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You’ve got your ESG or sustainability strategy, it’s recorded, you’ve done a company-wide webinar about it, but does it stop there? If you want to keep momentum going on your goals, a fully engaged, fully committed workforce will help your business play a part in a more sustainable future.
What do they know about your aims? Are they invested in the future of the business? Have you given them tangible ways to get involved?
Find your common ground
To come up with an ESG strategy in the first place, organisations will often ask their employees what issues are most important to them as part of the discovery. This will then be mapped against what other stakeholders find important to come up with a set of strategies unique to your organisation which will address common issues. Then what?
Chances are, even if you didn’t do this as part of your discovery, there will be different parts of your ESG or sustainability strategy that will resonate with different employees and their passions. The trick is to harness that common ground.
They can make a difference
Your employees may see your goals on paper, or read about net zero promises in company emails, and they may feel like a small fish in a big pond. How could they possibly make a difference? What they may not realise is that they are the key! The diversity of interests, passions, and skills within your organisations is incredibly valuable to actioning a strategy, so tell them this.
Show them how to get involved. Or simply let them know that the door is open for ideas in this area as part of their role or as a professional development opportunity.
Some ideas to get you started:
- Encourage them to get involved in measuring and reporting carbon emissions
- Provide opportunities to look at reducing their team’s carbon footprint, could they upscale their recycling setup, switch off more equipment when not in use
- Encourage reviews of all procurement: could they buy refurbished, or can equipment be repaired rather than replaced?
- Help employees to review faulty or leaky equipment regularly and fix or replace to optimise energy efficiency
- Encourage re-use, increasing the lifecycle of products used at work
- Provide events and talks on diversity and inclusion that they can get involved with
- Create volunteering opportunities, charitable activities and wellbeing activities they can join in on
- Be vigilant with the supply chain, making sure suppliers are working to the same ESG values and scrutiny that you are
Where does it start?
This all starts with engaging everyone across the business with ESG. Do they all know what it is and how important it is to the organisation? Do they know how important these issues are to your customers? Do they see the connection with global sustainability goals? Tell them! A series of engaging training activities is a great place to start.
Upskill your people in all things environmental, social, and governance so that they understand better how to help.
ESG Fundamentals from Kineo Courses is the first in our ESG training suite and lets employees know the basics about all things ESG.
Harness the power of your people to reach your sustainability goals.
