SENSITIZING STAKEHOLDERS

Interface's mission is to become a restorative enterprise, striving to understand and achieve sustainability and influence others to see the opportunity of "Doing Well by Doing Good."

Issue: Most of society does not understand the basic principles of natural systems or how individual and collective human actions affect them.

Response: To progress toward sustainability, we must engage our stakeholders and enable them to better understand sustainability in all of its fronts for the challenges that lie ahead. The result will be a community that we share with our suppliers, our customers, and our families; a self sustaining ecosystem where cooperation prevails in lieu of confrontation.

Building a Sustainable Team - Energizing People

In the late 1990's Interface made use of "Play to Win™" team building exercises to enable its associates to learn the techniques needed to face the tremendous changes that the quest for sustainability introduced into the workplace.
Play to Win
Interface's business had quickly become global, and unless everyone learned to anticipate change, identify opportunities, be flexible and react quickly, there was no hope of becoming the kind of organization that customers were demanding. Managers were the traditional source of ideas, but not anymore. The "Play to Win" culture encouraged everyone to see change as a challenge, not a threat, and encouraged them to get outside their comfort zones and let go of the older, established patterns of behavior.

Just as processes and products need to evolve, so do people. "Play to Win" helped to break down fear and assist with the processes of learning, growing and continuously improving. Everyone who experienced "Play to Win" was free to stop, challenge and choose new ways of delivering superior value while reducing their impact on the environment. Interface Americas groups also sponsored "Why?" conferences for customers and suppliers, combining the concepts of "Play to Win" and sustainability in an understandable, interactive format.

In January 2000, Interface called together the top level managers from around the world to review the company's mission, vision and strategies for carrying sustainability forward. Emphasis was placed on what we now call the 5 P's: people, product, process, place and profit.

Interface's management team spent three intensive days reviewing the company's history and creating a mechanism for "Reconnecting for the Future." The management meeting was followed by a series of meetings in the individual business units where the information gathered was taken to all of the employees of Interface for more ideas and input. Each business unit gathered information from its employees and then provided the information to a global team focused on setting up a framework for the future. One of the ideas that came from "Reconnecting for the Future" sessions was the concept of "Global Circles of Excellence."

Headed by a senior officer of the corporation as the "champion", circles (or groups of individual experts) were created for each fundamental element of our company: sales, operations, QUEST, human resources, information technology, research and development, marketing, finance and legal. The goal of each circle is to identify key issues facing the corporation globally and locally and to address them with a priority consistent with Interface's corporate strategy. The fundamental advantage the circles bring to each individual business unit is the mechanism to share best practices with each other globally as we solve problems and create new solutions to business opportunities. The circles usually meet by video or audio conferencing and the champions summarize programs against objectives to the CEO quarterly.
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