8. Engaging Employees Around Sustainability

Employees are most effective at their job when they can engage their head, their heart, and their hands. This chapter is designed to help you understand the benefits of a fully engaged workforce, and why sustainability is one of the best ways to achieve that, and then to describe the various intricacies required for sustainability to be fully embedded in your workforce.

Engaged employees are more productive and enthusiastic and will carry the mission and goals of your company forward. The most productive employees have high job satisfaction and find purpose at work outside of financial gain. I emphasize this because although there are a number of technical aspects of sustainability implementation, it will never reach its full potential unless employees are engaged, trained, and brought into the process.

Numerous studies show that employees are the least engaged they’ve been in a generation, so that’s why I’m going to lay out why sustainability is the best way to engage employees, the specifics for doing just that, and how it ties back to both innovation and your bottom line.

See their talents, values, and aspirations aligned with the company’s mission and goals

Are emotionally attached/committed to their work and to the organization

Are motivated to contribute and put forth discretionary effort that furthers organizational success

These factors are important because, as Daniel Pink says:

“Companies need to move past their outdated reliance on carrots and sticks. For creative, 21st-century work, companies are better off ensuring that people have ample amounts of autonomy and that their individual efforts are hitched to a larger purpose.”¹

Unfortunately, there are a number of barriers that are keeping this from happening around sustainability at various companies, including the following feelings by employees:

They are overworked, have no time, and already have too much on their plates.

This is just another thing they have to do.

They lack training and don’t know exactly what is being asked of them.

They are not empowered.

Their boss doesn’t support time away from their “real job.” It is acceptable to work on sustainability only after work or during breaks.

Past efforts failed, so they are apathetic this time around.

Middle management and department managers don’t see how business objectives are tied to sustainability.

This is management’s “fad of the year.”

These are common statements that employees express all the time. Therefore, it’s important to remember that when you engage employees on sustainability, you first need to make sure that the fundamentals are in place, which were outlined in Chapters 1–6:

Defining sustainability and why the company is taking action

Making the business case

Setting the company’s North Star on sustainability

Demonstrating stakeholder interest

Ensuring management support

Conducting your baseline

Obviously, the easiest solution is to incorporate sustainability into every job description and include it in every new employee orientation and training. However, the reality is that most, if not all, of your employees have already been trained and have been working off of their existing job descriptions, so how do you change your employee engagement strategy to embed sustainability for the long haul?

There is a myth that both people and employees are primarily motivated by pay. The reality is that today’s employees are more highly motivated by intrinsic factors such as pride in their work, career ambitions, autonomy, and connection to the company.

This manifests itself when everyone is rowing in the same direction, at the same time, with a clear idea that they can make a difference in the world. This ties directly to sustainability because employees want to feel the following:

“I’m making a difference.”

There is real meaning in my job.

My work matters internally and externally.

My job helps the organization achieve success.

“My company has my back.”

This is a safe environment, with a culture of trust and respect.

My strengths are matched to my job description and my day-to-day job.

“We’re in this together.”

I have dependable colleagues and I can count on them!

There is a balance between “we’re all going full-bore” and a more relaxed pace.

Sane expectations exist.

“There’s trust at work.”

I believe in leadership and in the direction of the company.

Merit and loyalty are earned, not bought.

There are no office politics, so my energy is used on my work.

I often pull from Gary Hamel, who was called the world’s most influential business thinker by the Wall Street Journal, that in today’s fast-paced and creative economy, a company’s success depends far more on its ability to tap the creativity and passion of its employees than ever before. And I come back to my core belief that you best engage employees when you can engage the head, the heart, and the hands.

This is a pretty hard feat to accomplish, especially for larger organizations where employees might have different ideas of levels of engagement. Therefore, I’m going to hit you over the head with some statistics that will demonstrate how important employee engagement is to productivity and the profitability of your business.

A Gallup study found that 71% of American workers are “not engaged” or are “actively disengaged” in their work.²

That same study evaluated numerous surveys linking employee engagement to key business units and compared businesses in the top quartile of engagement with those in the bottom quartile of engagement and found the following median percentage differences:³

16% in profitability

18% in productivity

12% increase in customer loyalty

60% increase in quality (fewer defects)

49% decrease in safety incidents

37% decrease in absenteeism

Moreover, if you are an owner or a shareholder who cares about your return or earnings per share, the following stats will jump out at you:

There have been 29% above average shareholder returns for companies with high levels of employee engagement versus 1% for companies with moderate levels of engagement.⁴

These numbers have stayed steady for the past eight years; a study by Melcrum back in 2006 found similar results, but with improvement closer to 27%.⁵

How does sustainability play into all of this? Millennials are expecting sustainability in their jobs and are factoring it into their decision criteria. A 2012 study by Net Impact pointed out:

88% of graduate students and young professionals factor an employer’s CSR position into their job decision.

58% of the student population would take a 15% pay cut to “work for an organization whose values are like my own.”⁶

Employees want to bring their values to work, not check them at the door!

And it’s not just new employees entering the workforce; with an improving economy, job mobility will increase as individuals will be more willing to leave the safety of their job and check out something that they are more passionate about. Although there was a severe decrease in employee mobility from 2008 to 2012 due to the great recession, people are once again looking to make a change—whether it is to find a more challenging job, more money, a shorter commute, or a company that is better aligned with their values.

Don’t forget that the other way an employee can “leave” is when they mentally check out. Let’s be honest; we’ve all had days when we’ve checked out. Think about how unproductive you were. Almost as big a threat as employees leaving are the ones who stay but are completely checked out. In either case, when employees aren’t engaged, this has tremendous financial consequences.

Any business leader or person in HR has learned that employee turnover and retention is a major cost that typically doesn’t show up in the profit-and-loss statement. A recent study by the National Environmental Education Fund found that “losing and replacing a good employee costs companies between 70% and 200% of an employee’s annual salary.”⁷

To put that in perspective, consider that cost of turnover shown in Table 8.1, based on the employee’s salary.

Bob Stiller, Chairman of the Board of Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, describes this connection between business sustainability and employee engagement: “I’ve learned that people are motivated and more willing to go the extra mile to make the company successful when there’s a higher good associated with it. It’s no longer just a job. Work becomes meaningful and this makes us more competitive.”⁸ Sustainability can be a major factor in creating a more engaged workforce.

For you to realize the full potential of your employee engagement efforts, you need to tailor your sustainability training to each job function, make it personal for each individual, and deliver the training in multiple mediums to adapt to the different learning styles of your employees.

To begin with, offer a Sustainability 101–type of training so that everyone in the company is on the same page. Tie it back to why your company is doing this, the business case, and your company’s North Star, but also be sure to demonstrate how everyone’s individual action adds up to a bigger whole.

You might find that for most employees, how they do things just stems from the fact that they’ve “always done it that way.” They might not have thought about how sustainability could be incorporated into their jobs, or they haven’t had the time to look beyond what is an immediate priority. So be patient with your training and start with something tangible.

For example, most office employees touch or print paper during the course of the day. So although not a huge behavior-changing item, a first step could be to get employees to switch to e-documents. Explain to them why the company is trying to print less, how it saves money, how it is better for the environment, and the expectation that each person has a role to play. Setting this expectation and following through early on is key. After you’ve asked them to take a small tangible step, then ask them where else they could take action within their job. Be sure to focus on items that might also make their jobs easier and more efficient because, again, this will increase buy-in.

As Dawn Danby says, “Sometimes you are asking employees questions they have never been asked before. But usually if you give them enough information, data, and the space to figure out the solutions, you’ll be amazed at what they’ll do!”⁹

Proctor & Gamble (P&G) and Patagonia are two examples of how different companies are doing this. P&G is working systematically to help all employees answer the question, “What does sustainability mean to my job?” The company is developing and delivering training in each functional area, providing information about how sustainability is part of every person’s job, and helping define specific actions and roles around sustainability for every position.¹⁰

Patagonia, on the other hand, is doing it slightly differently. Rather than tying it to individual job functions, they incorporate environmental considerations into product design and production processes to build in the idea of “how will sustainability manifest itself through our product?” They call this “Q=E through education, which was meant to be a design challenge with the message that quality and environmental protection had to be one and the same.”¹¹

The most successful employee engagement programs engage employees not only in what they care about at work, but also in what’s important to them outside of work. Do they have kids, do they like to travel? Are they hunters, fishermen, or recreationalists? Find out their hobbies and where they most fondly spend their time outside of the office, and you’ll also find a personal connection and reason to engage each employee on sustainability.

I think back to a personal example when I was manning an environmental organization’s booth at a charitable giving event a few years back. I had been handing out brochures and talking to people about the organization’s mission when one particular, burly individual from the Washington State Department of Transportation walked up to me with his chest bulged out, smirked, and said to me, “I plow through wetlands. How does that make you feel?” A normal response could have been “Don’t you realize what you are doing, you jerk?”

Instead, I quickly thought through the situation, looked at what this person was wearing, smiled, and asked him, “Hey, do you hunt or fish?” He responded, “Yeah, I hunt elk.” And therein was my opening. I said to him, “Really? That’s awesome. How is the hunting this season?” He opened up, and started talking fast and furiously about how the herds are so much smaller, and that the available land to hunt on is constantly being threatened by development, blaming all the suburbanites and people with second homes.

I explained to him that plowing and developing of natural areas for cookie-cutter homes was only accelerating the loss of habitat for game such as elk. A light bulb went off inside his brain as he realized the correlation and apparent conflict between his comment and his passion. His whole demeanor changed and he said to me, “I need to go talk to my boss.” Then he gave me the thumbs up and walked away.

I hadn’t challenged him or attacked him for what he said, but rather I embraced him about what he cared about most personally. I had earned a level of credibility in his eyes that other environmentalists had previously failed to do. Moreover, that one conversation probably had more of a direct effect on protecting the environment than any $25 or $50 contribution I could have gotten out of him.

Another good way to engage the heart is to appeal to people’s parental instincts. I’ve never met a parent anywhere in the world who didn’t want the best for their children. And we hear this over and over in the media, about parents making sacrifices for their children—whether it be helping them get a better education, a safer upbringing, or helping them save for the purchase of their first home. Just think about toxins in most of our plastic products. As adults we don’t pay as much attention as we probably should, but when lead was being found in children’s Christmas toys, parents engaged and started an outcry that eventually led to a ban on those types of toys.

The lesson is that you can always find a way to make a personal connection on sustainability. Each of us is unique in what motivates us, so while attempting to train and engage your employees on sustainability, make it personal.

The company realized that it needed to help employees understand what sustainability meant to them personally if they wanted to make it stick. It soon launched its Personal Sustainability Projects (PSP), “whose goal was to help its more than two million associates in 28 countries take everyday steps to live healthier, greener lives.”¹²

The program encouraged associates to choose goals most relevant to their own lives and break them down into smaller, everyday actions—whether it’s eating a salad every day, pledging to recycle more, quitting smoking, losing a few pounds, biking to work, or getting out more.¹³ These goals and commitments are posted by employees’ desks at Walmart headquarters in Bentonville for everyone to encourage and congratulate one another. After doing this program, employees had a better grasp of what the company was trying to accomplish because it personalized some aspect of sustainability.

Since the program began, nearly 20,000 associates have quit smoking; together, they have recycled 3 million pounds of plastic; lost more than 184,000 pounds; and walked, biked, or swam more than 1.1 million miles.¹⁴

We’ve done a similar thing at my firm, where employees set not only six-month and annual professional goals, but sustainability (health, environmental, and personal) goals as well. They commit to them and we check in on these quarterly when we do performance evaluations. It is a way for all of us to both demonstrate commitment and hold each other accountable to the changes we want to make—whether they be personal, community, or environmental. Moreover, these quarterly check-ins also provide an opportunity to just have a general dialog that often leads to ideas for continuous improvement and new service offerings. So this ends up being a true win-win-win for the business, employees, and sustainability. Here are some examples of SBC staff members’ sustainability goals:

Join a CSA.

Telecommute once a week.

Drop 10 pounds by June 1 and 20 pounds by year end.

Bus every day for one month.

Start composting at home.

Eat only unprocessed foods for one month.

Shop only at farmers markets.

Practice meatless Mondays.

Become fluent in sign language.

Finish an Olympic triathlon.

Feel as though I’ve removed stress from my work life.

Remember, the first step in any personal sustainability plan is making your own life more sustainable!

Realize that we all are probably busier and have more stress in our lives than we want. And although I’m not advocating for us all to move to completely different lives with zero stress, I’m trying to be realistic while also imploring people to take a good look at how busy their lives are and what steps they can take to take care of themselves from an emotional, wellness, health, and physical standpoint. It is not just about what you want to do, but about what you need to stop doing as well. I personally have a “stop doing” list on my desk so that I can intentionally flag those things that are life draining and time-consuming and try to instead spend the time on the things that matter to me. As Tauschia Copeland likes to say, “You determine what seeds you want to plant and harvest and what weeds you need to pull.”¹⁵

Implementing sustainability into a company is a long, difficult slog. We are all warriors on this path, so be sure to figure out how to bring more balance, fun, and community to your life because we all need to refresh our minds and bodies more often than we do.

As I’ve learned through my teaching, how you deliver the content might be sometimes more important than the content itself. It’s important to acknowledge and understand that introverts and extroverts process information differently. You need to take this into account when developing your employee training and engagement efforts around sustainability.

The following is according to the Jung theory of personality:¹⁶

Extroverts:

Enjoy generating energy and ideas from other people. They prefer socializing and working in groups.

Learn from teaching others how to solve a problem, appreciate collaborative work, and employ problem-based learning.

Enjoy working with others in groups and learn best through direct experience.

Are willing to lead, participate, and offer opinions regardless of experience.

Jump right in without guidance from others.

Introverts:

Prefer to solve problems on their own and work alone.

Enjoy generating energy and ideas from internal sources, such as brainstorming, personal reflection, and theoretical exploration.

Listen, watch, and reflect. They enjoy quiet, solitary work.

Like to think about things and choose to observe others before attempting a new skill.

Prefer to read materials beforehand so that they have time to process and reflect on discussion points.

Understanding these distinctions is especially important if you are the one delivering the training. If it is in-person, and you are the instructor, you’re more likely to have a tendency to be more extroverted, and your style will likely resonate better with extroverts. That’s why it’s important to be aware of your delivery as well as provide alternatives such as online learning or posting PowerPoint online before a class so that those with a different learning style can maximize their ability to process the information in their desired environment.

Every employee engagement program should factor in and include something for each of the five learning styles, shown in Table 8.2, and the different personality types, shown in Table 8.3. The take-away is that just as you need to tailor the message to what people care about in their job function, you should vary your sustainability training across these various learning styles. If you do so, you’ll have a greater chance of success of reaching everyone within your firm.

Introverted leaders are more effective than extroverted leaders when dealing with proactive employees.

Extroverted leaders are more effective when dealing with employees who tend to be passive.

Introverted leaders are more likely to apply suggestions made by employees, and are less likely to modify these suggestions and make them their own.

Introverted leaders are more likely to let employees try out new strategies and spend more time listening to those whom they lead.

Extroverted leaders tend to be better at inspiring otherwise uninspired troops but are more likely to try to put their own mark on whatever work employees come up with.

These three things help to empower employees and avoid issues of hierarchy:

Employees need to know what is expected of them and why.

You need to set the framework as to what you are trying to do and also set the constraints. After you do this, they will figure out the best way to get there.

If employees have ownership, it won’t feel like the company’s idea; they will make it their own and appreciate the autonomy and freedom they’ve been given.

All of these are important because you want your front-line employees to be the ones to identify opportunities for sustainability improvements; they live and breathe their area of expertise every day. After they have been trained and empowered to use their “sustainability lens,” they will begin to see things differently and offer up ideas about changes to how things are done on a day-to-day basis.

Reich believes in employing what Jim Collins states in his book Good to Great, that you want to develop a system with clear constraints, but one that also empowers employees with autonomy, responsibility, and freedom to get the job done within that system.

For example, at a dairy plant in Argentina, employees “own” their two to five square meters of work space—and are charged with improving processes in their small area of the plant.

Another example is from one of my legal clients. Their office manager, who also led the green team, was said to carry more clout than senior management around sustainability. Because he controlled what happened in the office from a facility and purchasing capacity, he took ownership and just pushed sustainability into everything he did on a day-to-day basis. When he couldn’t get more budget for 100% recycled paper, he put all the printers and copiers to default to duplex so that less paper was needed, and used the savings to go ahead and order the 100% recycled content. Because he met his budget, nobody asked any questions. He took ownership of sustainability wherever he could within the firm.

It’s important that you recognize that, from time to time, there will be failures. Sometimes the lessons learned from a failure can lead to a brilliant new idea, and other times they won’t. Accept this fact. Although you’ll obviously want to work to avoid failures, realize that if you fully empower your employees around sustainability with ownership of their tasks, even with a few small setbacks your company will end up way ahead in the long run.

“This forced everyone to share information more freely, and discuss problems and work out solutions before it got to the recommendation phase. Managers and employees both had to think more systematically and ask each other tougher questions because they both were 100% responsible for any change. This not only led to greater empowerment, but a better understanding of the product, process, and better decisions”¹⁹ because they were forced to get things right the first time around.

There are two sides to intrapreneurship: how to get started as an intrapreneur and how to create a work culture that encourages an authentic, proactive pursuit of intrapreneurship around sustainability. The goal is to stimulate the creativity, spirit of innovation, and entrepreneurial value-creation mind-set of employees to further support your engagement efforts.

With intrapreneurship, one or more employees assume the leadership responsibility, financial accountability, risk, and operational challenges of creating business value through the development of an innovative technology, product, or service within a company.²¹ Companies need these types of people to address many of the challenges sustainability brings because the most difficult issues have yet to be tackled, so innovative and disruptive thinking is needed.

One reason why intrapreneurship is so important is that big companies are largely averse to ideas from the outside. This means that sometimes the only way to change big business is from within, and that is by using the company as the test lab for intrapreneurship. This will help develop a culture of intrapreneurship, which will be essential to helping your company implement sustainability because it will enable the creativity and innovation of your employees to come forth.

“Contrary to popular belief, the brains of an organization are equally distributed across a company—about one per person.”²²

At first, as an intrapreneur, you will want the time and space to develop your idea and generate buy-in, because you don’t want to unveil your idea until you have run it by a few people, worn off the rough edges, and garnered some support. Be sure to engage people who can benefit from your idea, as well as people who can help you spot land mines along the way. By doing this, the intrapreneur can avoid pitfalls and pick up some valuable wisdom. Moreover, you want to test your idea and iterate it quickly, because you don’t want to spend all your time in the planning stage. “Faster learning beats better planning,”²³ so test ideas and iterate, iterate, iterate.

Pinchot has witnessed that after you have tested your idea a few times, you need to start sharing your ideas more broadly. “Holding on to your ideas close to your chest in fear that someone will steal them guarantees that they will not happen. Sharing them with people who can advise you and help you to implement them has a much better chance of success.”²⁴

To recruit an intrapreneurship sponsor for your sustainability idea, first seek advice from someone in the company you want to work with, whom you could learn from, and who might have some alignment with what you are attempting to do. Then build your relationship by getting that person to help you. People love giving advice and mentoring whenever they can. Feed that. The relationship will strengthen until the time comes when you are trying to develop the idea more concretely, and the sponsor believes that you are the right person to accomplish what you are setting out to do.

Treat your sponsor like your own internal stakeholder and remember to keep the flow of conversation two ways by giving progress updates and feedback. Tell your sponsor how she helped make your idea better, what changes have been made or improvements have been completed since the last time you talked, and where you are headed next. Be sure to be transparent and share both the good and the bad news because the sponsor should hear that news from you directly and might have suggestions for other ways to tackle the issue. All of this is essential because if you can get commitment from a sponsor or team of sponsors, especially at the management level, they’ll be more bought in and less likely to let you or your idea fail.

1. Realize that ideas change and evolve. Things don’t always turn out according to plan. The more innovative/disruptive the idea, the more learning that will need to take place, and the idea might change, grow, or pivot accordingly.

2. Ideas without intrapreneurs are just that. They add little value. You need people who will own and operationalize the idea.

3. Most of the success has to do with the person and the team involved with the project versus the quality of the idea.

4. All managers have the ability to support intrapreneuring around sustainability. They just might need to couch it under different wording—continuous improvement, innovation, efficiency, risk management, and so on.

5. The quality of the relationships of the people within an intrapreneurial team is equal to or more important than the quality and titles of the people on the team. Too often people focus on the titles and skip over the fact that if a team gets along, they are more likely to be able to overcome the obstacles and innovate around them. And if they don’t get along, the opposite is true.

6. Things will take twice as long as you think, and the more innovative the idea, the more flexible people will have to be with their budgets.

As mentioned previously, there are going to be naysayers and obstacles along the way, but knowing all of these facets ahead of time will help you create a successful atmosphere within your firm for intrapreneurship around social and environmental issues. Or, as I like to call it, sustainapreneurship.

Employees are the least engaged that they’ve been in the past 20 years, and the best way to authentically engage your employees’ heads, hearts, and hands is through sustainability. The business benefits are clear: An engaged workforce is more productive, is more profitable, performs higher quality work, and the employees themselves tend to garner higher satisfaction.

When training employees, recognize the different learning styles and realize how best to communicate with and engage both introverts and extroverts.

Tie sustainability to people’s jobs and don’t forget to connect with employees on a personal/human level.

Empower your employees. Tell them what you are trying to do and why, tie it back to the business case, and then get out of their way.

Cultivate a culture of intrapreneurship, because many of today’s greatest social and environmental challenges will need the creativity and innovation of an engaged workforce.