Staff Conference 2019 – Butterfly Creek, Auckland

It’s that time of year again for Enviro-Mark Solutions’ Annual Staff Conference. This year we all met in Auckland for two days of reflection and team building. This dedicated time and space to be together is invaluable as we are spread across three main sites (Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch) and with a few satellite staff. With the current environmental momentum, our projects have been racing along as well. Stopping for a couple of days meant we were each able to get a solid catch-up of the various projects and solutions that we’re all working on with our clients and industry. Watch this exciting space!

Day 1 saw a fantastic session with the insightful Rob Campbell, a Director on a number of Boards including SkyCity and Summerset Group (both members of our carbon programmes). He shared with us his view of how the value of a company should incorporate its carbon impacts and the responsibility of Board members to embed this into their organisations.

We also received the results of our work preferences survey and how our teams can work together. These were quite interesting occasionally surprising! We have a great mix of introverts and extroverts, but slightly stacked practical/analytical/structured workers and fewer creative/beliefs/flexible workers. Not that surprising given what we do!

We also celebrated our successes over the past year and heard from our very own Professor Zero, CEO Ann Smith, on what the future looks like and what we’ve achieved for the atmosphere. It ended with dinner, drinks, frivolity and then some zzz’s at our client Sudima Auckland Airport (carboNZero certified).

On Day 2, we got stuck into strategy and heard updates from each of our teams, including Technical, IT and Marketing – no spoilers here! There was also a lively session with small groups working on some of our business processes. It was handy knowing the results of our work preferences from the session on the previous day in order to work the most effectively with each other. After all the hard work we then said our goodbyes and travelled back to our home towns.

What did we learn? How passionate we all are about ensuring we do as much as we can to inspire our clients, our partner organisations and our own staff to take action for a better environment and a sustainable low carbon economy.