Engaging busy employees, with little time to spare in sustainability initiatives, can be challenging. Take call-centres, for example: these workers are answering phones back-to-back, answering queries for customers. When do they have a chance to read your sustainability strategy and understand their part in it?
However, it’s important to ensure that everyone in your organisation is contributing to making your workplace more sustainable. By engaging all employees in your green mission, you can create a culture of sustainability, boost employee engagement, and reach your net zero goals faster. So, here’s how to engage your time-pressured employees in sustainability:
Make it Convenient
First and foremost, make it convenient. Make acting sustainably as convenient as possible for your busy employees and they will be more likely to do so. For example, have adequate recycling bins, proper sustainability signage, and provide easy to follow guidelines for sustainable practices. Research has found that even minor behaviour interventions influence behaviour change. The less burdening it is for your team to remember to act sustainably, the more convenient it is to take action.
This is part of the foundation of Team Jump programmes. With each of our clients, we handle internal comms around sustainability engagement. This means sending out newsletters, using app notifications, and hosting in-person events to remind our members that they can easily embed sustainability into their routine.
Make it Relevant
Make sustainability initiatives relevant to your busy employees’ day-to-day work. This can include reducing energy consumption, reducing waste, or promoting sustainable commuting options. You can also include a role-specific sustainability goal within each employee’s performance review. The Estée Lauder Companies have talked about using this exact method to engage employees in sustainability.
Our NHS Gloves Off Challenge is another example of making it relevant. The idea is simple; since the COVID-19 pandemic, clinical staff have been using gloves more often than necessary. By educating staff about the efficacy of glove use, we can reduce waste and improve hand hygiene. This is a specific behaviour that clinical staff take multiple times a day, and with the right knowledge, they can change it.
Make it Fun
Who can resist a good laugh? By making sustainability initiatives fun we make them more human, and ultimately more engaging. Adding an element of fun to these initiatives ultimately creates sustainable habits in individuals engaging in them. Therefore, you can create competition to encourage employees to make a difference by livening up your eco endeavours. Simultaneously, you can boost your green credentials and positive work culture.
We do this with our programmes by encouraging competition. Features like the leader board and activity feed within our platform allow all members within an organisation to see that their colleagues are taking part, and motivates them to come top of the leader board. But is competition for competition’s sake enough? Not for everybody. That’s where incentives can be a great motivator.
Provide Incentives
Using incentives is a great way to engage busy employees with your sustainability initiatives. This can include prizes, such as vouchers or treats, extra time off, or even recognition for their efforts. Research has shown that having a green reward system in place improves employee’s perception of the workplace and motivates recipients to perform sustainable actions.
We use prize vouchers in our programmes, but this doesn’t have to be the only way to incentivise action. You can use badges to signify progress, or you include it as part of an employee’s performance review. These are both great ways to build a culture of sustainability within your organisation.
Provide Education
Make time for employees to receive sustainability training. Research has shown that providing education and training on sustainable practices helps employees understand the importance of the initiative and how they can get involved. It has been found to successfully reduce waste as well as energy consumption.
Our own survey of over 1,500 workers, found that one of the largest barriers between employees and sustainable action is understanding how they can contribute to sustainability goals. They clearly want to take part, but they don’t know how. This works hand-in-hand with everything so far. By using the tools we’ve given you, you can tell your team exactly how to embed sustainability into their role.
How Can Team Jump Help Engage Busy Employees?
Engaging busy employees in your sustainability initiatives is essential for reaching your net zero goals. By making initiatives convenient, fun, relevant, and offering incentives you can build a culture of sustainability that makes taking action routine. If you liked this blog, read our Essential Guide to Sustainability Engagement for more advice, or request a demo and find out how Team Jump can create an engagement programme that creates lasting behaviour change.
