Page 92 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

HR PRACTICES AND PROCESSES THAT MAKE SUSTAINABLE VALUES STICK 71

TABLE 2.3 BREAKDOWN OF CONSULTANT’S TIME,
2001–2007

YEARS TOTAL HOURS
2001 78.61
2002 90.73
2003 24.07
2004 40.98
2005 11.68
2006 67.74
2007 61.50
Total 375.31
Average per year 53.61

“productive” work to culture-building (green glue) practices, which is basically a 1.25
percent reduction in potential revenue enhancement. We’ve used these figures to cre-
ate a synopsis of these costs, totaling about $1 million over ten years, in the analysis
of Green, Inc., the fictionalized company we introduced in Chapter 1, which is
intended to be a reasonable approximation of Melaver, Inc. The costs per year and
totals for lost opportunity and facilitator’s time can be seen in Figure 2.3, the Updated
Cash Flow Analysis for Green, Inc.
The benefit side of the ledger is obviously trickier to calculate. As part of our analy-
sis of Green, Inc. in Chapter 1, we considered the issue of retention and the cost to the
company of losing just any worker. Deliberately left out of that calculation was the
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retention of a good worker. Bob Willard, in his book The Sustainability Advantage, esti-
mates this premium to be around $159,000 or two to three times an annual salary when
one takes into account these factors: loss of productivity while employee considers pros
and cons of leaving, cost of company’s time trying to keep the person from leaving, cost
of payroll/benefits administration, cost of separation allowance, cost of training, cost of

TABLE 2.4 STAFF HOURS SPENT ANNUALLY
WORKING WITH CONSULTANT
Entire staff 357 hours
Sanskrit team 125 hours
One-on-one 18 hours
Annual total 500 hours