10 Steps to Becoming a Carbon Neutral Business

Page 18 STEP 05: ENGAGE YOUR COLLEAGUES Engage your colleagues STEP 05 You could argue that you should start engaging employees the minute you launch your carbon neutrality pledge. You certainly could. Ultimately, it all depends on your organizational culture and setup, but for many, it will probably make sense to widen the engagement activities when you have reached the point where you have set out your goal, mapped your carbon footprint and defined your strategy. It is not just the Sustainability team or the colleagues directly involved in the program that are going carbon neutral – your entire business is. Engagement is a powerful lever to maximize support for your initiative or even accelerate progress by motivating colleagues to be involved and reduce emissions themselves. Proper employee engagement that actually drives organizational and cultural change as well as reputational benefits requires resources though. Prioritize engagement and use the opportunity to build a powerful platform for motivation, attraction and retention of employees. Ideally you have a specific work stream focusing on employee engagement, both in terms of allowing them to actively contribute to the carbon reduction initiatives and for being ambassadors both towards other colleagues and external audiences. You need to communicate and campaign your carbon neutrality pledge continuously. It really helps having your Communications and Human Resources teams involved, as you need to find a balance in how you build your carbon neutrality drive seamlessly into the wider network of priorities in the business. You need to determine what level of engagement will have the biggest effect in your organization. Would you like all employees to feel included and able to contribute? Or do you prefer launching large scale projects that generate considerable reductions that everyone can then be proud of but which only need a limited group to implement? The optimum approach is probably a combination but explore what is feasible and applicable to your business. Regardless of what you do, continuous campaigning should be a key element of your carbon neutrality program. And note – carbon neutrality is not easy to understand even for sustainability professionals, let alone for colleagues in other functions. It is really helpful to use visuals to explain concepts and facts as early in the process as possible. The more specific and relatable you can make the presentation of where your emissions come from for instance, the better. Do not be afraid to oversimplify to explain the technical parts of carbon neutrality. You can always add complexity upon demand and further interest.