GreenBiz recently released its 2014 edition of the State of Green Business,
and in it we find both good and bad news for sustainability trends. One
bright spot that the report highlights is the focus on employee
engagement. This translates into better customer and talent retention
and acquisition, improved productivity, and innovation. The not so
bright spots? Progress on sustainability performance against goals, and
increased spending on sustainability, especially on human resources to
support sustainability programs. Environment, health and safety (EHS)
and corporate social responsibility (CSR) budgets are remaining
essentially flat and Chief Sustainability Officer (CSO) positions are on
the decline, but nonetheless sustainability initiatives and goals are
still being pursued, albeit sluggishly.
The GreenBiz report indicates
that corporate leadership support for sustainability has risen from 12%
in 2009 to 33% in 2014, but this C-level attention appears to be
directed at non-CSO positions, which have fallen to 2003 levels. Hiring
of new sustainability positions in general has fallen from a high of 49%
in 2011 down to 32% at present.
So who will be achieving the sustainability goals if
companies are not adding sustainability staff? Enter the rise of
employee engagement, or as GreenBiz contributor Grant Ricketts calls it
in his recent article,
Employee Engagement 2.0 (EE 2.0). EE 2.0, as Ricketts suggests, is
about integrating and embedding sustainability into the fabric of the
organization. This means making sustainability an integral part of
everyone’s job, and aligning sustainability initiatives with standard
job functions. I repeatedly heard during my MBA program at Presidio that
when a company becomes truly sustainable, there will be no need for a
separate “sustainability department”. While the sluggish performance
against goals that many companies have reported this year indicate that
there is not wide achievement of the “Sustainable Company” benchmark,
firms seem to be moving ahead with implementing leaner sustainability
organizations nonetheless. Case in point – in a Feb 2013 article
in the MITSloan Review, Nestle’s corporate head of agriculture, Hans
Johr, touts the fact that the company doesn’t have a CSO as evidence
that they are achieving this integration of sustainability into the
fabric of the company.
So what does it actually mean to
integrate sustainability into an organization through employee
engagement? How is this manifest? Contrary to what is commonly written
on this subject, I don’t believe that this means encouraging employee
volunteerism, or getting people to turn off their computers at the end
of the day, or letting people work from home to save on office energy
usage (because really, unless employees are sitting home in the dark
with the heat or AC off, the energy they are using is just shifted from
the company to the individual). Don’t get me wrong – all these things
are great in their own right and are very important. However, as a
strategy for leveraging employee engagement to further sustainability or
CSR goals, they are low-hanging fruit at best.
So here are some ideas for achieving this
integration: Communicate goals to employees, and them let them decide
which one to support through their existing job function. Take a play
from the agile project management
playbook and build cross-functional teams based on employee’s strengths
and areas of interest. Agile is an iterative, value-driven process.
It’s about everyone on the team knowing which direction to pull, and not
getting bogged down in prescriptive protocols and roles. For example,
if a company has a goal to reduce water consumption by 15% over five
years, a group of employees from different parts of the organization
might adopt that goal as their own and apply their own skills to
addressing the issue. Someone in IT might create an app or web-based
tool for the intranet site for other employees to report on leaky water
faucets or other office water leaks. Someone in finance might work on
calculating the savings over time from reducing water usage, and then
work with someone else in marketing or communications to create internal
messaging for the whole company so that everyone understands the issue
from a dollars-and-cents perspective. Employees in engineering or
manufacturing can work on innovating ways for production processes to
recycle wastewater. Enable employees to dedicate 5-10% of their time to
using their skills to support one of the company’s sustainability
initiatives or goals, and tie bonuses to sustainability performance for
employees and executives whose jobs are directly related to key
environmental and social metrics. Intel has
been linking compensation to sustainability performance since 2008, and
other companies can implement this same approach to accelerate
meaningful change.
An agile project management approach is a
novel application of implementing EE 2.0, but a new approach is
necessary if meaningful progress is to be achieved. A sustainability
manager or similar role will still be needed to wrangle all these
disparate efforts, but an integrated project-based approach can be
successful with the right management and organization.