Employee Engagement for Carbon Reduction: How Companies Can Inspire and Involve Their Staff

It is widely recognised that successful organisations ensure that staff goals are clearly aligned with business objectives. Accordingly, as environmental credentials increasingly become key performance indicators (KPIs), organisations must take action to engage staff in their sustainability strategy. Read this blog to explore the 7 key steps you can take to inspire and involve your staff in your carbon reduction strategy.

7 Steps to Inspire and Involve Your Staff in Your Carbon Reduction Strategy

1. Start at the Grassroots

Take sustainability from a ‘nice to have’ and reframe it as being business critical by embedding it into your business strategy, KPIs and job specifications. In addition to the financial benefits that sustainability practices provide, studies have found that employee retention, productivity and overall engagement all increase when sustainability is woven into an organisation’s DNA.

If you don’t have the executive power to make operational decisions, consider your scope of influence and leverage the resources at your disposal. Consider incorporating sustainability into your job and encourage peers to do the same.

Top tip! Make your goals measurable; this will give you a vital benchmark to aid you and your team in making informed, evidence-based decisions throughout your carbon reduction journey.

2. Form a Green Team

Once you've introduced sustainable thinking and decision-making into your business, the next step is forming a Green Team of dedicated and passionate individuals who can bring sustainability to life within their departments and the whole organisation. Giving your staff the freedom and power to strategise and lead your environmental initiatives will help stimulate innovation and identify practical solutions to supercharge carbon reduction. If you do it right, your Green Team will become your very own in-house sustainability think tank.

Follow this link for a step-by-step guide on organising a progressive and influential Green Team/Sustainability Committee.

3. Climate-Positive Training for All Staff

Training is a highly effective way to bolster engagement in your carbon reduction strategy programme while upskilling your workforce. Keep reading to explore two proven approaches to delivering climate-positive training successfully.

Company-Wide Lunch and Learn Sessions

Schedule regular companywide lunch and learn sessions to engage as many colleagues as possible. Create an inclusive forum where employees can share ideas, ask questions, and leave feeling more knowledgeable and empowered about your business’s commitment to reducing carbon emissions. See below for some suggestions for session themes to get you started:

• Carbon jargon explained.
• What is carbon reduction?
• How to reduce your carbon footprint at work.
• The benefits of reducing your carbon footprint.

Talk to Planet Mark experts about bespoke training programmes.

Introduce Sustainability into Your Induction Process

Capture the interest of new hires by making them aware of your progress and carbon reduction strategy and aspirations; tell them about the forums, resources, and initiatives you’ve created to support them on their sustainability journeys. By incorporating sustainability into your induction process, your organisation will invigorate its carbon reduction efforts with each hire, further enhancing your commitment to environmental responsibility.

4. Environmentally Focused Away Days

Take your team for an environmentally focused away day. Many opportunities exist to collaborate with your local community to organise climate action initiatives. This is a wonderful way to bring your carbon reduction journey to life and inspire you and your colleagues to introduce fresh ideas into the workplace.

5. Make Sustainability Fun!

Who doesn’t love an opportunity to pair environment-focused team building with a fun activity? Create competitions centred around promoting nature and rewarding employees for sustainable practices. Sustainability knows no boundary between work and home, so create competitions that can take place in the office or away from the screens. Feel free to be inspired by the suggestions below:

• Best photo of nature – also a fantastic way to get the work chat buzzing.
• Quarterly printing audits – the team who prints the least wins.

Prizes always make competitions more enticing; this is a perfect opportunity to make them environmentally focused! Buy the winner a desk plant or offer tickets to The Eden Project.

6. Celebrate Your Successes

Celebrate successes! Make yourself aware of critical dates, mark them in your calendar, and use them as an opportunity to share your positive carbon reduction stories and achievements. Give your colleagues something to be proud of about which they can talk.

7. Bring Sustainability Talk to the Table

Encourage bucketloads of chatter! Conversation is a terrific driver of change and is one of the simplest and most practical tools to build thriving engagement from colleagues. Start striking up conversations in the office, online and don’t stop there! Talking to your peers will amplify your sustainability culture and is an excellent metric to gauge engagement. The more sustainability chatter that happens, the better!

Remember, as a leader in your organisation, you are responsible for championing sustainability and leading by example. You must be the change you want to see in the world. Use every opportunity available to you to inspire and motivate your colleagues through your actions.

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At Codex, we are working together to identify actions and initiatives we can implement to reduce our carbon footprint and positively impact our local community through our Codex Cares Programme.

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