of a geotechnical company. Here, a pedigree matrix, grounded in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), is used to assess the sustainability of every process carried out in Keller UK. These processes span from HR and procurement, through to maintenance yard and site operations. This bottom-up assessment reveals how geotechnical companies impact almost every SDG in some way; this includes far more sustainability impacts than previous top-down, or project-focused, sustainability assessments have recorded. More importantly, it also reveals the specific company processes that impact each SDG. This enables geotechnical employees to target these processes, to either promote them if they are more sustainable, or to focus improvements if they are unsustainable.<br>
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description: Having established the existing impacts of a company, the second objective highlights processes that can improve sustainability. Using the ‘Kube’ approach, alternative processes from Keller Austria are compared against Keller UK, to establish what constitutes improved sustainability. Again using the pedigree matrix, this Kube comparison reveals processes that every employee can adopt to improve the sustainability of their own function. It also reveals how sustainability varies based on local sustainability priorities and drivers. These improved processes have since formed the basis of the first sector-wide sustainability guidance for geotechnical companies.<br>
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description: Finally, this research explores how to support the adoption of these improved sustainable processes. This starts with semi-structured interviews with geotechnical company stakeholders, to establish the main drivers and barriers to sustainability. Methods are then proposed to help realise these drivers and overcome these barriers. These include: sustainability champions; dashboards and methods to interact with the Kube; local branch sustainability prioritisation exercises; and simplifying Kube outputs into guides, posters and training. This section also advocates for a more bottom-up and middle-down approach to company sustainability, alongside traditional top-down approaches. In particular, the efforts making sustainability guides and training resulted in a geotechnical sector award, with the resources used by hundreds of geotechnical employees around the world.<br>
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description: Overall, this research overcomes many previous barriers to sustainability in geotechnical companies. It provides practical support, focused on process-level improvement, across all functions of a geotechnical company. This has already enabled many sustainability improvements in Keller and the wider geotechnical sector.<br>