Any business can formulate a sustainability strategy, but what are its chances of success if employees aren’t engaged in it and taking action? Small actions performed daily around offices, such as not switching off electronics or wasting paper, all add to a significant impact. This can be costly for businesses and harmful to their attempts to become more sustainable. In this blog, we discuss six ways you can increase employee engagement in your sustainability strategy and create a cohesive culture of sustainability in the workplace.
Create understanding
Staff are more likely to engage in your sustainability strategy if they understand what it is and why it exists. Take time to hold a sustainability strategy meeting with your employees where you explain your long-term goals, the areas you are targeting, and why you are targeting them. This is also when you can explain what areas of the strategy they can contribute to, e.g. reducing waste, and why this is important. As sustainability professionals, other employees may not have the same understanding of sustainability issues as us, so take time to educate them on the broader issue as you go through the strategy.
Listen
Employees who feel listened to feel more valued within the company, and listening to employees can protect against blind spots. The Deloitte 2019 Millennial Survey found that millennials, who make up the bulk of the workforce, believe that employers put profits over all else, which leaves them feeling like a commodity that is there purely to make money for the organisation. By actively seeking opportunities to co-create staff sustainability strategies and receive employee feedback, employers can create a workplace culture that this generation feels they contribute to, are valued in, and can be proud of.
Humanise the cause
Most employees use cost-benefit analysis, put simply, ‘what’s in it for me?’ to decide how to act in the workplace and when dealing with management. In most cases, ‘it’s the right thing to do’ or ‘it will save the business money’ aren’t going to cut it for your average disengaged employee. This is why it is important to stress that making sustainable changes is imperative to the health of the community.
A child born today is likely to see 6.3 degrees of warming within its lifetime. This level of warming would bring about a catastrophic series of events (source). Including most of the planetary surface being uninhabitable and oceans stratifying, meaning that they lose all oxygen, which would cause mass extinction in the oceans (source). Humans have an instinct for survival, and humanising this issue in terms of what it could look like for our children and us is essential to sway their cost-benefit analysis.
Incentivise
Again, this plays into the cost-benefit analysis. What’s in it for your employees in the short term? Several papers have reported the efficacy of incentives for adopting sustainable behaviours (Ayres, 2010, Corepal et al., 2018, Novak et al., 2018, Zhu et al., 2020, Manca et al., 2022). Sustainability incentives can be competitions where you award monthly winners and prizes. For most businesses, measuring who in your team is most sustainable is complex data to track. We address how this can be achieved further into the blog.
Frequently Discuss Engagement
Managers should frequently include staff in the conversation around engagement to get them engaged in the topic. Hold meetings on the engagement in your sustainability initiatives and be transparent about why you seek improvement in this area. Give employees room to share ideas on how to increase engagement and listen to their opinions on what’s going wrong. Keeping the conversation around your sustainability initiatives alive is essential, and allowing employee decision making has plenty of benefits. These include boosted morale, enhanced trust, and better working relationships.
Create a Positive Work Culture
As said by Joan Peters’ in her 2019 book: “if you love your work, you have something to look forward to every working day, yet we often think that work robs us of our enjoyment of life.” Creating a culture where staff have close working relationships will boost morale and increase positive sentiment for the organisation. This will materialise in the form of staff who are more engaged in activities and initiatives in the workplace. You can achieve this by making more time for social activities and creating societies within the workplace.
How we can help increase employee engagement in your sustainability strategy
At Jump, we have spent over a decade developing our sustainable employee engagement platforms, using our behaviour change model principles. It has been reported that to deliver sizable climate impacts, approaches to sustainability rooted in behaviour change are imperative (source). Our programmes incentivise sustainable behaviour change using gamification, including points, teams, leaderboards, and prizes. The efficacy of gamification for sustainability has been reported in multiple papers referenced within this report.
The platforms create understanding in users through sustainability modules and resources. We can integrate your sustainability strategy documents into the platform, making it an all-inclusive resource for your organisation’s sustainability efforts. Employee feedback and ideas are also encouraged on the platform through submission portals.
The friendly competition and conversation created by it also make a Jump programme ideal for creating a positive work culture. Some of our partners have integrated their social programmes into their platforms, such as modules where users can sign up for running or book clubs. This is in line with our belief that personal wellbeing and sustainability are interlinked.
Finally, our programmes allow managers to track sustainability data such as CO2 avoided from our impact dashboards. As well as track employee engagement over time using our performance management dashboard. Following employee engagement in sustainability initiatives is often time-consuming and challenging to achieve; a Jump programme is an invaluable resource for businesses that make creating and maintaining sustainability initiatives easy.
Our platforms are transformational to the culture of the businesses we work with and can help you increase employee engagement in your sustainability strategy. Check out our employee engagement page or request a demo from one of our sustainability experts.
