As we’ve noted before, corporate sustainability is becoming the new normal. More and more companies are issuing corporate sustainability reports. In 2016, 82% of the S&P 500 issued corporate sustainability reports, up from just 20% five years earlier.
Similarly, more and more communities—red as well as blue—are committing to green goals. Reducing waste saves money and increases resilience—benefits that appeal to everyone.
Expanding the Reach of Your Sustainability Program
In the early phases of any organization’s efforts to be more environmentally sustainable, energy and waste savings are relatively easy to find. For example, there are often opportunities to update technologies for substantial savings benefits.
However, as organizations get better at saving, it becomes more challenging to identify new energy and waste savings opportunities. The discussion shifts from easy-to-implement lighting projects, to more complicated efforts that focus on building operations, and ultimately, the engagement of stakeholders within the building.
These corporate sustainability efforts often start out with small teams of energy and resource experts. But as sustainability efforts evolve, it becomes more and more important to broaden the team and engage representatives in every department of the organization, and to launch initiatives that can engage all employees around corporate sustainability initiatives.
Increasing Community-Wide Sustainability Efforts
Similarly, community initiatives begin with a group of enthusiastic citizens and key staff. To be really effective, though, these efforts need to broaden to include representatives from every part of the community, creating opportunities for everyone to participate.
Achieving breakthrough results require culture change, and culture is about everybody—not just the core green team.
Growing Sustainability Efforts Beyond the Green Team
It’s important then, to grow your efforts beyond the green team. You need to engage and inspire regular folks in various departments. That’s where Cool Choices can help. Our approach makes sustainability appealing across a broad population—engaging people you’d never expect would join. Our game-based program encourages conversation—intra-team coaching as well as cross-team “trash” talking—that raises the profile of sustainability in ways that will surprise you. As people talk, they discover shared values, which reinforce their new habits. More, their actions influence the actions of their peers and culture starts to shift.
You might well be thinking that this approach sounds too good to be true. Maybe you’ve tried to engage employees in the past, without much success. We interact with a lot of sustainability advocates who have similar feelings about their previous engagement effort. In a sense, this isn’t any different than technology upgrades: you might well have struggled with early lighting or HVAC upgrades too. As systems improved and experience accumulated, though, the upgrades got easier. Cool Choices’ approach is built on decades of best practices in engagement and behavior change—our methodology has worked in a myriad of settings. A benefit of partnering with us is that we share that expertise with you, increasing your odds of success.
Kohler Co. Found Success Via Cool Choices Sustainability Engagement Programs
That said, you don’t have to take our word for it. We co-presented a webinar with Brigitte Cruce-Dillman of Kohler Co. that provides a first-hand account of our employee engagement efforts at their corporate campus. Brigitte talks about their sustainability champions program, and how they worked with Cool Choices to broaden engagement at Kohler. Perhaps most importantly, she talks about how her own skepticism evaporated when she saw people volunteering to become part of the solution at Kohler Co.
If you’ve got aggressive sustainability goals, you’ll need to engage everyone to achieve them. Contact us to talk about how we can help you broaden your efforts to include everyone, not just the green team.
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