Factsheet dialogue on sustainability in Pakistan

Lessons learned

• A baseline prepared in a participatory approach using carefully chosen key performance indicator, plus allowing the factories to set their own targets increased ownership and helped drawing the attention on progress as well as challenges and risks.
• Compliance is usually related to increased costs. By showcasing increased productivity and cost-beneficial impacts of increased compliance with labour and environmental standards, the factories’ engagement increased.
• Consultants conducting the Dialogue for Sustainability need to be highly experienced and well capacitated in process consultancy and change management, while being subject matter experts in labour standards and HR, resource efficiency and environment and industrial engineering. Hence, using the Dialogue for Sustain - ability for the development of sustainable business models for local consulting firms remains a challenge for the future. It is highly important to include the top management of factories. Some factories would only send their middle management which causes lower ownerships among all participants.
• Change management processes have largely been institution - alized in the factories and were reported to continue even after the project ended. Nevertheless, refresher workshops were necessary to maintain the quality and increase learnings.
• The approach needs to be adjusted to the size of the factories. Smaller factories have less capacities but can operationalize improvement more quickly and there is more room for improve - ment in comparison to bigger, mainly export-oriented factories