Harnessing the Power of Your Workforce: Using Internal Communications to Drive Impactful Sustainability and Social Impact Initiatives
A lot of work goes into your company’s sustainability and social impact commitments, but how much time do you spend to amplify it so it reaches even bigger audiences? One way to expand the reach of your efforts is by engaging with a powerful internal resource: your own employees.
Employees can be your biggest cheerleaders: they can bring a diverse range of ideas, perspectives, and lived experiences, and they play a central role in living out your company’s values and brand identity. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that bringing their voices into your sustainability and social impact work is not only the right thing to do, but also makes good business sense.
To do this effectively, you need to integrate your employees into your work in both directions: pushing information to them and receiving input and feedback from them. Here are a few ways you can begin to more meaningfully connect with your team.
Determining (Two-Way) Communications Channels
Begin by understanding how information and ideas can flow in both directions. Employees don’t want to just be told how things are being done and asked to get on board. They want the opportunity to contribute their own thoughts and ideas in the process. By enabling a more free flow of information and ideas, you can make this happen.
First, determine the channels you will use to both push and pull information, which can include the company intranet, email updates, newsletters, surveys, town hall meetings, focus groups, social media, events, team meetings, or other company communications channels. Focus on where employees already consume their internal company information and integrate your messages and feedback mechanisms into those mediums.
Second, develop a plan that fits the culture of your organization. If employees regularly provide feedback during lively town hall meetings, for example, this may be a good way to get feedback. But if these tend to be slower, one-way methods of communication, you may be better suited convening a focus group or a survey to receive input. You can liven these up by doing something like creating a contest where someone wins a prize for participating.
Third, make sure the information is timely, relevant to their roles, and accessible regardless of where they work or how they show up to work (for example if they work remote or from a satellite location). In larger organizations in particular, it makes sense to use multiple channels at once to reach everyone. As with other communications, redundancy increases effectiveness.
Integrating Employee Feedback and Ideas
As you know, it’s not enough to simply communicate your plans and goals once they’re already in place. Receiving support and action from employees also requires actively integrating their feedback and ideas into your programs.
Employees want to be heard and valued, so find ways to make this happen. This includes more interactive methods discussed above such as town halls, events, surveys, and focus groups.
By soliciting input and ideas during the planning stages, you can create programs that are more aligned with employee values and priorities and increase ownership, leading to a higher rate of success. You can create cross-functional teams with representatives from different departments and employee levels, or conduct ideation sessions to generate new ideas. While they are not necessarily the experts and you will need to determine the ultimate shape and strategy for the work, having these conversations is never a waste of time.
Engaging Employees to Drive Greater Impact
Getting your employees excited about sustainability work is not always easy, but engaging them in the most effective way possible will reap heavy dividends.
Encourage your employees to adopt sustainable practices by creating opportunities to participate in sustainability and social impact projects in the workplace or community such as volunteer days for environmental or social causes, participating in company-wide sustainability challenges, or supporting other local initiatives.
While your company will only make marginal gains through these actions and focus needs to remain on transforming your operations to reduce your environmental impact, these added efforts will nonetheless create a sense of teamwork and shared goals. Provide basic training, resources, and support to help employees make more sustainable choices, including reducing waste, conserving energy, and using compostable and recyclable products.
Providing employees with the chance to get involved will help develop the sense of purpose and engagement you need to drive forward your larger enterprise-wide efforts.
Empowering Internal Teams to Tell Your Story
To fully leverage the value of your story, you should encourage your employees to spread the word about your sustainability and social impact work both internally and externally.
Make it as easy as possible for them to do so by providing tools and language that can be utilized with clients, partners, and stakeholders, and can be used by employees on their own social media channels. This can include talking points or elevator pitches to highlight your sustainability goals, progress, and impact. By empowering employees as ambassadors for the company's sustainability and social impact efforts, you can amplify your impact and raise awareness among external stakeholders.
Provide a compelling narrative:
Develop a compelling narrative that articulates your sustainability and CSR goals, progress, and impact in a way that shows deep understanding of the priorities of your employees, creating a feeling of excitement that will encourage them to spread the word.
Provide training and resources:
The more confident your internal stakeholders are with the subject matter and the easier you make it for them to spread the word, the more likely they will be to do so. Use in person/virtual meetings including workshops or webinars and existing town hall and team meetings.
Create easy-to-use resources like content toolboxes for employees to access materials, graphics, and language.Give them a measure of creative license to personalize their messages while providing the tools they need to do so more easily and confidently.
Collaborate across functions:
Try to break out of silos and work across departments or functions in a way that will help you tell the story more broadly. Work with marketing teams to develop sustainability-focused campaigns. Partner with sales teams to identify new business opportunities. Collaborate with product teams to develop sustainable product features.
Conclusion
Employees provide a unique resource that is often overlooked when trying to promote sustainability and social impact work, but they present significant opportunities to get the word out there. They have unique megaphones of their own, and when they have a sense of ownership over the initiatives and an easy way to demonstrate their alignment with your company’s values and work, they will put these megaphones to work. Prioritizing the feedback and support of your employees will be an asset to your company’s environmental and social impact work, creating a truly sustainable business that positively impacts your stakeholders and the world around you.
The Uplift Agency
Uplift builds strategies, programs, and communication campaigns that advance ESG in workplaces, supply chains and communities.
We know how to navigate the road ahead because we’ve already been down it – 90 percent of our team has led environmental or social programs in corporations or nonprofits. Because ESG is all we do, our services are more comprehensive and integrated than most firms.
