Sustainability Practices: Employees Are Generally Disappointed

Most employers have only just begun interacting with employees around sustainability, and their efforts leave room for improvement, according to a recent survey conducted by start-up carbon offsetter Brighter Planet.

The company came up with four major conclusions after crunching some 30,000+ datapoints on practices of US employers.

1. Although 86% of respondents said their organization promotes employee sustainability in some arena, only 16% said their employer collects data related to employee sustainability and just 14% said their employer had an official employee sustainability engagement policy.
2. Small organizations are leading on employee sustainability engagement. Organizations with fewer than 100 people are nearly twice as likely to promote sustainability very frequently, and their efforts are twice as likely to be effective at changing employee behavior.
3. The most effective engagement programs feature an organization’s management or board as the main advocate for employee sustainability. These programs are three times as effective as those in which an employee sustainability director was the main advocate.
4. Employees are generally dissatisfied with their employers’ sustainability engagement efforts. Over 60% of respondents want to learn more about their employers’ and co-workers’ sustainability efforts, and 67% would like their employers to change their stance on sustainability.