Systems Lens to Increase Sustainable Procurement Success: Co-creating Insights to Bolster Employee Engagement
Procurement accounts for 92% of an organization’s total climate emissions and has significant human rights impacts throughout the supply chain. Sustainable procurement should be part of every organization’s carbon mitigation and social justice strategy. Employees are critical to the success of these strategies as they are on the front lines making decisions about what to procure and from which suppliers. These individuals must be engaged for the organization to meet its sustainable procurement goals. Our research question, therefore, is: How can organizations bolster their employee engagement to increase their sustainable procurement success?
Our engaged research project answers this question by studying the purchasing system at American University, and using a systems lens. A system is a set of elements, such as people, objects, or events that have a common purpose. Through the interaction of these elements, systems produce integrated wholes. A system can be understood only by looking at the interactions between the parts rather than looking at parts in isolation.
We partnered with AU Office of Sustainability, and AU Procurement & Contracts to design this study. During Spring 2025, the research team conducted 35 interviews of individuals who comprise AU’s procurement system, including buyers, vendors, unit leaders etc. Our preliminary insights are as follows:
- AU has a strong sustainability culture, as identified by the accolades the university has received. Somewhat paradoxically, AU’s accolades have fallen short of translation into everyday actions related to procurement.
- Actors vary in how much they focus on sustainability in procurement. Most of sustainable procurement is driven by personal commitment or the passion of the unit leader around sustainability, rather than institutionalized routines.
- There is variance in assigning responsibility for embedding sustainable procurement in organizational routines. Some believe it is the individual buyer’s responsibility, others assign the responsibility to AU Procurement & Contracts, yet others to AU leadership, and a few believe the responsibility lies at every level.
- Sustainability procurement is more likely to focus on big ticket items such as those related to construction or furniture, as compared to medium and smaller ticket items (which are also routine purchases), such as coffee for the unit or meals at department events.
- Sustainable service procurement receives less consideration compared to sustainable product procurement.
- The effort needed for individual buyers to find the information on sustainability features of a product or service is significant.
Based on these insights and the initial data we have collected, we are in the process of drawing a systems map, which will help us examine how different elements of AU’s purchasing system are interconnected, how resources flow between them, and how feedback loops amplify or attenuate issues and opportunities. At the end of summer, we will organize a workshop with those we interviewed. The objective of the workshop will be to help us refine the systems map, and generate ideas and actions to move the system toward greater sustainability. Some of the ideas we have recorded in the interviews are: (1) creating a green vendor database, (2) standardizing a sustainability clause in RFPs for larger purchases, (3) training for buyers for considering sustainability in their buying decisions, and (4) connecting common purchases across departments to increase the scale of purchase and hence make sustainable options more cost-effective. The workshop will help us hone these ideas and build actions around each.
