Do Your Employees Care About Sustainability? Tips to get people on board with your Sustainability Goals

No matter how big or small the organization, companies everywhere are making new and exciting commitments to sustainability - externally and internally. 

But how much weight do your external sustainability commitments hold when inside your office you throw things away instead of recycling, leave the water running while you make copies, and generally don't set a good example. 

Changing behavior is not easy but in a supportive group environment you can prioritize actions that will foster a greater understanding of your sustainable business strategies. 

1. Offer Flexibility | Your employees are already busy. Study work patterns to identify opportunities to insert flexible sustainability training that works for their schedule not yours. Use digital, unique means of communicating this information. Let employees own their education.

2. Be Relevant | Make sure employees understand what sustainability means to them and their responsibilities. Forcing broad generic goals on hard working people will give you at best mixed results. Use focus groups to present sustainability goals and solicit real feedback on why these goals are meaningful to your employees. Recognizes differences between positions, teams, and departments. Cater sustainability information accordingly when you roll out sustainability programs.

3. Keep Current | One of the biggest complaints about all training is when resources and information are out of date. When designing the program, assign accountability for updating content, resources, and especially links (nothing shows you don't care about training by putting dead end links into current training). Get buy-in from everyone involved and make these responsibilities an important part of a job description. Creating a great sustainability training program is one thing; keeping it great is the real goal. 

4. Do It Together | Get everyone on board with your goals. Create team goals and declare and track progress publicly. Don't over promise; set one or two goals at a time to change behavior with a fun challenge. Do challenges for at least two weeks to start forming new habits. Assign team leads to motivate people and create ownership. 

5. Reward Learning | Think of non-monetary incentives. Offer opportunities for professional growth for individuals, teams, and departments. Offering experiential rewards that last long beyond the moment instead of one-time monetary or short-term rewards will save the business money, add more value for employees, and create longer term commitment and engagement in the important process of embedding sustainability in your internal culture. 

Do you have any other ideas or suggestions for employee engagement? Send your thoughts to mackenzie@sustainabilityinreview.com

Thank you!

By Design, Not by Default

For a long time, there has been a major assumption about Sustainability in business. Not always explicitly stated, but clearly communicated through actions taken by the majority of businesses: Sustainability should happen by default.

Whether through the power of intrinsically-motivated leadership or due to the nature of the industry, some companies just "get it". Outsiders assume these leading companies default to sustainable actions - seemingly at odds with stakeholder interests or other business goals. 

Other companies wait until their hands are forced, by bad press from negative consequences of unsustainable practices or other means. These companies ignore sustainable options until they are in the middle of controversy and must respond quickly, without preparation, and often under the scrutiny of the public eye. 

But as a whole, people are beginning to recognize that true sustainable business practice must happen by design and not be default. Those first companies succeed not because they stick to sustainability despite good business sense - it is because they have incorporated sustainability into the core of their business strategy. Sustainability is a lens through which we can view our business practices and make decisions not to the detriment of stakeholder value, but to enhance everything we do as value creators. 

The other kind of company may not have holistically implemented sustainability into its business strategy - but still is beginning to recognize the value of considering sustainability as a highly effective method of risk management, as a tool for capturing more customer value through marketing, as a longer term and truer financial valuation of the company not just in the snapshot of today but as it will exist ten years in the future. 

So, wherever you are of the spectrum of completely integrating Sustainability into your business strategy or just looking to explore how sustainability can enhance your business strategy, grab your drafting pencils and blueprint paper. As in building anything else, constructing Sustainability into your business strategy starts from the foundation. It is a material with which we use to build structure and strength into our businesses - not a coat of green paint we apply liberally to the outside whenever green is en vogue. Sustainability ensures we will succeed, sustain, and thrive well into the future. 

Hello 2015

Hello 2015!
As another year comes to a close, we may find ourselves looking back - but we also are looking ahead. While we have many exciting projects with current and future clients to look forward to, we also want to make a commitment to be more present. Both in our lives, but also here on our blog. So expect to see lots more of us. Please don't hesitate to write in if you have any ideas you'd like to see a blog about or even share as a guest blogger. In this new year, we can't wait to bring you new content, new perspectives, new stories - as we begin another adventure at Sustainability in Review.

Sustainable food

I am currently up in Hood River Oregon where the valley is just glorious in all of the blossoms.  I am loving the conversations of all the fruit that is starting its growing process and keep asking when are these crops going to be ready to harvest?  You might notice I can't wait.

There are so many aspects to sustainable food and for this post I wanted to think about how much I really need to stay alive, thus sustain my existence.  And couple this will how much food I want to eat.  I could eat and do eat a lot more than I need to stay alive.
The balance of calories is a micro example of a sustainable system.
First you have to determine how many calories you need.  There are all kinds of website that can help determine this.  It gets a bit complicated when you factor in your exercise and lifestyle.  But the average person needs about 2000 calories a day.  So if you break down your meals into 3 a day that is about 667 per meal.  And some of us eat snacks, so move some calories over to snacks and take them away from meals.

Well we all can attest to not eating enough, or eating too much and finding that balance.  Maybe you eat too many calories at one time because you know you are going to be with less at another time and you are planning.  Also what happens when the calories we need are not available - pretend you can't just go to the grocery store and buy apples from around the world?

This has been a neat exercise for me, because it made me think how much I rely on connivence and what kind of changes I would have to make to plan out my food in take and caloric burning if food was limited.  Ultimately this is the kind of level of detail we should know to truly incorporate sustainability into our daily living...

Wall Street and Sustainability

So it isn't any surprise to any of you who are interested in sustainability to know that the objectives of corporations and wall street don't usually include environmental and social unless it benefits the bottom line.
Avoiding risk is an easy sell for either, reducing costs helps on the environmental front and improving workplace moral and security benefits productivity. Social and environmental are almost always linked into their financial siblings success.

The interesting part about this is that we are chasing our tails and are too disconnected from our impacts to truly understand how we can manage environmental and social to our benefits.
Chasing our tail because there is a desire to make the company financially stable and then help the planet and its occupants, but then we are hurting before helping and growing in a way that builds bad habits. And we know all habits are hard to break.
Disconnected because we have no control when environmental destruction floods out the crops we rely on to make our products, or when poverty becomes too much and disease prevents workers getting to work, thus losing our delivered on time products.
Despite the world becoming so ever intertwined we have also become so fragmented into different cogs of different wheels.
Big companies are starting to invest themselves all the way through their supply chains to avert risks, and when they get down to the parts they never imagined many are having to adress the social and environmental ills they caused head on. Be it cleaning up local drinking water, providing education or health care.

While we see providing social and environmental benefits as a cost here in America, it will come full circle and bite us in the ass if we don't and it will be a lot costlier when we do. but for now the eye is on the financial gain, so we will continue to weave our social and environmental endeavors into this web. In some ways this is the easy way out, accounting is simple. Environmental destruction is a hard one to measure and when it comes to justice, everyone has an option on what is fair for the social good.
This is where it is going to get interesting - this is where leadership lies.

I am so busy I am bored

I look around me and have noticed how incredibly busy people say they are. The idea of busy is interesting to me because it gets wrapped up with the idea of importance.
Busy people are important, they have tasked to do, they have deadlines to meet, they are essential in the success of the business, or in their personal life. We have to look at this because I think the idea of busy relates directly to sustainability. And slowing our selves down is a correction in the path from an unsustainable life to a sustainable one.
Why are we busy? Expectations, interests, keeping up with the Jones, the need to get ahead, the need for coveting more... there is always more to do, more to say, more to experience. This is life.
Our minds have decided that being busy is a life style we want or... we HAVE to have.
When we are so busy we have to make priorities, of course my boss comes before me, of course my kids come before my partner, of course X comes before Y. This is the nature of trying to do everything all at once.
If we choose to do somethings quickly we have to take short cuts, and those short cuts have impacts, not only on us, but on the world. My short cut might be to buy pre-made foods, or order take out, or not exercise, or not be a part of my community, or not read about issues, or engage with people. The list goes on and we notice OH I have a little more time, so we add more things to our list and become even busier.
Another thing I notice about the idea of busy is that I am not used to the feeling of busy. So busy that I do not understand what to do with myself or my mind when I don't have something I need to do. SO I start to make up projects, fill in time, go shopping, all sorts of things. And soon I become bored. Because this busy, this filling in all sense of quiet with consumption of things and duty has me locked into a feeling that I cannot escape.
Who I am I and what value am I if I have not output something today?
I have to answer this question because the busier I become the less useful I am. And I need to remain grounded if I am going to step out of the race and look for some kind of alternative....
I'll get to that, but in the meantime - like my plants I planted?