Sustainability – from your head to your heart!

Everyone can work on sustainability, every day, in every job. It’s an incredibly diverse topic that touches each employee. On the other side, every employee influences their company’s positive progress, too. That’s why I believe businesses can only achieve a sustainable transformation if they have the right culture in place. But how exactly can companies create a culture that’s ready to embrace the change for a sustainable future? How can they truly shift mindsets at every level of a large global organization?

I think about this a lot, and there’s no easy answer…

In my experience, companies that get this right start by making the emotional case for sustainability. They help employees understand how environmental and social topics connect to their tasks, their teams and even their personal lives – because sustainability IS connected to all of those things.

Many teams are handling the practical realities in their daily work. It is the experts who are staying on top of new reporting requirements and ESG regulations. It is the engineer who is tracking water use to enhance water circularity at laundry detergent production site. It is the DEI teams who work to make our culture even more diverse and inclusive of fresh sustainability ideas. It is the R&D colleague who designs adhesive solutions for more mono-layer packaging to simplify recycling processes. It is the purchasing department who seeks out the renewable raw materials to replace fossil-based ones. Many colleagues make an impact in a unique way, within their specific role and with their particular skillset. Every person can be motivated to support a more sustainable world.

To support each employee, we need a culture that conveys just that: We must urgently push forward our sustainable transformation. Everyone is responsible. Everyone is empowered, allowed to take risks, make mistakes, develop ideas – to make an impact and act as a pioneer. This requires a mix of top-down and bottom-up approaches.

From top-down to bottom-up

As a board member at Henkel, I know it’s important to make sure our cultural and sustainable transformation as a company resonates loudly and clearly with our people worldwide. Our company’s strategy and company purpose both have sustainability at their core. The Management Board has direct responsibility for our Sustainability Strategy , the Sustainability Council, our central decision-making body, brings together top leaders from all areas of the business and we have a dedicated sustainability team?developing and driving the corporate strategy and orchestrating the governance. In this way, we make sure sustainability is embedded as a priority for every department and region, ensuring leaders embrace it – top-down.

But it’s equally important for the entire organization to embrace this topic – bottom-up. Companies need to empower and upskill people to drive sustainable transformations. And that carries some big challenges. I admit, at Henkel , we’ve faced difficulties reaching every region because we were sometimes too Europe-focused. We also struggled to engage every employee because it’s harder to reach shift workers or people without regular access to a computer, for example. But openly acknowledging these challenges is the best way to address and ultimately overcome them.

It's all about people

The key to success? It’s all about connecting people and making sustainability personal!

In 2022, we launched our Sustainability at Heart program with exactly this aim – to inform, learn and connect. It builds on our Sustainability Ambassador program, which reached more than 50,000 employees worldwide with extensive trainings. Our new and more holistic approach now further equips employees with the knowledge, skills and mindset that are central to sustainability leadership.

In 2023, we experimented with a new platform – our Global Sustainability Forum. Colleagues from all corners of the business from around the world spent two intense days together, picked up new skills and made a strong commitment to deepen collaboration. To reach all employees, including production workers, we set up the Sustainability Pioneer training program to share job-specific knowledge. And our Sustainability Incubator Lab offers an eight-week learning opportunity with live sessions and group work that connects people across teams to work on projects together. By offering a variety of channels and programming, we try to foster a culture of exchange, bold-idea sharing, and openness to education – because sustainability is a learning journey for all of us.

I’ve seen these kinds of activities create positive change experiences for people in our teams around the globe. That is what helps us foster the right culture for a sustainable transformation. Culture is not an HR topic – it’s a shared responsibility. We have to keep making the emotional case for change. We have to continue revealing how sustainability connects to every employee’s tasks, team and life. And we have to make it personal again…and again, and again.

Companies that achieve that cultural change will unlock fantastic potential to lead positive progress for sustainability. We must make this incredibly complex subject matter comprehensible and approachable, appealing to the head and the heart. Even more importantly, we must give every individual the opportunity to contribute. From there, it can propel an organization into a successful and responsible future.

How is your company inspiring cultural change for its sustainability transformation? Let me know!