Employee engagement strategies for corporate sustainability implementation

Introduction Engaging employees is an essential part of a sustainability strategy. When employees are intrinsically motivated to take initiative for meaningful changes, those changes become entrenched. To engage employees over a long period of time, sustainability practices also need to be genuinely aligned with company mission, values, and goals. Moreover, sustainability needs to be embedded into the company culture. Thinking about how to optimize business practices and operations begins with the type of creative thinking that keeps sustainability as one of the guiding principles of all decisions. To do so requires a long-term vision for inculcating new company values and guiding moral principles. Short-term thinking has been called the “bane of sustainability,” (Bansal & DesJardine, 2014, p. 70). Sustainability needs to be reframed as a core strategic objective, with implications for both external and internal operations. Polman & Bhattacharya (2016) outline eight ways companies can engage employees to achieve sustainability goals. Several of these apply to my company’s sustainability strategy and the process we are using to reach our goals, but there are other ways we can engage employees to inspire change. Background Until recently, our company did not have a cohesive or formal sustainability plan or strategy. Sustainability was something that seemed abstract, which led to an avoidance of realistic thinking about how changing our practices might yield added value for the firm. However, recently we adopted an initiative to combine cost-cutting goals with sustainability by reducing water and energy consumptions in our production facility. This was not initially conceived of as a sustainability maneuver, but the change has since morphed into something more long-term and strategic, as well as more aligned with company values. It has also allowed our operations managers to work more closely with the marketing department on helping improve the image of our brand. At first, we framed the reduced energy consumption solely as a matter of cost cutting. This was deemed the best way to solicit support from major stakeholders as well as senior management. Then realized that what we were doing did coincide with what employees had wanted, which was proof that we were working more towards corporate social responsibility. When clients started to express interest, we really decided to move forward with a new vision for implementing a long-term sustainability strategy. The Eight Methods of Employee Engagement Of the eight methods Polman & Bhattacharya (2016) list for employee engagement, we currently use only a few. The first one is spelling out the economic case for sustainability. Spelling out the economic case was essential for getting senior management teams on board with our decisions but not necessarily for engaging all employees. We needed to give them the numbers, so they could see how some sustainability practices would yield both short-term and long-term economic gains. However, we do realize now the need to focus on other methods to stimulate interest in doing even more to improve our sustainability and ethics. A second method we have recently employed has been defining the long-term purpose and integrating sustainability into our company’s statement of ethics and values. We had not previously done this in company literature. As soon as we revealed our strategy and commitment to sustainability goals, including measurable outcomes, the feedback was tremendous. We had clients who celebrated our new vision, and employees did start sharing their ideas and insights. As Dyllick & Muff (2015) point out, sustainability plans suffer when there is a major disconnect between the rhetoric or ideals, and the actual results. Therefore, the next step is to have more concrete means of leveraging sustainability, and do more beyond the simple cost-cutting measures we have implemented. Sustaining Sustainability The typography offered by Dyllick & Muff (2015) applies well to our firm. This typology classifies businesses into a sort of continuum, starting with firms that are still operating in a “purely economic” paradigm like ours (Dyllick & Muff, 2015, p. 8). From there, companies like Unilever have adopted the “refining shareholder value management” approach, which is great but still fails to totally integrate sustainability with ethics, values, and guiding principles (Dyllick & Muff, 2015, p. 9). As Polman & Bhattacharya (2016) also point out, the company can engage employees better by defining those guiding principles clearly. Every employee needs to feel empowered to take initiative or participate in competitions, to showcase the best features of the company’s corporate sustainability model, or to make sustainability more visible overall. As a manager, I would immediately get the marketing team on board as well as human resources. We need to shift from the economic valuation framework to a higher vision and values point of view. “Every person wants his or her working life to have a higher purpose that goes beyond doing a job and earning an income,” (Polman & Bhattacharya, 2016, p. 1). To motivate employees, we need to recreate the company’s mission, vision, and values to focus on how our work contributes to either environmental or social justice causes. This will require some clever and creative approaches, but working together as a team will allow us to generate new ideas regularly. Ultimately, I would help all departments work together to achieve common goals.