Action! The Final Step to Employee Sustainability Engagement
Note: This is the fourth installment in a five-part series on engaging employees around sustainability. The first part introduces the four stages of employee engagement; the second part discusses raising employee awareness about sustainability; the third part discusses connecting to the company’s vision and strategy; the fourth part discusses how connection leads to commitment; while the fifth part discusses learning the secrets of measuring employee sustainability engagement.
Congratulations! You’ve successfully moved through the first three phases of employee engagement and have achieved effective, actionable engagement from your workforce. This installment is the fourth piece in our series on employee engagement.
We hope you’ve gained valuable insights and knowledge from our proven process, client examples and other relevant best practices. Here we showcase the best practices of companies that have successfully moved through the employee engagement process and have achieved action-oriented results.
Campbell’s Effective Employee Engagement Program
Campbell’s Soup Company has many examples of actionable, effective employee engagement. It’s culture celebrates, informs and engages employees on a daily basis. From presenting employees with formal awards for excellence to informal peer-to-peer awards called Make a Difference (MAD), Campbell’s actively embraces employee sustainability engagement.
An annual innovation fair for Campbells employees allows them to submit their ideas for new product development. Campbell’s tracks and measures employee engagement developing an information database comparable to Gallup’s database of respondents in this area. Shown in the graphics below.
The company has stayed consistent with high employee-engagement numbers. This is mainly due to its daily efforts in driving action-oriented results around engagement.
Google’s Employee Engagement Actions
Google is a great example of a company embracing employee engagement best practices. A company like Fairmount Santrol, promote a sense of family and provide a work-life balance that takes into consideration children and outside interests and commitments in the community.
Diversity and inclusion is a Google priority, where “do the right thing” is not only a slogan but business as usual. Employee benefits and freedom allow more productivity and better business. This includes free on-site medical care, low-cost high-quality child care, a fitness center, and a library. Employees are also encouraged to spend 20 percent of their time on a project of their choosing.
Google tracks and measures employee performance. It has found that innovation and productivity consistently increase with higher employee engagement. Turnover and sickness rates consistently decrease and employee satisfaction is high overall.
Employees can be reimbursed for classes and degree programs, receive free legal advice or common legal services at a discount. They even have travel insurance and emergency assistance even on personal vacations.
All of these benefits help explain why Google continues to be among the top companies on the 100 Best Companies to Work For list. Google believes that engaging employees and making them happy allow them to be highly productive and innovative.
ThyssenKrupp Embraces Sustainability
ThyssenKrupp Elevator has embraced sustainability journey for years and has taken measurable steps to actively engage its workforce around its sustainability initiatives. ThyssenKrupp has the most LEED Green Associates of any company in their industry and provides continuing education for these individuals and all employees.
With the issuance of its first sustainability report, the company developed a foundation and visual identity around its sustainability initiatives. It established regular electronic communications to update employees on progress. They also provide a separate website dedicated to sustainability that serves as an outlet for employees to share best practices and success stories. This website is a perfect example of employees taking action in sustainability.
With the development of the Interactive Virtual Navigation (IVN) technology, the sales team is able to tell the ThyssenKrupp Elevator story on the road and educate customers and potential customers on not only products and services, but how they’re sustainable and how they can help others be sustainable, too.
Fairmount Santrol’s Employees are “Family Members”
Fairmount Santrol embraces being a sustainable company every day, with its employees leading the charge. Not only do employees, or “family members” as they’re referred to, participate as members of sustainable development teams as part of their daily jobs. Employees take it upon themselves to individually volunteer in their communities and make a difference.
Volunteers undertake everything from educating local students to helping clean up a park to organizing teams for Relay for Life. Family members consistently exceed their allotted paid time off to volunteer. Yearly, family members complete more than volunteer hours, than they pledged in each previous year.
Fairmount Santrol also achieved more than 1,000,000 consecutive safe working hours, due to its commitment to health and safety. Fairmount awards a family member at each facility every year with the Sustainable Development Employee of the Year Award, given to a family member who is the most active in sustainability initiatives at work, at home and in the community. Family members are personally committed to helping the company be an industry leader in sustainability now and into the future.
Employee Engagement Generates Ideas
We hope you found these examples and best practices useful and that they’ve generated some ideas for your own organization around employee engagement. We also hope this whole series was helpful in understanding and explaining the four stages of employee engagement. And how to make good progress and move along the continuum.
Employee Engagement Requires Patience
Remember, it’s not a race. Every organization is different and it may take time to move through the stages. The key is to make consistent progress and affect genuine organizational change.
Calculate Your Carbon Footprint
If you would like to calculate your Carbon Footprint, follow the link to the free carbon footprint calculator of the United States Environmental Protection Agency.
