How to Integrate Sustainability Into Your Business: Employee Engagement
The strategies to integrate sustainability into your business
This topic is a four-part series on the strategies to integrate sustainability into your business. In my last article, I talked about defining sustainability goals and things to take note of. Other topics in this series are reviewing your business value chain and engaging clients/customers in your sustainability journey.
This article will be focused on the second topic, which is employee engagement.
Employee engagement is vital to achieving a full-fledged eco-friendly business and a happy workplace. One significant benefit of integrating sustainability in your business is attracting and retaining top talents. The National Environmental Education Network reveals that 90 % of employees say that engaging in their company’s sustainability works enhances their job satisfaction and overall feeling about the company.
As awareness and conservations around climate change and environmental risks continue, sustainability can be a great tool to recruit and inspire employees. Today’s employees are enthusiastic about working for companies where they feel they are making a difference, a difference that goes beyond profitability.
The Key to creating a vibrant and sustainable company is to find ways to get all employees, from the top executives to assemble line workers, personally engaged in day–to–day corporate sustainability efforts. — Paul Polman, Unilever’s CEO
Integrating sustainability into your business through employee engagement creates a win on all sides (The firm, employee, community, and the planet) and ensures continued growth for the company.
A company that is making efforts to integrate sustainability into its culture and operation will attract top talents, and a continuous employee engagement will also yield job satisfaction and increased productivity which will, in turn, enhance the growth of the company and so the cycle of growth and business success and employee’s satisfaction continues.
Most businesses are coming around to ensuring that sustainability is critical. However, they haven’t yet figured out how to engage all employees in the company’s day-to-day sustainability activities. Paul Polman
Here are some thoughts on how to engage employees:
Communication
Communication is the basis of an engaged workforce and, ultimately a successful business venture. Integrating sustainability into your business through employee engagement will require the ability to effectively communicate your sustainability goals, how you came about the goals and the reasons for selecting the goals. The method of communication will determine how employees perceive the goals, how they receive them, how they want to relate to them and how they integrate the goals into their daily operations. Employees should see the bigger picture, beyond profit and the business growth to more developed and stable social communities and a sustainable planet.
Educate
The importance of educating employees on the issues around sustainability should not be overlooked. Investing in employee education help to build your internal network of subject matter experts, and it also helps to drive innovation in your organization.
Education is key to bolstering the involvement of employees in the innovation process because a continuous updating of knowledge is needed to contribute to innovation processes.
For instance, if you run a textile company and one of your sustainability goals is to reduce the release of toxic chemicals into the environment, having trained employees in issues around toxicology (toxicant pathways, principles, management), green chemistry principles, and many other will be an asset to the organization.
Leverage new employees’ onboarding sessions
Statistics have shown that top talents are drawn to sustainable business enterprises. However, we also have a large percentage of great talent that might be drawn to an organization for other reasons aside from sustainability, such as work-life balance, compensation, additional perks, and benefits.
Organizations are leveraging employee onboarding sessions for these kinds of talents to communicate the company’s sustainability goals and initiatives. This is a good way of placing the idea of the bigger picture into the employee’s mind.
Sustainability culture and practices
Making sustainability part of the company’s culture is achievable, but it is usually a gradual process. One of the most effective ways is to creatively bring sustainability into team bonding activities. Here are some ideas for team bonding activities around sustainability
- Sustainability education: Informal sustainability discussions on issues around sustainability, such as Lunch and learn (this can be done bi-weekly, monthly, or as desired.)
- Sustainability film series: There are tons of films (as short as 5 minutes to as long as 1 hour) that address different issues around sustainability which discussions can follow.
- Sustainability or green book clubs
- Sustainability workplace challenges and competitions, quizzes, and games. This can be centered around recycling, workplace paper management, energy, and many more
- Sustainability moments: Most organizations have safety moments at the beginning of a meeting, a brief safety talk about a specific subject. In the same way, we can also have sustainability moments, picking on any trending issues around the three pillars (economic, social, and environment).
Finally, engaging employees should go beyond creating a green team; employees down to seemingly unrelated positions such as accountant, receptionist, and software engineers must all be involved to achieve this goal.
Regardless of their role in the company, everyone needs to understand and embrace that sustainability vision. Check out the Project Drawdown Lab on How every job can be a climate job.
Thank you for reading.
