Making Values Pay: Sustainability and Staff Engagement

What is the real value to sustainability to an organisation? Is it something to pursue or a waste of money? In this article Adam Bastock of Small99 explores the benefits and risks of getting to grips with sustainability. 

Sustainability can feel like a nice to have strategy, or one that is irrelevant in today’s economic turbulence. The opposite is true – without engaging your team on sustainability, you’re sacrificing a huge amount of financial resilience, operational efficiencies, and potentially sales. 

To understand why, we first need to define what we really mean by “sustainability”. 

What is sustainability?

This is a huge question so for simplicity sake, I’m going to focus on greenhouse gas emissions and more specifically Net Zero. Net Zero and Carbon Neutral are very different terms, with Net Zero requiring a 50% reduction in your carbon footprint by 2030, and 90% by 2050. 

Large organisations are sometimes legally bound to their targets, and large institutions such as the NHS are committed and driving this down through their supply chains. 

Now, this may be instilling some panic as you realise what a large task this is! To meet these targets, you need to be engaging your entire team to meet them. It can’t fall to just one person. 

So, why bother?

Financial

Contracts, tenders and customers are increasingly requiring Net Zero commitments, especially if you work with larger organisations. If you can’t tell your story of what you’ve done to reduce your footprint, you may not be the preferred supplier anymore and lose out. This goes for existing clients as well as new ones. 

Action

Passive actions such as planting trees or organising staff litter picks can’t get you very far, especially if you don’t have sight of what impacts you are helping to reduce.

You need team engagement at all levels to tell the story of what they are doing to reduce the organisational impact every single month, and year so that when you get asked about it, you can show tangible results. 

Strategy

Your sustainability strategy needs to be strategic, not just be a feel good initiative you’ve signed up to. That means embedding it across the organisation with KPIs and measures to track it accordingly. 

Without having the team onboard, there are several consequences!

A lack of engagement on Sustainability means

Action Doesn’t happen

A plan isn’t good enough, you need to demonstrate progress. If your team isn’t aligned, initiatives stall. Communication breaks down between departments, actions get lost and ultimately, you stop moving forward…

Sales Suffer

As a result of lack of action, your sales stories become pretty weak. Competitors who may be telling better stories and seeing operational benefits gain an edge, and eventually you stop retaining clients and lose them to new companies. 

If you’re B2B, bigger companies are under pressure to meet self imposed Net Zero and/or legal targets, and this means making sure where they spend their money is sustainable.

If you’re B2C and selling experiences, a strong sustainability story still stands you out from the competition. Products with ethics and a story behind them perform better.

Talent begins to leave too

This is the third and in some cases, the most expensive part. Most people (80%) are concerned about climate change and their future. Staff want to feel like they’re doing the right thing against a backdrop of overwhelming news, and jobs that empower their staff to tackle the issues they’re concerned about will retain and engage staff far higher.

So, what do you do about it?

Every Job is a Climate Job

Ultimately this is what you need to embed – there is no single person responsible for sustainability in an organisation. 

Everyone has a part to play, and you need to be aware that if you’re ignoring it

This isn’t just a green, tree-hugging approach to business but one of ongoing operational success and business continuity. What happens if you can’t insure your buildings because of climate risks? Or supply chains are disrupted due to more frequent storms you failed to predict? Or servers go offline due to inadequate cooling?

These are all material, short term risks to your business that can only be managed if your staff are empowered to act on climate adaptation (living with the changes coming) and mitigation (trying to minimise the changes coming) efforts.

Implementing this has to come from all areas of the business.

Sales teams need to have confidence in your organisation’s actions so if they are asked as part of a contract, they can highlight your good work without risking greenwashing (or greenhushing). 

Operational teams need to know where their costs are going and the risks they face from disruption. A low-carbon fleet is one that is more able to weather fuel shocks.

Financial teams need to understand incoming legislation, taxations, and inefficiencies in the business. Net Zero is an efficiency drive – carbon emissions are typically cash (burning fuel, buying electricity) so ignoring it can lead to unnecessary costs. 

Marketing teams need to be able to tell the story and stand out from the crowd to attract new customers. HR and wellbeing teams need to ensure staff are looked after, climate anxiety isn’t high and that people are empowered to deliver the tasks they want to achieve.

How to Engage Staff

So, you know it’s important, but how do you go about it?

Firstly, here’s what not to do:

• Put too much on 1 person: It’s a common issue where 1, usually passionate, person gets given all of the sustainability responsibilities, with no budget, and often on top of their existing job. Green teams are useful, but they need resource, time and goals to meet. 
• Invest in Tech and assume it will fix it: Technology and carbon reporting tools can be useful, but how excited do you get about a PDF? Exactly – your team don’t either. 
• Give the solutions: For action to happen organically, you need to step back and let people have the space to get on with things themselves, including coming up with their own ideas and solutions. There’s plenty out there, but only when someone has  ownership over the idea themselves will they truly feel responsible for it
• Focus on the personal lives: What someone can do at work is far more empowering than trying to instill any individual change. The carbon footprint of the business will always be greater than the sum of the individuals, just due to raw spending power on materials. Therefore, people need to reduce through work, 
• Focus on climate change education: Sometimes the approach can be that the more data and numbers on climate we have, the more we will act. It’s false. People act based on stories and emotion – use this to your advantage and sell a better future to staff to really engage them.

Here’s what you should do:

• Ask, don’t tell: Host workshops to discuss ideas everyone has on reducing footprints or share what they may have learned recently. In training we have done as Small99, we find the team has the solutions more than we do. They know your business much better than you might think, and are likely quietly passionate about topics you’ve not realised! This might be just an hour or two each month to keep things moving forward. 
• Give space: As well as hosting workshops, you need to make sure sustainability is woven into the fabric of the business. Bake it into everyday conversations and KPIs and give it the space in meetings, but try not to make it a bonus talking point. Ensure you allow the team to give updates on progress and identify blockers to any ideas they are progressing. 

Conclusion

If you successfully engage the team, the values will pay for themselves through building in operational resilience, and give everyone something to talk about when you inevitably get asked by customers – old or new. Staff will feel engaged and like they are doing something bigger as part of a wider mission, and stay with you for longer. 

If you don’t start today, your competition will, and in an economic environment such as we have today – do you really want to be left behind?

Adam Bastock is the founder of Small99.

Small99 engage teams to tell their sustainability story with confidence and helps them drive adaptation and carbon reduction actions. 

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