As avid readers of my blogs may have noticed, I regularly call for organisations to make employee engagement a pillar of their sustainability strategy. I have described how employee engagement can turbocharge business efforts to reach net zero. How employee engagement can be good for business, and for the planet.
That’s why I was pleased to see “upskilling your organisation on sustainability topics” listed among Edie’s eight New Year’s resolutions for sustainability professionals.
I would have used the term “engaging” rather than “upskilling”, but that’s just the world I inhabit….
Upskilling is about more than one-off campaigns or training programmes; about more than attractive internal communications.
Upskilling (or engaging) around sustainability is also about listening: finding out what sustainability or net zero means to employees, as individuals, and then discussing how it affects their role and function.
And it’s about empowerment: making it easier for teams of employees to plot their own course towards more sustainable ways of working, and then recognising and rewarding their efforts.
It’s actually about how your business interacts and co-creates with its employees. In other words, it’s about your organisational culture.
Anyone involved in organisational change, whether related to sustainability or to anything else, must pay attention to the power of organisational culture to catalyse, or to suppress, change.
For this reason, 2023 should be the year that culture and employee engagement take their (rightful) place in the sustainability professional’s toolkit.
And NetZero.Work is doing all it can to turn this hope into reality.
Photo credits: Todd Quackenbush and Ian Schneider