In the past, businesses have been known to focus on the bottom line and only take action when it’s beneficial to the organisation. This is often seen as short-sighted thinking, with the environment and sustainability being an afterthought.
However, if you want your business to be successful and sustainable in the long term, engaging employees in sustainability is essential. In fact, if your employees aren’t engaged in sustainability, they’re probably not going to help you reach your environmental targets.
So how do you engage them? Here are five ways that businesses can do so:
Create understanding
Research has shown that a key barrier to individuals changing their behaviours is a lack of clarity around the goals and aims of the change effort and ambiguity around what actions to take to support it.
As a result, it is important to create an understanding of why your organisation is taking strides to become more sustainable. This can be achieved by defining your organisation’s long term purpose, values, and sustainability strategy. Take time to map out where you want to go and your ultimate mission, and ask yourself: why does our organisation exist? This will help your people see their part to play in your mission. Alongside this, invest in sustainability training to ensure that all of your staff have the same level of understanding of climate issues.
Create an opportunity
External influences on behaviour, such as signage or provision of sustainability resources, have been shown to successfully influence behaviour change. This is because it makes it convenient for individuals to engage in the behaviours (Steg & Vlek, 2009, Martin et al., 2017). You can make your sustainability efforts more visible to your people by creating a ‘Green Team’ of staff volunteers. Through this initiative, you can get staff buy-in and feedback, as well as promote collaboration across your organisation. Have the green team organise semi-regular meetings or newsletters to update different departments within the organisation on their progress, initiatives, and to recruit new members. This keeps your green agenda at the front of all employees’ minds, not just those within the green team!
Create a reason
Many people don’t know why they should care about sustainability, how it affects them personally, and how their actions can make a difference. This is why it’s important to give them reasons why they should get involved in making changes for the betterment of their community, environment and society at large. While sustainability training will help with this, you should take time to explain the impacts people taking these actions have within the organisation and wider society, for example, the amount of waste saved in visual terms such as trees saved, as well as how much money this has saved the business. Making sustainability visual and accessible is something that can be achieved within a Jump platform, where users can see the impacts of their actions in terms such as ‘homes powered for a day’ to ‘bathtubs of water saved’.
Create an incentive
Research by Think Smart found that companies who incentivise their initiatives report a 79% success rate in achieving their goals when the correct reward is given. Incentives can come in the form of financial rewards, office lunches and socials, or extra time off. Rewards are key to creating behaviour change and can form part of a ‘gamified’ sustainability initiative. Studies have found that organisations that utilise gamification can achieve three goals at once – making non-gaming experiences enjoyable, achieving player empowerment, and creating collective behaviour change (Taylor & Wolmarans, 2021). While a study by Oppong-Tawiah et al. found that gamified sustainability initiatives worked to create sustainable habits in individuals who engaged in them.
Create a community
Community involvement makes individuals more likely to adopt sustainable behaviours. Create a culture of sustainability in your organisation by allowing staff to participate in volunteering away days for sustainable causes, such as conservation projects. This can create community through team building, gets people thinking about the environment, and is a great corporate social responsibility activity.
You could also become a part of a global community. For example, by becoming a B Corp, your organisation would join a community of 530,940 workers from 6,263 Companies that span 89 countries. B Corps are organisations that aim to address society’s most critical challenges, including climate change. By becoming a B corp your people would be able to see how serious your organisation is about becoming a force for good, which is something increasingly on the minds of today’s workforce, who want to work for progressive employers.
We can help you engage employees in sustainability
At Jump, we specialise in engaging employees in sustainability and helping them to adopt sustainable habits that last a lifetime. Join our mailing list to get tips and tricks on how you can best engage your employees in sustainability, or request a demo to find out how we can do the heavy lifting for you.
