How sustainability builds employee engagement

Engaged employees create sustainable companies – according to Unilever CEO Paul Polman and ESMT Berlin professor CB Bhattacharya. At the same time companies that champion sustainability practices build employee engagement.

A recent Gallup poll revealed that “The world has an employee engagement crisis, with serious and potentially lasting repercussions for the global economy.” With so many organizations focused on employee engagement, why do only 13% of employees worldwide say they are engaged?

One of the reasons is to do with purpose. It has become an axiom of management thinkers that providing purpose is a key to creating an engaged and productive workforce. We would all like our working lives to have a higher purpose that goes beyond turning up to work and earning an income, and this is where sustainability comes in. Companies that focus on sustainability practices can resolve the tension people feel between their personal values and their work by providing a higher purpose.

Unilever, with an employee rating of 87%, is one organization that has got this message and is bucking the trend. In a recent article ESMT professor CB Bhattacharya and Unilever CEO Paul Polman draw on the Unilever experience to show how the key to creating a vibrant and sustainable company is to find ways to get all employees—from top executives to assembly line workers—personally engaged in day-to-day corporate sustainability efforts.

CB Bhattacharya is the Pietro Ferrero Chair in Sustainability, and Founding Director of the Center for Sustainable Business. In order to leverage sustainability to build employee engagement he proposes these eight key action points:

• Define the company’s long-term purpose. Thinking about the social purpose that a company serves enables employees to latch onto that higher purpose and use the company as a means to express their values.
• Spell out the economic case for sustainability. Research has shown that truly sustainable business is profitable business and it helps the cause to share this knowledge with employees.
• Create sustainable knowledge and competence.  Many sustainability initiatives require specialized knowledge. 
  • Make every employee a sustainability champion. It is not enough to have sustainability champions at the top — they must be cultivated at all levels of the organization.
  • Co-create sustainable practices with employees. A great way to embed sustainability in a company is to act on employee initiatives.
  • Encourage healthy competition among employees. For example, an initiative at BASF provides every employee with an opportunity to join a team and develop a corporate volunteering project. All employees then vote for their favourite projects and the top 150 are funded.
  • Make sustainability visible inside and outside the company. Measuring and communicating progress on key sustainability indicators reinforces the idea that achievements in sustainability are meaningful for the company.
  • Showcase the higher purpose by creating transformational change. Learn to collaborate with competitors to solve thorny environmental and social issues. Doing this fosters a sense that achieving sustainability is not just about their own company, but rather a societal issue with global implications.

This article was originally published on IEDP.com.