Workshop: Employee Engagement for Sustainability

Getting your employees really engaged in your sustainability initiatives can be difficult if you don’t use the right approach. Low or no budgets, minimal time allocations and competing priorities leave Green Team Members tired and disheartened. Join this Workshop and reinvigorate your Green Team’s efforts to achieve authentic engagement with your employees. Using the techniques and tips discussed in this course you will design a plan for your company or Green Team while getting creative and fun ideas from peers.

Understand how Worldviews Impact Employee Engagement

Employee engagement can be the key to the long term success of your sustainability and social responsibility initiatives. Broadly, it can also predict organizational success, financial performance and employee outcomes such as retention and attraction. Research shows a “systems” approach to employee engagement for sustainability can be powerfully successful. When we connect with the Whole “thinking, feeling, willing, social self” – employees throughout the organization respond in surprising ways.

The “engagement gap” is costing North American businesses in excess of $ 300 billion in lost productivity each year. Sustainability is the real key to closing this gap. It provides employees with the reason, opportunity, freedom and knowledge to engage in meaningful, impactful outcomes. At a time when environmental and social sustainability needs to sweep through businesses at an unprecedented rate, employee engagement offers the power to authentically turn organizational culture toward tackling deep environmental, social and economic challenges. It is through engaged employees that your organization will actually “walk the talk”.

In this ON-LINE, Hands-On, Workshop we will provide you with proven practices to implement and sustain your employee engagement program and demonstrate how tools such as branding can accelerate the delivery of sustainability’s economic, environmental and social benefits to your company.

Here are five simple, research-based ways to engage your employees:

1. Connect employees with the people they serve. One five-minute interaction with individuals who benefit from the company’s products and services can produce up to a 500 percent boost in employee productivity. Interaction increases empathy for customers, motivating employees to do a better job serving them. For example, attaching a photo of the patient to an X-ray enhances radiologists’ effort and accuracy, yielding 46 percent improvements in diagnostic findings.

2. Get personal. Employees who know their manager well “as a person” are more likely to be engaged. In North America, getting to know employees on personal level can boost employee engagement by 11 percent. Managers often believe traditional managerial skills such as effective delegation of assignments or providing regular feedback will raise engagement levels – but research shows that building personal relationships is even more effective.

3. Allow employees to help colleagues via employee support programs. Employees who support co-workers in need experience increased commitment to the organization. Employee support programs (e.g. counseling services or financial grants) provide employees opportunities to help each other. To achieve the engagement benefits of such a program, communicate to employees the ways they can contribute, demonstrate the program’s credibility and highlight the organization’s contributions to it.

4. Commit to corporate social responsibility (CSR). Research shows that employees who are satisfied with the organization’s commitment to social and environmental responsibilities demonstrate more commitment, engagement and productivity. In fact, when employees are positive about their employer’s commitment to CSR, engagement across the company rises: in the same study, engagement spiked to 86 percent when employees had positive feelings towards the company’s commitment, compared with just 37 percent for employees who harbored negative feelings.

5. Invest in workplace wellness. Employer-sponsored programs that support employees in adopting behaviors that reduce health risks and improve quality of life — also known as wellness programs — raise engagement levels and directly impact the bottom line. For instance, Johnson & Johnson saw returns of $2.71 for every dollar spent on wellness programs.

Except from: Help Employees Help You: Five Research-based Ways to Boost Engagement by Bushra Tobah, Network for Business Sustainability

Learning Objectives & Modules

Learning Objectives: Using examples, case studies, best practices and hands-on activities, you will:

• Create the business case for employee engagement for sustainability.
• Understand and apply the Learning Engagement Model to your Employee Engagement for Sustainability Plan.
• Evaluate how the motivations of your employees differ and how this understanding can increase your engagement success.
• Diagnose your culture of engagement and engagement strategy.
• Apply a employee engagement campaign checklist to your events.
• Examine the 5 key steps in successfully implementing sustainability strategies with employees.
• Understand and apply 8 tools used in winning employee engagement campaigns for sustainability.
• Examine the 3 steps of the Employee Volunteering Framework and the role of employee engagement in your CSR program.
• Understand the value of and steps in creating an internal brand and internal brand communications strategy for the long-term sustainability of your program.
• Evaluate how branding can accelerate the adoption, enhance buy-in and achieve greater impact for your sustainability efforts.
• Develop an Action Plan for employee engagement and branding for your sustainability and social responsibility strategy for the next year.

Module 1 – Understanding Employee Engagement for Sustainability

Can engagement in your sustainability initiatives give employees connection to a “higher purpose” resulting to greater productivity? Guest Speaker: Dr. Stephanie Bertels, Assistant Professor in Technology & Operations Management, Simon Fraser University.

In this module:

• Define “real” employee engagement for sustainability.
• Create the business case for Whole employee engagement for top down & bottom up “greening” of a company.
• Apply the Learning Engagement Model to engagement in your company.
• Assess your engagement strategy using the System Model of Engagement for Sustainability
• Use tools to determine the best place to intervene in a system for employee engagement for sustainability.
• Embedding and Diagnosing Sustainability in Organizational Culture (Dr. Stephanie Bertels).
• A Diagnostic Tool to Understand Employee Engagement in your Company

Module 2 – Best Practices, Tips, Tools & Approaches to Success

How do you engage employees to bring your sustainability strategy to life? Guest Speakers: Panel of Employee Engagement Practitioners. We will:

• Understand how to maximize the effectiveness of the roles and responsibilities of Green Teams.
• Examine the 5 key steps in successfully implementing sustainability strategies with employees.
• Understand and apply 8 tools used in winning employee engagement campaigns for sustainability.
• Hear about the practical side of what works and what doesn’t. (Panel of Employee Engagement Practitioners)

Module 3 – Engagement in Social Sustainability Projects

In the rapidly growing field of Sustainability and CSR employee engagement is essential to every CSR program. In this module led by guest speaker, Chris Jarvis, Realized Worth we will:

Examine the three steps of the Employee Volunteering Framework including:

• Performing an environmental scan and benchmarking against best practices
• Using a Canvas Design process to test and evaluate the best options for your company
• Implementing a employee volunteer program with clear plan, objectives, and measures.
• Explore tools for increasing employee matching, volunteering and giving.
• Discuss automating processes as prompts, recognition, rewards and feedback.
• Use Templates for bring together different types of employee volunteering and giving.

Module 4 - Building an Internal Brand to Promote and Celebrate Employee Engagement Programs

Brands promote more sustainable behaviour by informing and influencing people’s choices. In this module led by Caroline Nolan — founder of ThinkSustain Consulting, a marketing communications company for sustainability (and Associate of The Natural Step Canada), we will:

• Understand the value of creating an internal brand and internal brand communications strategy for the long-term sustainability of your program.
• Examine the steps to creating and launching this internal brand.
• Evaluate best practices for internal brand development for engagement.
• Create a step-by-step plan for your organization.
• See case studies and identify key success factors.

Who Should Attend

This course will be of value to Sustainability Coordinators, Sustainability Team Leaders and Members, Sustainability Coaches and Champions, Municipal Sustainability and Communications leaders; Marketing and Corporate Communications Managers; business managers/owners and anyone planning to lead the development of a sustainability strategy within business, government or the not-for-profit sector. Bring your entire “green team” and use this workshop as a kick-off to your sustainability initiative.

Course Price: Early Registration Date Early registration: $ 350 plus tax

Course Price: Regular $ 450 plus tax

Sustainability Learning Centre – Continuing Education Units (contact hours) This program is part of SLC’s Green Core Competency Certification. Completion of this course provides 6 units toward a Certificate of Sustainability Education.

To register click here.

Workshop: Employee Engagement for Sustainability republished with permission.

Richard Matthews is a consultant, eco-entrepreneur, green investor and author of numerous articles on sustainable positioning, eco-economics and enviro-politics. He is the owner of THE GREEN MARKET, a leading sustainable business blog and one of the Web’s most comprehensive resources on the business of the environment. Find The Green Market on Facebook and follow The Green Market’s twitter feed.