How to engage your employees on sustainability & climate change?
As an environmental start-up that specialise in helping businesses engage their employees and attract new talent through nature and sustainability, we’re tired of seeing companies get it wrong. So we thought we'd lay down the law on how to do it properly.
What you can't do
This is obvious, but people keep doing it
Communicate through the same old internal comms channels
Run a lacklustre change campaign centred around a generic carbon footprint app that only gets used once or twice and then never again
Absolve your employees of their guilt by making them ‘carbon neutral’ at the click of a button using cheap offsets and the like
What you need to do
Your six-point plan
Come up with interesting concepts to make it different – it can’t be like standard corporate communications. It needs to be thought-provoking and fun.
Make it highly relevant to the organisation – our data and qualitative feedback has consistently shown that employees really care about what their organisation is doing on nature and climate.
You need to create something for everyone – sustainability is a broad topic and people care about different things. Some people care passionately about wildlife while others care far more about waste and plastic pollution.
Make it multi-channel – everyone engages differently, so you need to ensure that content is shared across every channel available, from email, staff groups, in person, on the intranet... the lot.
You need to frame the message effectively – a sensible way to do this is by using Science-Based Behavioural Insights such as ‘gain frames’ i.e. focusing on the personal gain or benefit to the employee rather than focusing on less effective negative messaging.
Lastly, you need to take it seriously – as we’ve said you can engage employees, but you need to do it properly - you can’t hand it over to somebody as an extracurricular activity. If it’s not done professionally it’ll be a waste of time.
How we do it
Using the above principles, we have designed our Carbon Jacked sustainability platform to engage employees on environmental issues in the most effective way. We work directly with our clients to tailor our memberships to their sustainability strategies.
If you ever want to get in touch about how you or your business can become more sustainable, drop us an email at enquiries@carbonjacked.com , or check out our environmental memberships and business services.
