Social Impact

Business Council On Climate Change

Empowering climate-related employee engagement

Introduction

The Business Council on Climate Change (BC3) is a San Francisco-based multi-sector nonprofit that connects the local government with the business community and is dedicated to incubating, scaling, and sharing solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in San Francisco. BC3 supports multi-sector collaboration on climate-related projects, such as increasing solar power usage, driving electric vehicle adoption, creating and implementing green tenant toolkits, and hosting sustainability awareness events. Members of BC3 are focused on sharing climate change-related solutions, tools, and learnings to establish best environmental practices for their respective companies and for the San Francisco community. Members include Oliver Wyman, Salesforce, Google, Wells Fargo, Genentech, LinkedIn, PG&E, Gap Inc., and Blue Shield of California.

Our membership has often expressed a desire for our small nonprofit organization to provide more programming and resources to engage their employees and green teams around climate change issues.... The Oliver Wyman team was amazing! [The team] did a great job leading the effort. They were incredibly patient, facilitated a really valuable process, and did a great job keeping track of a ton of input from our various stakeholders
Maura McKnight, Executive Director

Scope

This six-month project was structured in three phases. During phase 1, we conducted research to better understand the landscape of sustainability-related employee engagement programs in the US. During phase 2, through interviews and a workshop, we developed and prioritized a comprehensive list of employee-engagement program ideas for BC3 to consider pursuing. During phase 3, we crafted a proposal and recommendation for the BC3 employee engagement offering and a high-level timeline for implementation.

It was incredibly fulfilling to see how the work our team did over six months translated into an implemented offering from BC3, and the impact those resources have had on my ability to offer more resources and structure to our global Oliver Wyman Green Champions program has been huge
Lauren Wylie, Head of Internal Sustainability

Impact

Sustainability managers are often focused on global corporate commitments and strategies, and with limited support in most cases, are challenged to keep local employee-engagement efforts afloat. With the implementation of the program that Oliver Wyman recommended, BC3 members now have an accessible, comprehensive set of resources to help design annual climaterelated engagement strategies. By grouping the resources in themes by quarter, members can also collaborate together as a community, delivering more impact together. And, as a member of BC3, Oliver Wyman now has the opportunity to benefit from the very program we helped design!

At Oliver Wyman, we put a strong emphasis on maximizing client impact and putting the client first – it was such a rewarding experience to be able to apply this mentality to a local Bay Area nonprofit that was extremely passionate about promoting sustainability awareness and action but was looking for more resources/support to put their plan into action. The Oliver Wyman team is thrilled that the employee engagement program launched this year, and is looking forward to engaging with other members in future events!
Jaclyn Phi, Associate