Five ways to engage your employees on sustainability

From facing contemporary challenges to navigating new reporting requirements, leading a successful business requires applying a sustainability lens. However, embedding effective, sustainable practices across business operations remains intricate and challenging for many companies. 

To achieve true and ambitious progress, companies must secure buy-in, foster a deeper understanding of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and encourage ownership of sustainability efforts by employees in all roles and functions. Evaluating your company's contributions to the advancement of the SDGs is a great first step in aligning both successes and challenges.

To help companies make progress towards their commitments, here are five actionable steps to guide your company on how to engage and upskill employees on sustainability:

1. Raise awareness

Demonstrate the commitment of top leadership to communicate that sustainability is a priority for the company and individual employees. This can be done through internal communications, town halls and official CEO statements. Using these forums allows employees to align across departments and provides an opportunity to raise awareness of new ideas and complex problems. 

2. Gain employee buy-in

Connecting the company’s sustainability targets with employee ambitions will bridge the gap between global impact goals and how employees participate in achieving them in day-to-day work. By setting up performance management indicators connected to sustainability, employees can be motivated to take action to advance sustainability goals. A defined employee pathway connected to corporate sustainability is beneficial and creates a flow between different roles and functions tied to the same goal.

3. Share expertise and upskill

Provide employees with relevant information and tools for each role function. Deep dive into sustainability topics connected with employee responsibilities and explore the broader system of thinking around SDG topics across the organization. This can include collaborative training and decision-making exercises.  

4. Showcase action

Demonstrate the impact of collective action by measuring and reporting success stories. Communicating metrics and confirming progress across sustainability initiatives keeps all parties informed about what is done, what needs to be done and what cannot be done.

 5. Encourage advocacy

Encourage employees to share updates about their concrete sustainability projects to build visibility. Provide staff with the necessary promotional toolkits and platforms to communicate achievements internally and externally, recognizing and rewarding their efforts.

By implementing the steps above, you can help your employees become the driving force behind a sustainability transformation. That said, it’s important to recognize the employee engagement and upskilling process as ongoing and iterative. The overarching benefit of connecting individual employee output with greater corporate sustainability goals is a culture of resilience and optimism, helping to achieve the SDGs while encouraging sustainability in the workplace. 

Check out our course, Unlocking Sustainability: Engaging and Upskilling Employees. 

Want to learn more about how to make your organization more sustainable? Join us at the UN Global Compact Academy to discover topics ranging from SDG-integration, human rights and gender equality to setting science-based targets. All employees of participant companies of the UN Global Compact have unlimited access and can create an account today.