Employee engagement makes an impact

Your goal is to reduce waste by 30% by 2015. The CEO’s on board, stakeholders are impressed, and your personal sense of achievement is running high. How do you hit the target? This is where your 10,000 employees come in. Without their collaboration, you’re lost.

CONTEXT has outlined our approach to get employees singing from your song sheet in our latest In Context Bulletin. Internal communications is the new sustainability frontier. The challenges were underlined at the Net Impact Conference, hosted by the Ross Business School at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and at the annual BSR conference in New York City in early November.

Net Impact, a global network of MBA students and young professionals looking to change the world through business, brought 2,500 people together for its biggest ever conference. It explored sustainability through the lens of a younger generation anxious to instill behavioral change.

Rose Kirk, Vice President – Public Affairs, Policy and Communications at Verizon Wireless, and one of three opening keynote speakers, said: “I can’t stress enough the importance of employee engagement.”

The theme continued in at least two breakout sessions. We argued the only way to get employees – from the CEO to workers on the shop floor – on board is by convincing them of the business case for sustainability. The better integrated sustainability in the business, the more employees will take note.

Delegates at Business for Social Responsibility’s conference in New York were similarly enthused. Discussions ranged from the effectiveness of compostable cups to the challenges of bridging the gap between the CEO and factory workers.

Tell us what you think, and keep a close eye out here for more.

Peter Knight on how clever Smarter Planet is

Whiter teeth, sweeter breath, enhanced body parts, curlier eye lashes, slimmer waistlines – Madison Ave knows how to sell us these aspirations. But what about sustainability? Will this join the list of emotional triggers and desires that get us to open our wallets?

IBM thinks so, or rather its advertising gurus who have devised the Smarter Planet campaign do. More than a simple one-off campaign to flog a few services, Smarter Planet is a deep branding and communications exercise that appears to be designed to change fundamentally our view of the giant brand we used to call Big Blue.

Communications people like to talk about the benefits of “owning” things in the public domain – things that can’t really be owned. Dove lays claim to the real beauty space, Heineken to the “refresh” space. Marlboro used to have the great-outdoors space.

IBM, it seems, wants to own the “planet” space. No one has ever accused it of lacking ambition and by the sheer size, breadth and depth of its advertising-cum-rebranding effort based on sustainability, it’s not passing unnoticed.

Read this article in full at Ethical Corporation

How to get Jack and Jill to turn off the lights

Why should employees want to turn off YOUR lights? Or put that costly compostable cup in the right bin? Or suggest a more energy efficient way to make YOUR products?

There is no obvious reason for employees to help you meet your sustainability goals. What’s in it for them?

Herein lie both challenge and opportunity: You are almost entirely dependent on your employees to do the sensible things that will help the company cut its costs and meet its sustainability goals.

You need their cooperation. You need their ideas. You need their enthusiasm. And you need them to keep doing the smart thing, over and over and over again. How do you get their support? How do you turn the challenge into opportunity?

Enter internal communications, probably the least glamorous, least appreciated of corporate functions. It is the internal communicators – those fine people battered by corporate correctness and bent double from kowtowing to the vanities of executives – whom you have to rely on to motivate the masses.

CONTEXT's winter 2010 bulletin gives readers a look at our simple strategy for successful internal sustainability communications. As always, we want to hear from you. Are we on the right track? Have we missed something? Is our "CONTEXT team" attractive enough? Carry on the conversation below.