The Benefits of Sustainability Employee Engagement

Why should you engage your employees in sustainability? Employees are a company’s essential stakeholders, its “most valuable assets” as often stated in mission statements. John Drummond, the CEO of Corporate Culture who will be speaking on employee engagement at  the Economist Sustainable Business Summit on March 17 in London considers that “an organization is its employees“, and therefore, a natural component of its sustainability strategy.

In a recent blog post, CSR Consultant Celesa Horvath offers an interesting insight into the benefits of employee engagement in sustainability.

She writes that in her experience,” early employee engagement enables the development of a bespoke approach to CR and sustainability that is relevant and sensitive to the realities of each specific organization, and which enjoys a high degree of support and buy-in from the outset.”

Engaging employees in sustainability is a perfect opportunity, especially for SMBs, to initially define – or measure the efficiency of – a company’s sustainability strategy.

Other benefits of employees engagement are:

• Identify and promote internal talent and drive loyalty
• Inspire staff and impact individual and collective behaviors within or outside the workplace
• Find solutions to specific sustainability issues
• Help achieve specific business targets
• Impact employees motivation
•  Help attract and retain talent
•  Make your employees your most valuable “sustainability ambassadors”

Both John and Celesa, acknowledge the fact that the first step towards a successful employee engagement in sustainability is to ensure a clear commitment at the  Board level and a consistent message across the company in case of a “top-down” initial approach. I’ve written in a previous post how important, and under-estimated, is the role of middle management in this process. 

In a recent round-table about employee engagement, participants highlighted the interest of  “an integrated approach, blending top-down & bottom-up ideas” in order to improve sustainability management across departments, employee communications and to inspire the change.

The main idea here is that top management should define the strategic roadmap and then involve employees in defining the ‘how to’, a topic that I will address in a next post.

 Top-down roll out may also be appropriate to meet specific ‘efficiency’ goals. Expert Glennon Franklin, Director of Strategic GreenSource, writes in a recent blog post that “in this stagnant economy, everyone is focused on cutting costs to drive higher profitability” and that  “getting your employees engaged in sustainable business practices is a quick and efficient way to achieve those savings.”

I usually find it hard  to engage employees & change behaviour around “dry goals” such as ‘cost-saving’, rules or restrictions (‘don’t; ‘use less’…).

 What do you think?