Full Time Sustainability Specialists in Your Firm

Our firm has approximately 75 people. I am not full time on the Sustainability Director role (especially lately) but our High Performance Coordinator position is full time so we are about 1.5 FTE on sustainability specialists. Kristian Kicinski AIA LFA LEED AP BD+C Associate Principal / Director of Sustainability (he, him) Bassetti Architects d 206-536-1370 / o 206-340-9500 www.bassettiarch.com

Bora is similar: 1 FT Sustainability Director for about 70 people. Other people's efforts amount to probably another 0.5 FTE. Mike Manzi He/Him Bora Architecture & Interiors Main: 503 226 1575 Direct: 503 802 5007

There are some good surveys on this as part of past SDL Summits – not sure if BG can share completely anonymized versions of those or not. At LMN we have 1 full time sustainability person (usually me, but I’m on vacation so it’s Justin) and another person (Chris Savage) who spends much of his time on building performance. That’s out of around 150 total staff including non-design staff. We have hired a summer sustainability intern or a full-time sustainability intern in the past as well. We also have other people who spend time on sustainability leading our Applied Research Teams but these are a relatively small number of hours. So somewhere between 2 and 3 FTE depending on what you want to count. -Kjell From: J

We have ~125 people across 7 offices.  I'm technically our Director of Sustainability, but by no means am full time in that role, though we too, should have someone be full time.  I'd say that maybe I'm a third of the time in that role typically, and then during project deadlines it would be very minimal.  Krissy Flickinger LRK T 901 521 1440 www.lrk.com

Here in Design Collective, we have 2 office locations with total 85 people. We have 1 director of sustainability, that is me, and total of 0.5 FTE among our staff contributing sustainability initiatives, outside of their day-to-day project delivery. My time is split between strategic and/or RnD efforts and project specific. The split fluctuates depending on what occupies my headspace, but I try to maintain 50/50 split for a reason. So, if we are counting number of people engaged in sustainability initiatives, we have about 15 people in varying capacity and focus areas. If we are looking at FTE, we have about 1.5 FTE.

At Elkus Manfredi we have 245 staff in one office, I am the only FTE dedicated to sustainability for our 50 Interiors staff and approx 160-70 arch/planning staff. We orginally had 2 FTE, but soon after the initial COVID shutdown we streamlined to one person, and it's way too much for one person! I am finding ways to get some relief, for example our materials librarian left, so I was able to adjust the job description for that role and we now have a new "Materials Specialist" in the office who is now able to help me with all of the healthy material initiatives. I also was able to bring an intern on board who does high perf analysis for our projects. We were easily able to keep him billable to projects pretty much 80% of the time, so he is now going on his second year. I am tasking him with leading up our energy code update efforts as MA's new metrics and thresholds are driving us to do more modeling/analysis using Therm and eventually diving into PH. Kristen

We are ~300 people across 10 offices.  We currently have one Director of Sustainability (me), two Sustainability Coordinators, and 1/2 Energy Analytics Specialist (other half of this person's time is mechanical engineering).  So 3.5 FTE at the moment.  We are engaging individuals across all disciplines (ARCH, MEP, Structural, Interiors, and CA) to take leadership roles in sustainability efforts, but those folks are not working specifically as sustainability staff.

This is a great topic - I love seeing everyone's responses.  We are a 100 person firm with 3 offices in MD and VA. I am the only Director of Environmental Design and it's a part time role (ebbs and flows depending on other billable work as either a PA or PM on design projects). We do have 5 champions in the office that spend some of their time with me on AIA 2030 reporting, internal sustainable administration on a few projects, being content experts, helping with healthy materials specs/library. And we have a student intern or two each year that helps with some other efforts that we do like carbon LCA, daylight simulations, etc. So - I guess we have the equivalent of 0.75 to 1 FTE at the moment. 

I agree - it's great to see what everyone is doing!  At SAR+ we have just over 60 architects, interior designers and planners, and I am full-time sustainability work as the sustainability coordinator. I have help on specific efforts and a few hours a week from one person from leadership and another colleague for guidance. I would say we are about 1.25 to 1.5 FTE on sustainability efforts for the 60+ of us. 

Kjell mentioned that BuildingGreen had some survey data on the # of sustainability-focused staff (billable and nonbillable) vs firm size.  Poking around, I found that slide 36 of the Report from the Summer 2019 SDL Summit provides a chart of results from firms participating in that summit; I've attached a screen-snap of that slide to this post as well. 

To accommodate the huge range in firm sizes among SDL partipating firms, the staff counts are listed as "FTE per 100 employees" and the horizontal axis is logarithmic. Huge scatter in the data, but if you squint it looks like firms of around 100 employees reported having around 2 FTE at about 50% billable, and firms  with around 1000 employees had around 5-10 FTEs with a sustainability focus, with around 2 of those FTE being non-billable.

Very interesting topic.  We are about a 35 person firm, and I currently spend about 40% of time sustsainability director duties. We dont have anyone else dedicated to it, but staff are pulled into studies from time to time. I believe it is critical for the director role to still be managing (or co-managing) projects for at least 50% of the time.  We are thinking of hiring someone at intern level to help with diagrams, presentations, data tracking, research, and library management.

For our office of ~50, we have one titled sustainability director (me) and a number of other staff in "lead" roles (a lead is kind of an internal title). None of us are full time, which is a function of how we like to structure our practice. but the total FTE time would be well over 1 i think if you add everything up. I think it's important to differentiate billable and non-billable sustainability leadership tasks. We try to strategically pair individuals with projects and efforts that will naturally grow their capacity in a focus area so that they can be more of a resource across projects. I think overall, half of what i would call "sustainability FTE" ends up being billable (where people like me and other topic experts are either using one of their projects to educate themselves on a topic or informing other design teams) vs non-billable (internal investments in research, analysis, writing and public speaking, etc) On Mon, Apr 10, 2023 at 9:01 AM Sara Bayer wrote:

We had a very helpful discussion on this topic at the SDL Summer Summit back in 2019, and I remember noting that the ratio of FTE's at the attending firms was approximately 1:60 staff. At the time, I was the only full-time sustainability point person in our firm of 300+ staff. Now we've expanded our Green Team: I remain the Sustainability Director, and we have hired full-time Sustainability Coordinators for Architecture and for Planning. We are soon to post a position in Landscape Architecture. 4 FTES seems like a realistic goal for us

And now from HKS. We have 16 people in our DesignGreen team. This includes a team of four that does performance / energy analysis. The firm is around 1,525 people so that's roughly 1:100. We have been moving toward a model where we have a DesignGreen person or team focused on specific Practices. (Think health or eduction or commercial mixed use.) This seems to be working. 

DIALOG is about 550 people across 5 studios including architecture, MEP, structural, landscape, planning, interiors, etc. We have 15 dedicated sustainability staff - about half energy modelers and half sustainability consultants. Two of us have other governance roles, but we also have a healthy group of architects and engineers who pinch hit -- particularly for LCA models, but occassionally other services as well. On the whole we have approximately 1 sustainability consultant and one energy modeler per 70-75 people. Mara