Top Strategies to Engage Employees in Sustainability Globally

One of my favourite parts of my job as co-founder at Giki is working with amazing leaders, driving positive change within their companies. This month on our Green Champions webinar I spoke with Stewart Green , Sustainability Director for Gentrack Ltd (Global) , who has successfully spearheaded various initiatives aimed at engaging employees and embedding sustainability into the core of his organisation. Off the back of their recent campaign where they managed to engage 50% of their workforce, he shared his strategies that organisations can adopt to drive meaningful engagement globally in sustainability.?

What is your broad sustainability strategy and how do employees fit into it??

Gentrack’s sustainability strategy is not unique to other businesses, but we wanted to make sure all elements of the strategy relate back to our people. We cannot cross the finish line alone. You can have an amazing plan, but your people are the tapestry that runs throughout all areas of the business. For us this includes:?

• Having a dedicated employee engagement platform (Giki). Using gamification to engage a multi-generational workforce. This makes it tangible and fun for people, as well as making it relevant to their day-to-day lives. It also appeals to their competitive nature.?
• Empower people in the regional locations to do what’s relevant to them wherever they are in the world, whilst still being guided and aligning to the global strategy. Regional offices can do what is important and impactful for them and their communities.??
• Customer Engagement. As a supplier, your clients want to know you’re doing the right thing. But we try to go beyond that, to partner and collaborate on challenges we all face across our industry.?
• Value chain. A source we need to understand, and have collective agreement on, to drive change. Having open and honest conversations, collaborating for solutions and data, data and more data needed here.
• Transparency. We have to report a climate statement to the market, but also our people. We wanted to break away from it being a marketing or compliance exercise. To be clear on what we’re good at and what we’re not, our beliefs and goals, and we aim to be as transparent as possible.
• We believe in the power of cleantech. We are a tech company and know that our solutions help accelerate the global transition to net zero. The industry must progress and that isn’t just the physical aspect, but also the digital. We lead in that space and are keen to innovate and continue to increase our offerings.??

“Employees are our change agents for Net Zero. If they’re not part of it, we’re not going to achieve our goals.”?

How did you go about implementing Giki in your organisation??

30% of the work was choosing Giki, 70% was creating the plan. The challenge being to land it across six countries at the same time, with the same message, plus get buy-in and support. You need a strong connection with not just marketing, but senior leaders too. We have seen a direct impact when the senior leaders engage on the platform, and broader participation. If you can’t get your leadership team and regional managers across the globe to engage, then it doesn’t land.??

So, we have a process of getting them involved, before the programme is rolled out. We have meetings with them to explain how it works, the expectations, the value and excitement it can bring. It is a lot of planning but is all about keeping the message simple. For us, it’s that we’re trying to educate and drive behaviour. Also, know your audience and focus on the areas you know are going to be most relevant to them. Articulate value and impact clearly. Launch day is easy, the hard work comes before in the planning and communication.??

Leaderboards are also key for us, playing to the competitive spirit and encouraging countries to compete against each other. We have also accepted that people are very motivated by incentives. We debated on prizes, but we settled on tree planting. For example, when you sign up you get to plant one tree, if your team wins you get 500 trees. People care about the planet, but they are very mindful about their data. So, to encourage them to go to an external platform and fill out information, we find an incentive helps massively plus it’s a win for the planet! And remember:

• Don’t try and do it all yourself. Find your champions and use them. I didn’t launch Giki, our people across the organisation did.
• Accept you’re not going to get everyone. I struggled with this at first, but it’s a journey and progress over perfection is the mantra here.

“We cannot cross the finish line alone”?

Do you have any tips for engaging leadership teams??

It is not easy, but generally the things that help me are:?

• Build it into global goals and objectives for them to support and build engagement around sustainability.??
• Link it back to commercial purpose. Things like being able to have richer conversations with customers, attracting top talent etc??
• Be clear about what you need from them and explain WHY we’re doing this. People are busy, so you must articulate impact and value from outset.

“Sustainability is not a nice to have, it’s a need to have”?

What is your communications approach to get the message out??

We used every channel we had available to us to run a teaser campaign before the launch to build interest and excitement. I ran workshops for our people, and the Global Sustainability Taskforce (our green team) did workshops and outreach. There were also the usual things, such as global emails and standard intranet posts. I spoke, along with the CEO, at the global town hall meeting, as well as at everyone’s regional team meetings. Plus, we have a regional champion who promotes in their country.??

In what ways does data help you??

Leaderboard data helps us to encourage engagement during challenges. But also, being able to playback post event the impact, and translating that to real thing, is really powerful. We always follow-up very quickly after a challenge with what we achieved both to the board and to our people. The number of users is important, as is the carbon savings, but being able to equate that to something else – such as a number of flights – is a great way to make it real.??

What’s next for Gentrack??

Our focus next is to look at getting data from working from home and commuting . People don’t like filling in surveys, so they need to see the bigger picture and understand why you want and need that information. They all have a role and an impact to make, so it’s about communicating how it will help them as well as the business. We’re using Giki to help us with this as people are already familiar with the platform and it will make our job a lot easier.??

“There is no prize for being the best in the world at sustainability”?

Thank you Stewart for sharing with us your playbook, which has been incredibly successful in engaging staff across your global workforce. I am excited for the next stage.