MaSC: managing sustainable companies

The Department of Trade and Industry, under its Partners in Innovation programme, has sponsored the development of a set of self-assessment tools called MaSC (Managing Sustainable Companies) for helping organisations to assess their current progress in introducing sustainable business practices and to plan what steps they need to take next to improve their performance. This paper describes the MaSC tools and reports their use by over 300 firms from across the demand and supply sides of the construction industry, through a series of industry workshops. The paper reports the average ‘organisational profile’ of these organisations against the six key management areas measured by the MaSC matrix: strategy, responsibility, planning, communication, implementation and auditing. It also records what firms saw as the key external and internal drivers for provoking their organisations to adopt and develop more sustainable business practices and the support they would need to implement change effectively. These findings are compared with the progress made using the wider set of MaSC tools, over an initial six-month period, by six test-bed organisations with whom the MaSC team worked to develop and evaluate the self-assessment tools. These organisations ranged from very large multi-national corporations to small companies and spanned both the demand and supply sides of construction.