Åsa Andersson
CR & Quality Manager at Peak Performance

Why did you choose to educate and train your colleagues? How did this fit into your sustainability strategy?

Being part of the SFA education is a good way to increase knowledge of sustainability within your company. The course gives you an overall understanding of this complex issue and a better understanding of the elements your business impacts and needs to work with. Increasing internal communication and increasing knowledge was one the key initiatives of our latest CR strategy.

How many colleagues from your company participated, and how did they respond to the education and training?

We are currently enrolling 15 students each year. The most recent years included a mix of people in different positions within the company, but in 2017 we’ll focus on having designers and buyers do the training, since a lot of the sustainability work starts with them. All participants are very positive about the course, as they feel it gives them greater insight and understanding about what they can do in their daily work to help the company become a more sustainable business. Furthermore, they feel they have a clearer overview of Peak Performance goals. We have had great, in-depth discussions around the course movies and the assignments as well.

What have the benefits of the training been?

As a “small/medium” company, we can never provide this kind of material as a benefit in itself. All the course participants are asked to immediately change their behaviour and approach to their daily work in order to contribute to our sustainable business goals.

What advice do you have for other companies planning to engage, educate or train their staff on sustainability topics?

SFA’s online educational platform provides stable footing and a solid base to work from. On top of that, you might consider adding additional information and inspiration for your sustainable brand work.

What advice do you have for other companies now planning to get the most of the SFA Sustainability Fundamentals course and SFA’s services overall?

To get the most out of the course, I think you should set aside time to study and work together, so you have a designated forum for group discussions during the course. Adding information about your own CR work, as we are also doing, is also something that I’d recommend.

We have tried to do the course in several different ways, allowing the students to complete the course all by themselves and gathering only a few times, but now we have decided to allocate 2,5 days to complete the course altogether. This will also give me an opportunity to add additional information to the different modules about the work that we do at Peak Performance.

Is there anything else that stands out about your SFA training experience that was helpful and you would like to share?

As a tutor, the great discussions that we’ve had during the course gives me a lot of inspiration and courage to continue to drive our CR work forward and into new great opportunities and challenges. We have also come up with innovative ideas that we may work on in the future.