Citizens Bank – Jennifer Eno-Ballbach – 2015

Goals

Citizens Bank, a financial institution comprised of 1,200 branches and 18,000 employees, hosted Jennifer Eno-Ballbach as an EDF Climate Corps fellow to build an environmental sustainability strategy and communication plan. Since announcing its IPO in September 2014, Citizens wanted to identify how to communicate environmental sustainability both internally and externally. Working as part of the Health, Safety & Environment team in Property Services, Eno-Ballbach set out on a mission to build a roadmap for beginning the conversation about sustainability, something the bank had been actively working on, but not sharing with stakeholders.

Solutions

Eno-Ballbach began her journey by interviewing stakeholders and learning about the culture of Citizens, including how Citizens was addressing environmental sustainability. Citizens had been measuring its environmental impact since 2007 and had previously worked with EDF Climate Corps fellows to reduce its energy usage. The Health, Safety & Environment team had already worked hard to identify and address environmental sustainability issues, but had not shared their success with colleagues, customers or shareholders in a strategic way. Eno-Ballbach spent time benchmarking Citizens against regional and national banks and created case studies of how other institutions were addressing the issue and celebrating success. In interviewing stakeholders, Eno-Ballbach identified the best methods of communication across Citizens portfolio of properties. Using all the information gathered and other extensive research on the banking industry and engagement, Eno-Ballbach built a strategy to begin talking about environmental sustainability and creating a communication plan for the next 6-18 months.

Potential Impact

By starting the conversation internally and externally, Citizens could increase employee engagement, retention and recruitment potential. They could also realize a continued reduction of energy use by engaging employees and creating Green Teams across its portfolio. Eno-Ballbach identified potential increases in customer and shareholder interest and commitment through the benchmarking study by marketing Citizens’ environmental sustainability strategy and successes on their website. Along the way, Eno-Ballbach also had the opportunity to provide input on the Supplier Code of Conduct to include more measurable environment standards for procurement.