How to Drive Greater Returns in Social Value: A Q&A With Alfie Gilbert

When looking at Alfie Gilbert's meteoric rise and early career wins, you'd be forgiven for thinking he's an overnight success or that he's cracked a secret social value formula. In both cases, you'd be wrong. Alfie's hard-earned wins and reputation have come through his tireless work ethic, his partnerships with talented teams, and his experience tackling the toughest projects and programs in the private and public sectors.

Alfie started his career in sustainability consultancy and began specializing in social value in 2019. Since then, he's worked to upskill, develop understanding and embed social value throughout the lifecycle of services for key infrastructure clients across multiple sectors, including transportation, healthcare, real estate, energy and environment.

The social value sector needs more people like Alfie. As the demand for social value and its measurement grows, the market faces constant changes in procurement processes and regulatory requirements and the increasing impact of climate change. On top of those challenges, it's saddled with rising costs and a severe shortage of incoming talent.

The key question: in the face of all these challenges, how do organizations get the best return for social value investment? The short answer is that we need community-focused, digitally-enabled, resilient solutions that keep iterating and adapting to change, both political and environmental. Safeguarding communities and protecting natural spaces, our wildlife and our future require data-driven decision-making, tech-led innovation and, crucially, the right leadership - shown in Alfie's insights below.

What motivated you to pursue a career dedicated to creating social value?

There are two key drivers. The first is that I've always been interested in people. I love learning and understanding how people tick and why society is how it is. A social value career provides the opportunity to help people and champion people-first decision-making in business. The second driver is the opportunity to work in a job where we're trying to make a positive difference in the world each day and can see tangible benefits or outcomes.

How would you define social value?

Jacobs has a pretty spot-on definition: "Social value is the net impact a business, project or policy has on societal wellbeing." Like sustainability, it considers the social, economic and environmental impacts but looks at this through a community outcome lens to ask: How does this impact someone's life?

In its simplest form, social value challenges us to understand the changes we make in people's lives and what value people place on these changes.

Can you describe some of the social value projects you've worked on?

I've been involved in various Environment Agency social sustainability workstreams at Jacobs. I've been seconded into the Environment Agency's Central Sustainability Team as a social specialist and have supported at a more regional level through the Agency's working groups. More recently, I've started getting involved at a program and project level to help the Agency better understand, strategize and embed social equity into their delivery.

My standout project would have to be the secondment into the Environment Agency, where, with my Agency counterpart, we've led in updating the Agency's approach and focus on social equity (otherwise termed people and community benefits) as part of the wider refresh of their sustainability strategy: eMission2030. This has involved helping define a standardized definition around social equity and people outcomes more broadly, along with a corresponding action plan for how they can deliver against this. Within this role, we've carried out significant consultations with internal and external stakeholders of the Environment Agency to ensure the core, central, strategic approach is applicable and achievable at a local level for teams getting out and delivering services.

What excites you most about the recent work you've been doing?

I think the Environment Agency would agree with me in saying they're in the early stages of their journey around social value (or social equity) and, therefore, it's an excellent opportunity to be at the forefront of this development in a major public body that has significant reach into, and influence, across so many people's lives. There is also real internal buy-in to social equity and a passionate team that wants to drive forward best practices in this space, so there's lots to learn and varied work to get stuck into!

I'm also excited about the digital innovation we see on projects. We're at the forefront of digital tools, and we've seen real success in automation - it has saved us lots of time and enabled us to centralize our data. We have built toolkits that deliver a single source of truth, offering earlier project engagement and driving more time savings. We've also built a cutting-edge design automation tool that has saved us substantial time in design works for a flood protection scheme. Lastly, we also have our own in-house developed carbon management software to save time and cost. This is paired with seconded carbon experts who offer their insights and intelligence.

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