Head of Sustainability

HEAD OF SUSTAINABILITY – DUNNES STORES

Dunnes Stores is Ireland’s leading retailer positioned at the cutting edge of food, fashion and home retailing. We have over 130 stores in Ireland, Northern Ireland and Spain, a strong e commerce business and are expanding our service and product offering all the time.

Overview of the Role

Dunnes Stores is currently looking for a Head of Sustainability.   This is a great opportunity for someone who wants to make an impact and influence at the highest level in Dunnes Stores.   We are looking for someone who is a passionate about delivering business change and being  a champion for the importance of sustainable initiatives, but credible and pragmatic enough to understand the challenges facing a business in a competitive,  commercial environment.   Here in Dunnes we currently have a Sustainability Strategy which is sponsored at shareholder and director level.   Our Strategic plan centres around five pillars Employees, Sustainable Sourcing & Circular Economy, Internal Resource Management, Food Safety, Health & Community.

We are looking for someone to help us to continue to drive this agenda within Dunnes to deliver tangible, practical change in our business.  Your contribution will positively impact the business, our customers, suppliers and our colleagues to create lasting value to our business. This is an exciting role and the suitable candidate would need to be a self-starter who can continue to build on our strategic plan and deliver to robust targets

Primary responsibilities

• Leading, developing, influencing and delivering Dunnes Stores Sustainability Strategy throughout the business.
• Support heads of business functions and Directors within Dunnes to deliver an integrated sustainability strategy and demonstrate progress against strategic objectives
• Monitoring and reporting on sustainability performance and progress against sustainability objectives to shareholders and Directors in Dunnes Stores
• Identifying new opportunities to create a positive impact and develop actionable strategies and plans to address key impact areas
• Working closely with internal teams including Food, Textiles, Store Development, Procurement & Supply Chain, HR, Marketing, Hospitality
• Overseeing and establishing base lines to measure areas and define KPIs to measure the success of Sustainable Strategy
• Supporting Science-based Targets for Climate, defining reduction opportunities in line with the targets
• Anticipating future trends as well as monitoring emerging global environmental issues, innovation and regulation direction
• Managing relationships with key innovation partners and building new relationships with key stakeholders internally and externally
• Overseeing and managing appropriate communication programmes, methods of delivery and evaluation of effectiveness to embed the agenda internally and externally
• Working with Dunnes to foster and embed a culture within the business
• Developing  policies and standards and working to embed  with business stakeholders
• Being a champion for Sustainability across the entire business, using your influence to drive change, working across other functions to share best practice
• Developing our biodiversity strategy and ensuring it lands across the business
• Chairing monthly Sustainability Strategy meeting with Directors and Shareholders and coordinating actions and deliverables against the plan.
• Supporting the business to consider sustainability proposals with attention to factors such as cost effectiveness, feasibility, and ease of integration with other programs.
• Being an expert. Providing support and technical advice to the wider business to enable them to undertake their roles and responsibilities for sustainability. In particular support  strategies to address issues such as energy use, plastic reduction, resource conservation, recycling, pollution reduction, waste elimination, transportation, ethical sourcing,
• Advise on compliance with all relevant statutory reporting obligations

Key Skills & Attributes

• Collaboration and Networking Skills – This role involves strong collaboration with multiple parties from inside and outside the company. You must be able to build relationships, influence, manage and navigate the varied parts of the business.
• Thorough and current knowledge of sustainability practices, and applicable laws and regulations.
• Ability to analyze and understand research and to identify relevant and valuable information
• Excellent organizational skills and attention to detail.
• Presentation skills required to deliver plans to varying groups of individuals.
• Demonstrate a high level of competence in business acumen, agility and resilience
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Creative problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to problem solve and to be able to develop relationships across all functions of the business, and all levels, to find the right answers, or to get the help you need to deliver a project.
• An ability to make an impact and influence at the most senior level. 
• A strategic thinker, and a confident and accomplished presenter and communicator.
• A problem solver who keeps the customer at the heart of what we do
• Proficient at managing sustainability reporting to demonstrate progress against KPIs

Experience

• 8 years+ experience in implementing sustainability programmes an in-house
• Experience and a track record in embedding sustainability into a business’s operations and delivering against a strategy. 
• Experience in delivering KPIs/metrics and baseline to measure the impact of the sustainability agenda

If this sounds like the perfect job for you, please apply now!

Dunnes Stores is an equal opportunities employer

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