Practical Models for Effective Employee Engagement in
Support of Evolving Sustainability Agendas
Susan Hunt Stevens, WeSpire @huntstevens
Stephanie Bertels, Network for Business Sustainability @sbertels
Jason Jay, MIT Sloan School of Management @jasonjjay
Zeynep Ton, The Good Jobs Strategy @zeynepton

Inspiring people to make sustainable
choices.
SB New Metrics - Sept. 24, 2014
Practical Models for Effective
Employee Engagement in Support of
Evolving Sustainability Agendas

About WeSpire
A cloud-based engagement platform that
global companies use to engage employees
in sustainability and responsibility initiatives

Delivering Measurable Impact
25 companies
45 different countries
2MM actions completed*
$250 saved per employee
*since July 2013
4

Tangible impact and savings
5
Since July 2013, our customers have saved
over $1M while reducing their
environmental footprint
waste energy water
100
Tons
3M
Kwh
3.6M
Gallons

Dr. Stephanie Bertels
Simon Fraser University, Canada
stephanie_bertels@sfu.ca

The starting point:
A systematic effort to understand how to embed sustainability
http://nbs.net/wp-content/uploads/Executive-Report-Sustainability-and-Corporate-Culture.pdf

What did we do?
Identified the 179
most relevant
sources
Located 13, 756
academic articles,
books, and
practitioner reports
Extracted 59 different
practices to embed
sustainability
Developed
the framework
• What are they doing?
• What are they trying to accomplish?
• How are they going about it?
• (With what degree of success?)

Key Recommendation:
Adopt a portfolio approach to embedding sustainability

Companies sought more guidance:
How do the practices shift over time?
Sustainability
maturity
time

Embedding Sustainability Working Group
• 9 firms / 3 year study
• Understand what they are doing
• Understand the impact on culture/climate
• Develop practical tools

Goal: Develop an assessment tool

Develop scales to compare performance
INTEGRATE INTO RISK: incorporate sustainability considerations into the organization’s risk process
To what extent do you integrate sustainability into your risk assessment process? Select the most applicable option:
0: We do not yet integrate sustainability into our risk assessment process and/or our organization does not have a risk
assessment process.
1: We know sustainability should be considered as part of our risk assessment process and are considering how we might
integrate it into our risk assessment process.
2: We have started to assess sustainability related risks as part our risk assessment process, but they are largely limited to
compliance based risks and generally only activated retroactively in the case of compliance failures. This work is mainly
undertaken by a few key people in the organization.
3: We are beginning to integrate sustainability into our core risk assessment process. We’re rolling this out to the business
units and some have developed an appreciation for the need to proactively factor sustainability into their internal risk
assessment processes.
4: We have a well-developed system for integrating sustainability into our risk assessment process. We have sustainability
expertise within our risk management group and we have an expanded risk matrix that factors in potential future risks due to
changing societal expectations or shifting natural capital stocks. We take a long-term view in assessing sustainability risk.
The business units have an appreciation for the need to proactively factor sustainability into their internal risk assessment
processes and see the value in doing so.
Questionnaire with 62 questions

Share best practices amongst members

Additional validation work
with South African firms

Understand the sequencing of the practices

Identify practice pathways

Formal Practices to Advance

Formal Practices to Deliver on Commitments

Informal Practices to Deliver on Commitments

Informal Practices to Advance

Develop a maturity model
Pathway Practice Not Embedded Tactical
Beginning to
Embed
Embedding Well Embedded Transformational
Envision
Prioritize
Sustainability Goals
Strategy
Ask employees
Listen
Review
Root Causes
Update
Lifecycles
Explore
Pilot
Internal knowledge
Improve Operations
Improve products & services
Scan
Benchmark
Standards
Feedback
Expertise
External Knowledge
Frame
Ask Leaders
Prime
Cultivate Champions
Trigger
Explain
Look beyond
Brand
Share stories
Mission-Vision-Values
Self-regulate
Commit
Model
Inform
Follow-up
Recognize
Employee Wellbeing
Communities
Resolve Inconsistencies
Link
Leverage Interest
Tackle Issues
Recruit
Onboard
Train
Sustainability roles
Allocate to senior leaders
Personal Goals
Compensate
Promote
Business planning
Risk
Business Processes and Systems
Policies
Procedures
Measure
Information systems
Analytics
Report
Verify
Plan
Improve
Innovate
Connect Outwards
Engage Leaders
Build Readiness
Shape Identity
Signal
Demonstrate
Develop
Assign
Integrate
Assess Progress

Current work: Assessing progress
Engage in systematic efforts to assess the efficacy of
particular practices.
… this requires pre and post measures

Developing guidebooks
Embedding Sustainability
• through storytelling for
sustainability
• by leveraging interest and
cultivating champions
• into the employee lifecycle
• through context-based
strategy making
… and more

Embedding Sustainability in the Employee Lifecycle
Attract, Recruit,
and Hire
• Sustainability Values
Onboard
• Socialize for
Sustainability
Develop
• Thinking
Manage Systemically
•Goal Setting
• Compensation
• Promotion
Engage
Retirees
• Community
Volunteerism
Foster
Employee
Wellbeing
• Diversity
• Income Equality
•Employee
Benefits

…think about your own company

Mission, Vision, Values
To what extent do you make explicit statements
about sustainability in communicating your
organization’s mission, vision, values, and/or core
purpose?

Brand
To what extent to you employ a brand to distinguish
or highlight your sustainability programs and/or to
differentiate and communicate your sustainability
vision to employees and others?

Attracting, Recruiting and Hiring for
Sustainability Values
To what extent do you include sustainability as an
element of the recruitment process by promoting
your organization’s sustainability commitments
and/or by assessing a candidate’s sustainability
values and/or competencies (such as
interdisciplinary thinking or an understanding of
lifecycles and systems)?
To what extent are your HR team able to screen
candidates for ‘fit’ on sustainability?

Onboarding
To what extent do you incorporate sustainability
training and socialization into a new employee’s
onboarding process?

Develop
To what extent are an understanding of
sustainability and sustainability related
competencies like systems thinking part of employee
development?

Listen
To what extent does your organization have a culture
of listening to employee ideas about sustainability?
Do you help emerging leaders to improve their
listening skills?

Sustainability Roles
To what extent have you established roles within the
organization to capture sustainability
responsibilities?

Allocate to Senior Leaders
To what extent do you allocate the responsibility for
delivering on the sustainability agenda to senior
leaders?

Personal Goals
To what extent do you translate organizational
sustainability goals and targets into employee
responsibilities and expectations?

Compensate
To what extent do you link employee compensation
to the achievement of set sustainability objectives?

Promote
To what extent do you move people with sustainability
values and skills into higher positions in the
organization through incorporating sustainability
criteria into decisions about advancement?

Employee Wellbeing
To what extent does the organization signal its
commitment to employee wellbeing?

Link
To what extent do you encourage employees to bring
their personal sustainability behaviors to work or
connect organizational sustainability activities to their
personal lives?

Leverage Interest
To what extent do you encourage and support
grassroots efforts and/or engage interested employees
to identify and reconcile inconsistencies and help
spread environmentally and socially responsible
behaviours?

Invest in Communities
To what extent does your organization contribute
resources to the communities within which you
operate and encourage and enable employees to do
the same?

What next?
-Reflect on where your organization could make quick
gains and where more investment will be required
-Plan for the investments needed to shift the culture
across the organization
-Consider engaging in a more systematic inventory of
your efforts

Watch this space ….
www.embeddingproject.org
Or contact me at: stephanie_bertels@sfu.ca

Q & A
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Thank you!
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