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 Keep Current | One of the biggest complaints about all training is when resources and information are out of date.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!

The pain of change

Interestingly businesses now and days do a great job of hiding the efforts behind the scenes of creating new products, new solutions, new ideas. By the time the customer interacts with it, the customer experience is made to be perfect. I think this has greatly skewed our expectations in our world today.
I buy a fancy new phone and now I can search the web, map where I am, find a cafe near by, take pictures, edit videos, etc. And when there is a dropped call I am gravely disappointed. Or if I purchase a shirt and after 10 washes it gets a hole - how could this happen? We have done such a good job of customer service and innovation and marketing that in all reality we live in a false world. Our expectations that anything can be done are incredibly high.
One side of me completely agrees (I am an optimist), the other side...
What impact will this level of expectations have on moving our world toward sustainability?
For instance, I am involved in a project currently where we want to change a regular behavior in our business to reduce our environmental impact. The first expectation was... "well can't we just change it and be done with it?" 6 months later we find that around ever corner is another set of questions and impacts that we had not thought of from the beginning. It will easily take us easily another 6 months to get this project off the ground. And when it eventually does happen, it will be talked about by our marketing and sales departments like it was an easy switch and we "just did it".
What gets lost here is the countless hours, conversations and testing to see if we can in fact make a sustainable change. I think if we lowered expectations so that they were more in line with the truth, we would see something remarkable happen. People wouldn't think of things in abstract, they would understand the steps it take. I invite all of you who were interested in making a change, but feared the time and effort - know that there is no other way. And what you will gain by going through the process is far greater than anything you can buy off the shelf.