5 Ideas for Engaging Employees in Sustainability

Sustainability is no longer a niche issue, but connecting with your employees on the topic in a way that feels authentic, matches their expectations and is self-motivating can often feel challenging. Success in sustainability communications should be viewed as a two-way street.

You want employees to be your champions, evangelists for your sustainability efforts, but they can’t do that if they don’t understand your mission, purpose, strategy or goals. Without your employees, it’s impossible to implement effective strategies for change. For continued success, you need to create ambassadors to help spread the message and achieve your goals. You need to create a culture of responsibility.

Here are 5 ideas you can put into action:

1. Communicate sustainability vision and strategy.

This is the foundation and platform on which all your other efforts will rely upon to blossom. By using plain language and communicating in a way that personally speaks to your employees, you will more likely meet them where they are. Work to get personal connection to the company’s sustainability efforts, throughout the ranks. Break down your long-term goals into shorter-term milestones, so you can encourage a culture of sustainability without overwhelming employees with targets that seem unrelated to their individual efforts. See if you can add a sustainability-oriented goal into their individual annual performance objectives and consider tying related metrics to executive bonuses and compensation. 

2. Market sustainability internally.

In this new world, every company is expected to make an honest effort towards doing better, and your employees expect you to rise to the challenge.  Don’t silo your sustainability communications. Treat this topic like you would a ‘viral’ campaign, success is not one way communication, but the audience adopting the messages as their own. (Think Tik-Tok challenge.) To reach them, you need to meet employees where they are, that may be email, slack, the intranet, in their Employee Resource Groups, or in the break room. Use all available channels. See if there are perks employees will enjoy that also further the goals (like commuter benefits, a discount on bikes, filtered water instead of bottles, etc.). And respect varying levels of interest and participation. 

3. Be generous with recognition, consider creating a sustainability award.

You can incentivize change by rewarding staff or teams that go above and beyond. Let employees know if there will be resources (and perhaps funding) available to them to encourage their efforts. Doing this will show that your company is committed to sustainability and allows them to be part of the solution. Create a branded program with an award to recognize achievement and inspire others. This will build your culture of sustainability, and nothing brings out success stories from employees like the opportunity for recognition. Once these stories are collected, they can feed your other communication efforts.

4. Keep communicating, and make it a two-way street.

Use all avenues to keep employees up to date on your progress in your sustainability program, educate them on the ‘why,’ and encourage them to contribute their ideas. Let leaders (at all levels) speak about their success stories, demonstrating this isn’t a top-down mandate but something all are working on together. Make sustainability a part of your new-hire orientation process, so everyone knows it’s embedded in the business from day one. Ask them to help generate ideas that contribute to the overall action. Change takes time, you need to be on the journey together.

5. Create space for the topics your employees care about.

Everyone is seeing sustainability messages outside of work. It can feel like an arms race to keep up with the latest cultural shifts, but it’s important take stock of what’s resonating with your employees. From there, adjust and adapt in a way that draws a continuous connection between your goals and the larger trend of sustainability in society and the economy. Use the opportunity to reinforce shared values — across DEI, food, climate, and biodiversity efforts. Employees (and potential employees) want to work where their values are reflected.

The Takeaway

It isn’t news that sustainability is increasingly top of mind for your current and future workforce. The research continues to show that engagement in these issues increases job satisfaction. Once you have an educated and engaged group of ambassadors, you have expanded your horizons and increased opportunities for change. As always, there is nothing more beneficial to your business progress on sustainability, or really any initiatives, than engaged employees.

If you are overwhelmed and don’t know where to start, begin with your story. A clear sustainability narrative with a call to action is a good first step.

Get guidance: How Ideas On Purpose can help

If you find yourself struggling to see how your company can bring its sustainability story to life with internal or external stakeholders, consider engaging an expert. Check out the award-winning and stakeholder-pleasing sustainability reports and communications IOP has created — and email us to get in touch if you need help with yours. 

Photo by Hudson Hintze on Unsplash