These slides by the Green Business Bureau offer advice and tips on how to engage your employees on sustainability. They focus on:
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Going Green
Sustainability
Employee Engagement
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Let’s Talk About
Why Generate Employee Buy In?
How to Involve Employees?
How to Keep it Going?
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Let’s First Understand the
Employees
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3 Sides of Employee Engagement
The Rational Side: Employees’
support the business’s goals,
strategies, culture and values
The Emotional Side: The feeling of
belonging, relationship, attachment,
pride towards their work place
The Motivational Side: Employees’ willingness to go above and
beyond their normal job responsibilities to make business successful
Source: Towers Watson: http://www.greenbiz.com/blog/2011/09/06/why-employee-engagement-critical-
sustaining-sustainability
The Green
Team
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A recent study by Towers Watson looked at
engagement levels across 50 global
organizations and found that operating
income in high-engagement companies
improved 19.2 percent over a 12-month
period. In low engagement companies it
declined 32.7 percent.
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• Another survey of more than 13,000 full-time
U.S. workers in 2008 revealed that highly
engaged employees are 26 percent more
productive
• Their companies earned 13 percent greater
total returns to shareholders over a five-year
period.
• Engaged employees also took 20 percent
fewer days off and tended to be more
supportive of organizational change.
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Bring a New Attitude
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Create your Green Story
Start with attitude change!
Green is not the in thing. It’s not a good thing to
have. It’s innovation and presents economic
opportunity. It’s needed!
One Gallup study found that organizations with an
engaged workforce have 2.6 times the earnings per
share growth rate as organizations with a
less engaged workforce.
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Employee sustainability engagement is the
practice of promoting efficiency, resource
conservation, and other green initiatives to
motivate changes in staff behavior.
From WalMart and the U.S. Federal Government to JC Penny and Intel,
many organizations have undertaken employee sustainability initiatives
in recent years.
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“The trick is not to let any excitement
around green go to waste”
Andrew Winston, "Get (Your People)
Engaged", Green Recovery
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How to Appeal to the Rational Side of
Employees?
• Share the Sustainability Vision: Create/Co-Create your company’s vision. This vision must
include a mission statement and values, and there must be a sound strategy of how to stay
on track with these goals. Employees want to know where they are going and how? Find
ways to connect individuals to company-wide goals.
• Create Code of Conduct: Create code of conduct documents written in every day simple
language. This should include some expectation of social responsibility from the
employees.
• Make it Do-able: Once the vision is decided, break it into small chunks. Ask employees to
pick one thing they want to do. For example, to help company realize zero-waste vision,
one employee could focus on recycling, other could focus on energy conservation.
• Make it Relatable for Employees: Climate change, sustainability and global warming can
sometimes be complex issues for employees to understand. Make these relatable to
employees. For example, by using emissions calculators, employees can calculate their
footprint and learn about ways to reduce their impact. Place a composter in the office
trash area. Encourage employees to compost often and as a reward they can take some
compost home. Or create a metro only day to encourage use of public transport system.
• .
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How to Appeal to the Rational Side
of Employees?...
• Go Seasonal: To encourage employees to get involved in
sustainability efforts, make your efforts relevant at all times.
For example, in summers start water conservation
contests/campaigns etc. In winters, focus on energy
conservation may be…
• Make the Business Case: Explain to employees that
sustainability saves utility and other operating costs,
improves brand image, provides marketing opportunities,
increases customer base
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How to Appeal to the Emotional Side of
Employees?
• Voluntary Participation: Start with a voluntary
participation programs to allow employees to
explore and learn independently.
• Inspire: Create internal communication campaigns
to share green tips, news, brochures, success
stories, future plans, discuss ideas. Place post-its
with green tips on the refrigerator, remote control,
office plate or place green ideas on screen savers
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How to Appeal to the Emotional Side
of Employees?...
• Share your Story: Encourage employees to share their green
story on company facebook page, email, or monthly meetings
• Organize Family Outing Days: Take your employees and their
families on a recycling spree or tree plantation campaign.
• Guest Lectures: Search for guest lectures in your area and
organize an office trip to the lecture.
• Employee Lectures: Each month give a sustainability related
topic to one of the employee to present on. For example,
composting, recycling, carbon offsets, water conservation, tips for
energy saving in winters etc.
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How to Appeal to the Motivational Side of
Employees?
• Friendly competition: Make it rewarding for the employees’ by creating small contests
between employees/departments. Recognize the employee/department who used least
paper, conserved water, recycled most often.
• Organize a Green Day: By organizing an earth day, recycling day or simply clean up day,
you will provide employees with an easy opportunity to network and share ideas about
going green. Employees could be asked to come up with ideas to green their immediate
work space.
• Performance Management: Include sustainability and social responsibility in job
descriptions, employee annual goals and employee reviews.
• Awards: Create special awards for employees to recognize their sustainability efforts
• Share your Success: On a monthly basis, in company meeting, share how much paper you
saved, how many aluminum cans were recycled, how you saved on utility bills
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4 Competitions to Boost Moral and
Awareness
Battery Recycling: Hold a competition to
see which employee collects the most
dead batteries for recycling. This will
provide a nice activity and raise
awareness amongst the employees. The
winner gets a dinner coupon where as the
one who collects least gets to take them
to the recycling center.
Save the Trees: Teach your staff to print smarter by holding a
competition. Divide the office into teams, and then assign each
team a certain amount of copy paper. At the end of one month
whichever team has paper left gets a free lunch. Whatever team
has the most paper left gets free lunch for a week.
Reusing the Lunch Bags: Every day that
they bring their sandwich to work in the
same plastic bag or bring their lunch in
the same paper bag they get a mark with
a permanent marker on their bag. At the
end of the month the three people who
have the most marks on their bags get a
free lunch at a local restaurant and an
extra half hour lunch period that day.
Ride the Bike or Carpool to Work: This one runs on the honor
system; every day people write their name on a list posted in
the office if they rode their bike, took the bus or carpooled to
work. Give it a month, then reward those who did the best with
something fun, perhaps a gift card for a new pair of walking
shoes.
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Some Facts to Make YOUR Employee Engagement
Program A Success
• Most effective programs promote sustainability in business travel, purchasing,
water use, and food
• Most common sustainability engagement areas are still waste and recycling,
energy use and commuting
• Organizations with a method for employees to share ideas were more than 6
times as likely to have a very effective program
• Organizations that collected data on their footprint, the impact of staff travel
and commuting, and employee sustainability efforts were roughly 3 times as
likely to have a successful program
Source: Brighter Planet “Greening the Workplace 2011” Second Biennial Survey
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Go Green Today
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