Senior Environmental Sustainability Manager

About the role

To provide strategic and operational leadership across multiple projects or regions, driving the delivery of the Building New Futures strategy.

This role leads teams, manages senior stakeholder relationships, and ensures sustainability is embedded into business planning and performance.

• Lead the development and implementation of the Environmental Sustainability Strategy and Bridging the Gap plans across the area, ensuring alignment with Building New Futures commitments.
• Oversee the management and development of Environmental Sustainability teams, fostering a #One Team culture and ensuring resource planning, capability, and succession.
• Promote a sustainable mindset across the group by engaging and inspiring individuals to embed sustainability into their functions and behaviours.
• Provide strategic sustainability expertise to business units and project teams, supporting work winning, operational delivery and innovation. Represent sustainability in bid responses and client engagements, aligning proposals with Building New Futures commitments.
• Drive cultural change by embedding sustainability into business‑as‑usual processes and the Business Management System (BMS).
• Lead internal assurance activities and support external audits, ensuring compliance with environmental regulations, ISO
  14001, the Business Management System (BMS), and company policies.
• Oversee governance processes and drive continuous improvement of compliance performance across the area, including the development of training and action plans to address recurring issues and inform strategic decision‑making.
• Ensure compliance and performance data informs strategic decision‑making and is accurately reported through internal and client systems.
• Contribute to business unit communications, sharing sustainability insights, performance, and opportunities for improvement.
• Plan and manage environmental sustainability resourcing, including forecasting demand and ensuring appropriate support is in place to deliver compliance and performance outcomes.
• Report good practice and near misses using the Observation App, and encourage others to do the same.

• Strategic integration and governance.
• Driving cultural change and continuous improvement.
• Leading internal assurance and audit programmes and reviews, and driving governance improvements.
• Understand global mega‑trends and how they drive the need to transform the world to sustainability.
• Understand how environmental limits and the equalities agenda support economic growth and sustainable capital.
• Environmental legislation and trends in construction.
• Business strategy and sustainability alignment.
• Understanding of business risk frameworks and how sustainability integrates with strategic planning.
• Governance processes and performance reporting.
• Experience.
• Managing area‑wide sustainability teams.
• Leading training and action planning.
• Supporting SLT communications and decision‑making.
• Developing and implementing area‑wide sustainability improvement plans.
• Qualifications.
  • Degree in environmental / sustainability‑related field preferred.
  • Registered Environmental Practitioner (REnvP) preferred, may be working towards Chartered Environmentalist (CEnv).

Day in, day out, our teams deliver some of the UK’s most ambitious, exciting and meaningful projects; developing, building and maintaining the vital infrastructure that supports national economies and strengthens communities.

• Smart working, giving you more flexibility such as staggered start and finish times, with up to 40% remote working, where roles allow.
• 25 days paid annual leave (pro rata).
• Family friendly policies which include 28 weeks full pay for maternity/adoption leave and four weeks full pay for paternity/partners leave.
• Pension, share incentive plan, volunteering leave, recognition schemes and much more…

Balfour Beatty’s Highways business delivers major schemes including motorway upgrade programmes, complex national infrastructure projects and regional investment programme works for National Highways. We have a strong orderbook and a positive pipeline of opportunities, we put the road…