Engaging Employees On Sustainability Can Pay Big Dividends

Why bother getting employees socially connected with their community or getting them involved in sustainability efforts? Over 50 people gathered at a recent Toronto Sustainability Speaker Series event to answer this question and to share ideas on how to use and celebrate human capital within organizations.

Speaker Chris Jarvis, Co-Founder and Senior Consultant at RealizedWorth, shared the value in allowing employees to grow as people by sharing their unique passions and skills. He offered real world examples that confirm the intuitive belief that happier, more engaged employees deliver real bottom line results. With examples such as $65 million of new revenue for Sears, Jarvis showed how engaging employees and allowing them to pursue their passions can pay big dividends.

Volunteering and community engagement on green and sustainability initiatives can transform both employees and organizations. Employees emerge happier, healthier, more creative, more innovative and more responsive to the wants and needs of customers and clients. Innovative employees and quality customer service lead to increased business success. Jarvis shared several examples, including how discussions about the need to embrace sustainability on a rudimentary level and eliminate styrofoam cups at eBay led to an array of solar panels that generate renewable energy and save money.

The greatest results emerge when employee engagement is about more than positive PR or good feelings. As with any sustainability initiative, employee engagement must be tied to the corporate vision. Organizations must resist the urge to adopt simplistic initiatives or to commit the sin of ‘human capital theft’ by claiming credit for hours of employee volunteering that people do on their own time, independent of any real employer support.

Fundamental to any successful sustainability initiative is not only a vision embedded into the corporate psyche but also a scorecard. To assess the value of your employee engagement initiative you must measure inputs, outputs, outcomes and impacts. It is through outcomes and impacts that you see if you are truly maximizing the value of your human capital and achieving your corporate vision. Tree planting may be a perfect employee engagement initiative for a sawmill, but for a pharmaceutical firm, planting trees neither aligns with the corporate reality nor does it harness specialized employee skill sets.

According to Jarvis, an employee engagement initiative will reap positive personal and professional rewards when done correctly. With effective use of social media, your corporate social responsibility commitment will be shared both within and far beyond your organization. Social media extends human relationships, and with a focus on strategic alignment and consistent messaging your employees will grow your initiatives and continue them into the future, ensuring greater corporate profitability.