“For the business, commercial and sustainability agendas are interconnected,” the firm’s sustainability director Sinéad Hickey told the Business Post. “I don’t think you can separate them.”
Last month, the Business Post revealed large Irish firms including Glanbia, Ryanair, CRH and Grafton Group were moving away from linking ESG measures to executive bonuses, but Hickey said Sisk was moving in the opposite direction because sustainability had become an necessity in winning major construction contracts.
Clients, she said, were asking increasingly sophisticated questions about contractors’ sustainability credentials and driving the sector towards greener practices.
“It has matured and evolved when it comes to tender submissions, and so we’re ultimately responding to the market and our clients’ requests,” she said.
“If we’re not able to answer those detailed questions, how are we to win the work?”
Sisk links annual performance objectives covering climate, people and health and safety to financial incentives for a range of senior leaders.
“The specific weighting of those objectives varies depending on the role and the relevant incentive arrangements, so there is no single percentage that applies across the organisation,” Hickey said.
The company has developed an internal governance structure under which Hickey reports directly to the chief financial officer, while an external advisory council challenges its sustainability ambitions and approach.
The council is chaired by environmental scientist Tara Shine and includes industry executives such as Marci Bonham, who leads Kingspan’s insulated panels business in Ireland.
Since setting its initial targets in 2020, the group has expanded significantly across Ireland, the UK and Europe, with revenues rising from €1.39 billion in 2019 to €2.62 billion last year.
It has also won major contracts including work at Manchester City’s Etihad Stadium, London’s Elizabeth Line and the first phase of Vantage Data Centers’ Dub1 campus in west Dublin.
Hickey said one of its biggest challenges had been reducing emissions while continuing to grow the business.
“We would have liked to have had a greater reduction in our emissions halfway through our roadmap, but we expected things like green hydrogen to have scaled faster,” Hickey said.
She said some of the factors needed to decarbonise construction were outside Sisk’s direct control, including the pace at which renewable power is added to electricity grids and the roll-out of lower-carbon technologies.
In the meantime, she said the company would focus on areas it could control, including working with suppliers to source lower-carbon concrete and steel.
For example, Sisk has used low-carbon concrete at its Cherry Orchard Point affordable housing development.
Hickey said there had been “huge interest” from clients in using similar materials on other projects.
While such technologies had yet to reach scale, she said expectations were changing rapidly.
“The conversation around low carbon and materials is evolving,” she said, with clients increasingly expecting contractors to be able to offer such solutions.
Full Business Post article here.