Want your colleagues to do business sustainably? Stop talking and start hosting.

Embedding sustainability doesn’t start with telling people what to do, but by providing opportunities for them to talk to each other about real issues

How and why does a company become sustainable? When the boss says so? When the customers demand it?

While these are of course strong drivers, it’s simple logic that a company can’t truly operate in a sustainable way until the employees make sustainability part of their job. And this includes all of the employees – even those who don’t have the “S-word” in their job title.

Last week, together with my colleague, I ran a workshop at the CSR Asia Summit on this topic. We normally hold this workshop internally among colleagues as a way to help translate vague, broad sustainability strategies into actionable items for each individual person’s job. For the first time, we held the workshop externally among a group of like-minded sustainability professionals.

What I learned: people get it. They already want their jobs to be about more than just making money. They don’t need to be told, and in many cases don’t need to be taught. Instead, they need the opportunity to explore and analyze the opportunities that exist in every function, in every product, in every company.

This can be done most effectively not by lecturing, but by hosting conversations that elicit the expert knowledge already available in the minds of the participants.

At this particular workshop, we had 1.5 hours and a group of nearly 100 people. My colleague and I presented BASF’s own sustainability story as the impulse to get everyone thinking. But the magic happened when we asked the group to go through each function in a particular company, and discuss what the possible metrics for sustainability success could be.

Each table chose one company as an example, representing industries ranging from technology to fisheries to cruise ships and hotels, and a particular corporate function such as human resources, research and development, or customer service. The participants were very quickly able to identify the drivers in that function in that company. A cruise ship’s catering department? Consider the waste produced, the origin of the food, and the working conditions of the crew. A luxury hotel’s customer service department? Enable sustainable behavior among the guests. A technology company’s human resources department? Help management set sustainability related performance metrics.

Most of the people at a given table did not belong to the assigned function, but using their general business knowledge they were quickly able to identify possibilities for action – both easy wins and longer-term projects. When we combine sustainability expertise with functional expertise, the possibilities are even greater.

Holding this workshop reminded me that in a certain way, BASF is already one of the more enlightened companies when it comes to sustainability: instead of having an isolated, ignored department, we have actually embedded sustainability into the organization structurally. We have sustainability experts in the strategy department, in the business units, and in the procurement department. Yet it’s also clear that to get all of our 112,000 employees to act, we need to stop lecturing – and start hosting more conversations.