Building for Tomorrow
Q&As
Document owner: PR and Comms
1.
What is Building for Tomorrow?
Building for Tomorrow is the name and identity of our sustainability agenda in the UK. It is our own version of
M&S’s Plan A or Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan.
Our goal under Building for Tomorrow is to embed sustainability into our business and it is delivered across four workstreams, encompassing all our sustainability activities: Leadership; Clients; Workplace; Communities.
2.
Why are we launching a sustainability agenda?
At JLL we have been committed to sustainability for a long time. This is not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it provides us with commercial value in a variety of ways:
 Sustained revenue streams
 New income opportunities
 Differentiation from competitors
 Added value to clients (cost cutting, managing compliance risks, future proofing asset values etc.)
 Improved relationships with clients
 Recruitment and retention of top talent
 Cost reductions across our own occupied portfolio
 Enhanced brand awareness and reputation
The launch of Building for Tomorrow aims to bring all our various strands together under one umbrella, that resonates more easily across our diverse and complex business.
Specifically regarding our clients, as they themselves progress along their sustainability journeys, they increasingly rely on us to deliver their aspirations. By embedding sustainability advice into our services, we can help them comply with regulation, source capital from investors, and future proof their assets by enhancing environmental and social performance.
Through our sustainability thought-leadership outputs we have an opportunity to reach out to existing clients with interesting and new ideas, and to extend our network of property investor, owner and occupier clients on a topic of mutual interest.
To safeguard our reputation and demonstrate integrity, it is imperative that we also tend to our own direct operational impacts. This includes ensuring we reduce our environmental impact and create workspaces that promote staff health and wellbeing. It also encompasses our investment into local community projects and the shared value this creates for our business in terms of new skills for staff and increased business profile.
3.
How does our sustainability agenda compare to our competitors?
We are the first property consultancy in the UK to publicly launch its sustainability commitments under a branded agenda. While most of our peers have a corporate sustainability policy, we are the first ones to commit to a wide range of sustainability targets, covering both our client services and our own operations. We believe it’s important to be clear about our commitments and journey, and transparent about our performance along the way.

4.
How does Building for Tomorrow relate with JLL’s Global Sustainability Commitment?
JLL’s Global Sustainability Commitment is to:
“Lead the transformation of the real estate industry by making a positive impact both in and beyond our business” [ http://www.jll.co.uk/Documents/csr/GlobalSustainabilityCommitment.pdf
]
Our UK agenda, Building for Tomorrow, is entirely consistent with this global commitment. It takes it one stage further by providing an identity for all our related efforts, driven by UK specific factors such as local regulations, client demand and market dynamics.
There are essentially two key pillars to our Global approach:
 The first one focusses on reducing the direct environmental impacts arising from our business operations. This essentially covers our Building for Tomorrow commitments under the Workplace and
Communities workstreams.
 The second one is focussed on the sustainability advice we provide to our clients. This covers our
Building for Tomorrow commitments under the Clients and Leadership workstreams.
5.
What are we doing across our four work streams?
Leadership
We include sustainability trends in our market research, where applicable, and also produce innovative research to drive sustainability in the real estate sector. Some of the key topics we plan to cover in 2015 include future sustainability trends, socio-economic impact measurements and investor exposure to Central London obsolescence risk.
We have also long played a leading role in developing sustainability benchmarks such as the Real Estate
Environmental Benchmark (REEB) for property investor members of the Better Buildings Partnership and the
Next Generation benchmark for the UK’s top 25 housebuilders. In 2015 we will continue to partner with key industry initiatives including GRESB, EPRA and Next Generation.
Clients
In 2014, we achieved:
 7% reduction in energy intensity across like for like client properties in our P&AM managed portfolio;
 18% reduction in energy intensity across client properties where we have implemented energy reduction plans (advice typically delivered by Upstream, not necessarily on P&AM managed properties)
We will continue to help clients consider the sustainability implications of their property decisions and achieve further reductions in energy and emissions use.
To ensure that all our staff are able to talk confidently to clients on sustainability, we’re pushing a programme of training out to all our UK workforce. Having spent a year developing a bespoke sustainability training curriculum, we have now rolled this out on our E-Learning platform and made it mandatory for all our 2500 UK staff. This training programme will ensure that JLL’s brokers, valuers, agents and advisors are well equipped to respond to growing concerns around energy and carbon performance, as well as wider socio-economic issues
Workplace

We are implementing sustainable workplace practices to maximise staff wellbeing and minimise our environmental footprint. Our original target was to reduce our energy and carbon use by 10% by 2017, against
2012 baseline. We are very proud to confirm that we have already achieved a 16% reduction in our energy intensity per FTE between 2013 and 2014.
In 2014 80% of JLL’s UK occupied estate was ISO 14001 certified by floor area. In 2015 we will increase this to
95%, as well as committing to Ska Silver ratings on at least half of the occupied UK estate.
We have also recently launched an environmental communications campaign intended to change key behaviours in the office so as to achieve even greater energy and waste savings across our occupied estate.
Communities
Community investment is highly valued at JLL. In 2014 we invested around £450,000 into impactful community initiatives, including 407 staff days of volunteering. Another key success story is our growing commitment to apprenticeships, and continued involvement in Business in the Community’s ‘Ready for Work’ programme which provides structured coaching and support for longer-term unemployed people who are at risk of homelessness.
In 2015, we will continue this scale of investment, extending to 500 days of staff volunteering. We have recently appointed a dedicated community manager for the whole of the UK, who will help to coordinate community investment activity and develop a formal community strategy for coming years.
6.
Who is responsible for delivering on the commitments under Building for Tomorrow?
Ultimately, all our staff have responsibility to take action under Building for Tomorrow. We continue to provide training and guidance for different staff groups on what they can do to help us achieve our goals.
To further support this, we have a comprehensive governance structure that includes:
 Building for Tomorrow Strategy Board:
Chaired by our COO, this meets three times yearly to provide oversight and direction across all four workstreams
 Clients and Leadership Group:
Chaired by the UK Head of Sustainability, this group is made up of Sustainability Leads from each of our principal business lines, research and marketing teams. This Group meets quarterly to oversee the embedding of sustainability capabilities and processes throughout all our advice to clients and thought leadership outputs.
 Workplace and Communities Group: chaired by the UK Deputy Chairman, this is made up of senior individuals representing a different aspect of our own corporate activities such as estate and facilities management, HR, charitable and community activities, procurement, ethics etc. This Group focusses on how we can embed sustainability in our workplaces and deliver on our communities commitment.
In addition to the above groups, we have a growing network of sustainability champions, comprising of individuals within JLL’s different business lines, regions, and offices who play a key role in delivering on our commitments across the four workstreams. These champions have sustainability objectives included in their annual performance appraisals and are supported with guidance, training, information and networking opportunities throughout the year.
We also have a small central sustainability team which measures the firm’s progress against the targets and key performance indicators. Progress is reported internally and externally through our website.

7.
Where do we want to be in are 10/20 years’ time?
Launch of Building for Tomorrow marks an important milestone in our journey towards being the most sustainable real estate advisory firm in the UK. We have already set ambitious targets for this year, some of which extend to 2017, and are currently working towards developing a longer term road map to achieving our goal. Over the coming years we aspire to:
• Be renowned for how our advice has driven sustainability innovation into the real estate market
• Achieve greater energy efficiency in the built environment and increase the share of renewables in the UK grid, in line with the EU targets
• Ensure all new developments and client fit-outs we work on achieve great green building and healthy building standards
• Ensure that every transaction that we advise on will have considered sustainability risks and opportunities fully
• Become an employer of choice where talented people want to work and flourish
• Achieve a truly diverse workforce of our own and champion the benefits of diversity through our work with clients
• Demonstrate that we are delivering and supporting resilient, diverse communities that enable
UK cities to succeed in the long term