A Day In The Life Of A Senior Manager Sustainability At Protiviti

A day in the life typically starts with understanding what your day will look like. Are you meeting with clients? If you're working at a consulting agency, are you stacked up on projects and need heads-down time? Are you building proposals for potential new clients?

That's what my current day-to-day looks like. The work itself involves building spreadsheets for greenhouse gas emissions accounting. This means looking at a company's operational activities and identifying where their carbon emissions are coming from.

This could be from company-owned vehicles, refrigerants, natural gas consumption, electricity consumption, or anything within their supply chain. The list goes on from that perspective. It could also involve sustainability strategy, utility reduction, or utility analysis.

This might mean looking at bills and operational activities to identify ways to be more efficient, reduce energy, water consumption, or electricity. That's more on the operational and consulting side.

When looking at in-house roles, it can range broadly. In corporate sustainability, you often fall within the ESG space, which is environmental, social, and governance. Depending on the company's size, you might be the sole sustainability person or manage the entire ESG team.

If you manage the whole ESG team, you'll cover social, environmental, and governance aspects. In that case, your skills would need to be broader than just focusing on one of those three pillars. It's industry-dependent.

In-house roles can involve building out sustainability strategy and ways to reduce carbon emissions over the long term. This includes developing a strategic carbon roadmap by decarbonizing operations and looking at ways to reduce electric load, water load, or natural gas load.

Sustainability often goes hand-in-hand with cost savings. If there isn't a return on investment (ROI), companies might not pursue it unless pressured by investors, consumers, or stakeholders.

There's still a maturity that needs to build within sustainability. For now, it's very driven by cost and ROI. A project that saves the company money by reducing electricity is a huge win and likely to be pushed forward. A voluntary project that's expensive with no significant ROI might not pass.

So, that's a glimpse of what a day-to-day might look like. It really depends on the company, the work, and the team you're on. It has a little nuance to it.