In This Chapter
Improve employee relations
Promote healthy food choices
Provide incentives for preventive health
Enhance employees’ lifestyles
In creating a sustainable business, you must involve employees in the process. Employee satisfaction, productivity, and engagement are important values you must incorporate into the overall plan. Creating a sustainable corporate culture means enriching employees’ lives through better health and wellness as well as providing a meaningful work experience that engages their intelligence, creativity, and critical thinking skills. Creating a more fulfilling workplace benefits your company as well as your employees. Engaging employees to help achieve your plans for a sustainable business gives them a sense of ownership of the idea, the process, and your company’s success.
Building relationships with your employees beyond the traditional employer-employee status keeps employees happy, productive, and committed to your organization. It takes an entire team to make a business successful! Engage employees in issues that speak to them and relate to their values, and tie this back to your organization so your employees feel a sense of belonging.
All Business (www.allbusiness.com), a resource for business owners and managers, provides 10 tips for building relationship capital with your employees:
Preach trust, and be worthy of employees’ trust.
Treat your employees with respect.
Periodically admit your weaknesses.
Keep your promises.
Support your team.
Lead with your heart.
Create growth opportunities for your employees.
Don’t just act interested, be interested.
Say thank you.
Be an open communicator.
Clif Bar is a company that takes great pride in its employees and takes advantage of its independence to customize work life for owners and employees. When owners invited employees to tell them the kinds of benefits they’d like to have, they created a friendly workplace.
Employees can participate in a 401(k), join a tuition reimbursement program, get help buying a first home, and receive incentives to choose eco-friendly transportation. They can create flexible schedules, enjoy a vacation for the winter holidays when the company closes from December 25 to January 1 each year, and earn a paid sabbatical leave of six weeks every seven years.
Providing benefits like these that go beyond traditional work perks supports a company’s sustainability goals and engages employees in sustainable lifestyles. It also supports the employees’ access to more rewarding lifestyles, which helps attract valuable candidates for employment and keep them on the job.
Building your green vision and values into your corporate culture is vital to the success of any green or sustainability program (see Chapter 3). So think of creative ways to engage all your employees by educating them on the vision, values, and goals you have developed. Get employees excited about your new green initiatives through trainings and workshops or activities and contests. Inviting everyone to feel a personal connection with the overall organization’s green vision, values, and goals is the only way employees will care enough to make your sustainability program a success.
Heather once worked with an organization whose goal was to increase its waste diversion rates. To get people to change their everyday habits of throwing their soda cans, paper, and food scraps into the same bin, she needed to think of a creative way to engage all employees. She encouraged the use of new recycling and compost bins scattered around the office by developing a contest between departments. After conducting a general training session educating everyone on the new waste system, she tracked the diversion rates of each department. At the end of the week, the winning department received an incentive for their hard work. As a result, employees kept up their newly formed recycling and composting habits, and the organization met their increased waste diversion goal. Without engaging employees and building the green value of eco-friendly disposal, the program would not have been a success.
Helping employees incorporate their values of sustainability into their own lives is an important part of creating a sustainable business, and it’s attractive to potential employees who want their work to be a meaningful contribution to society and to their lives. For the company, it’s a great way to build a strong staff that’s committed to shared goals of creating a more sustainable business and product.
Going Green
Clif Bar supports employee involvement in community service by working with several nonprofit organizations and encouraging employees to volunteer on company time. Staff members maintain a community garden; deliver meals to homebound elderly; collect food, clothing, and goods for local food banks, shelters, and families in need; and raise funds for disadvantaged youth. A contingent of Clif Bar staff made the trip to New Orleans to help rebuild homes with Habitat for Humanity. In 2007, 92 percent of Clif Bar employees participated in these community service programs, donating an average of 22 hours each year.
Inviting staff to help make your business greener connects them to your cause and multiplies your supply of brainpower. Helping employees think greener can spark their creativity and unleash a wealth of good ideas, which is the foundation on which we’re all building as we forge new and better ways to conduct business and our lives in better harmony with the earth.
Supporting employee creativity fuels innovation, which can make or break an organization. These days, “business as usual” is becoming a fading mantra replaced by words such as “innovation,” “efficiency,” and “cutting edge.” Your employees will deliver cutting-edge ideas and technologies only if you create an environment that spawns creativity and thought exchange among them.
In his article in Innovative Edge, “Six Steps for Encouraging Employee Creativity,” company president Jeffery Govendo points out the following ways to actively support creative thinking and innovation.
Create a safe haven for new thinking. Encourage employees to share new ideas.
Employ a process for developing new ideas that have been offered. Make it possible for new ideas to evolve into innovations.
Cross-pollinate ideation groups. Generate discussion of new ideas among experts and employees.
Have a neutral facilitator conduct ideation sessions. A facilitator will help keep new ideas alive during the process of evaluating them and putting them into action if warranted.
Support employees for engaging in the process. Encourage creative brainstorming by allowing time for discussion of new ideas and development of implementation plans.
Assure follow-through. If new ideas are deemed worthy of pursuit, help employees make a plan to explore possibilities.
Clif Bar challenged staff in conservation efforts by conducting a company contest to see how employees could find ways to conserve energy and water and reduce waste. Creating a dialogue and forum for creative thought—in this case for the issue of energy, water, and waste reduction—allowed employees to develop innovative strategies for tackling the problems set forth. Engaging employees brings out their best ideas and gets them involved in company-wide initiatives, which they carry into their home lives and share with friends.
Making employees feel valued through rewards helps keep them loyal to your organization and encourages them to give 110 percent when coming to work each day. And you don’t have to break the bank in rewarding employees. There are plenty of cost-effective ways to make your employees feel valued, wanted, and inspired to keep up the good work.
Simple gestures, such as sending a handwritten note (on eco-friendly paper, of course) or offering to buy a cup of coffee, go a long way. Providing priority parking that rotates between hardworking employees is another great way to boost morale.
Another great way to reward employees is to encourage the use of flextime (see Chapter 16). Offering employees flexible work hours allows them to maintain balance between their personal and professional lives. The less an employee worries if she will be reprimanded for taking time off to visit the eye doctor or pick up her sick child from day care, the more productive she will be. This perk also builds a relationship between employees and supervisors as they communicate about schedules and trust each other to accomplish the week’s work.
Working from home can be a welcome reward for any employee, especially those who are accustomed to braving the rush-hour commutes. It’s also a great way to incorporate sustainability into your organization by reducing your employee’s commute carbon footprint.
Reward effort as well as success. Not every idea is going to produce award-winning results, but you still want to encourage employees to generate those ideas. Without a few failed ideas, you might never reach the one that positions your organization for continued success.
Clif Bar, who provides incentives to employees who choose alternative vehicles or use mass transit, also provides on-site services to make life easier for staff, including laundry facilities, a hair salon, and a car-washing service. Taking care of these mundane domestic chores while at work means more time to relax at home. In most cases, there is no additional expense to the company—it’s just a matter of contracting with local businesses to provide these services.
Healthier employees are more productive employees, and encouraging healthier food choices will reflect your sustainability values. Look into local fruit delivery services that will stock your employee kitchen with fresh, healthy, local snack options. Also consider encouraging employees to buy into a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program. CSA programs connect local farms directly with local consumers by offering produce subscriptions. Buyers receive a weekly or monthly basket of produce, fruit, eggs, meats, milk, flowers, or any variety of agriculture products. If you have a kitchen where employees can cook meals, consider purchasing a CSA program for your office.
Note
A Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production. A CSA’s focus is usually on a system of weekly delivery or pick-up of vegetables and fruit, but can also include dairy products and meat. The term CSA is mostly used in the United States, but a variety of similar production and economic subsystems are in use worldwide.
Consider offering gift certificates to area organic restaurants and groceries as incentives for employee performance. If your company has (or volunteers with) community gardens or CSA programs, develop a contest to create exciting new meals utilizing the fresh produce and herbs from the gardens. Encourage employees to pack healthy lunches and snacks to satisfy their hunger throughout the day by providing healthy recipes in your company newsletter and on your company bulletin boards.
Most offices hold employee parties or meals throughout the year to celebrate birthdays, engagements, and other milestones. Holiday parties that include food and drinks are also popular.
When holding company breakfasts, lunches, or other gatherings, include local ingredients in your meals. Using greener raw ingredients is a sure-fire way to reduce your environmental impact (see Chapter 10). In both instances, you have the added bonus of improving the health of your employees.
Clif Bar hosts a breakfast meeting each week, a low-cost organic salad bar twice a week, and fresh organic fruit and Clif products daily. Employees can purchase healthy take-out dinners at the office a few days each week to cut down on cooking time at home and to encourage healthier family meals.
If you’re planning a business lunch or dinner for employees or customers, consult with the caterer, restaurant, or chef to incorporate healthy food choices into the menu. Select locally grown organic produce for a memorable meal that reflects your company value of sustainability. From the type of coffee you serve (choose Fair Trade certified organic!) to the cup you serve it in, think about how your purchasing decisions reflect your values. Your clients need to see you walk your talk, and what better way to show them than to offer a delicious, holistic meal served up with local, seasonal ingredients?
In your snack room, skip the traditional candy bar and soda machines filled with mass-produced, fatty, sugary snacks and drinks. Instead, provide a basket of fresh fruit and fruit juices and healthy munchies such as nuts, natural energy bars, and yogurt. Keeping employees energized and healthy on the job is good for them as well as for your company and helps maintain their productivity levels with nourishing brain foods.
Plath and Company, a builder located in San Raphael, California, encourages healthy food choices by stocking its kitchen with healthy foods, snacks, and drinks. After embarking on a sustainability program, it rid its kitchen of sugary sodas and fatty snacks and replaced bottled water with filtered water. More often than not, employees grabbed lunch from the employee kitchen and ate in the building, either at their desks or in the community room. Replacing unhealthy food brought an increase in employee energy and productivity and a feeling that their employer was looking out for them.
One organization located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, chose to follow a similar path as Plath and Company. Because they didn’t have as many options for delivery of local organic fruits and vegetables to their office, they designated an employee each week to pick up office food during a trip to the grocery store. The only requirement was that the employee had to purchase healthy snack food. Within two months, most employees not only showed an increase in energy but also a decrease in their waistlines!
Replace paper plates and plastic cups in your kitchen with real dishes, cups, and silverware. Assign a rotating schedule for kitchen clean-up if you don’t have janitorial service, or simply require individual users to wash their own dishes or put them in the dishwasher. When washing dishes, use an eco-friendly dishwashing soap or a dishwasher detergent that is biodegradable.
If you must use disposables, choose compostable fiber board and bioplastics made from corn, starch, and other natural materials that you can compost. If you do use compostables, be sure to actually compost your disposables. Throwing compostable containers into a garbage can destined for the landfill will not promote biodegradability.
Going Green
If your municipality does not offer a composting option, consider building or purchasing a worm bin for your office kitchen. You can compost food scraps (excluding meat and dairy), tea bags without staples, and coffee grinds right in your kitchen. For more information on how to make a worm bin, visit http://your.kingcounty.gov/solidwaste/composting/wormbins.asp.
Providing visible recycling stations throughout the office encourages and reinforces the need for increased waste diversion and overall awareness of sustainability practices. Locate recycling bins for paper, plastic, and compostables in your dining area as well as throughout your facility, and do some investigative research to make sure your materials are being properly disposed of. Too often employees make the effort to sort their waste to dispose of it in an environmentally preferable manner just to have the night janitorial staff toss everything into the trash. Properly train everyone involved in your organization’s waste stream on how to dispose of all waste.
Double-check with your waste management company to make sure they can compost the compostable cups, plates, and cutlery you’re using. If these aren’t properly disposed of, their sustainable value is invalidated, and they just add to the lost resource collection at the city dump.
In addition to a traditional health-care plan, many sustainable companies are including credits or coverage for alternative and preventive health care. Taking good care of our bodies before we get sick is much more cost-effective than treating disease when our defenses have been worn down. Gym memberships, massage, and acupuncture all maintain health and prevent illness.
You might also consider this idea for an employee perk or reward. Dow’s on Ninth, a jazz club and restaurant located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, provides its employees, wait staff, and kitchen staff the opportunity to receive a 15-minute chair massage at the end of a busy Friday or Saturday night. This helps keep the employees feeling fresh and allows them to work faster and harder, providing better service for Dow’s guests.
Group activities increase the health of your employees, keep them mentally sharp, and build the skills necessary to engage in teamwork and collaboration, all of which are key to making a business function successfully.
KACO Solar is a carbon-neutral company that creates inverters for photovoltaic power systems. The small company, founded in 1914 and with offices in Germany and the United States today, holds morning workouts for staff, provides subsidies for gym memberships, and provides time off for employees to participate in marathons.
Clif Bar provides an onsite gym and allows daily workouts (with personal trainers) on company time. The company also offers nutrition counseling, free yoga classes, and bargain-priced massages.
You can incorporate all these benefits into your employee benefit plan to help improve the lifestyle of your employees. Providing credits or subsidies for alternative health care (such as massage and acupuncture) as well as incentives for preventive measures (such as increased exercise and healthier eating habits) can reduce overall health-care costs. At the same time, you’ll be supporting your employees’ involvement in healthier, more sustainable life practices. These kinds of innovations help draw employees to your place of business and reinforce your overall impact of sustainability.
You increase your business sustainability when you extend it to employees and their activities.
Encouraging exercise and healthy diets is a valuable benefit for employees.
Healthy employees are happy employees.
A strong, healthy workforce reduces turnover and increases productivity, which is good for your bottom line.