Creating a culture of sustainability

Businesses that embrace sustainability can build trust with customers and stakeholders, improve their reputation, and foster a positive work environment. However, despite the growing importance of sustainability, many businesses are struggling to meet their goals. One key reason for this is that they often fail to properly engage their employees and take them on the sustainability journey.

As organizations adapt to combat climate change, the focus must shift inward – towards internal culture and how employees embrace the necessary changes to minimize their impact on the planet. Fostering a sustainability culture isn’t just advantageous; it’s a powerful opportunity for positive change, both within the workplace and beyond.

While many businesses acknowledge the need for environmental action, creating real passion among employees requires something more. We need to create a culture of sustainability.

Creating Green Monday – a collective sustainability learning opportunity

At Something Big, we’ve been on a long sustainability journey. Bolstered by our B Corp status, we’ve measured carbon emissions, offset through carbon avoidance projects, embraced sustainable suppliers and production, increased our carbon literacy through tailored employee training, celebrated the circular economy and initiated easy recycling for our team. And we have of course been taking our customers on this journey too.

To kick off 2024 on a green note, we transformed Blue Monday into Green Monday – a day dedicated to embracing positive environmental change. We ran a series of engaging and interactive sessions covering a variety of sustainability-related topics, from making our personal finance greener to understanding how to recycle tricky items, leverage the circular economy and reducing our food waste, even getting going with planting our office garden. For lunch, we rescued unsold food through Too Good To Go to share, introducing the idea of buying surplus food to many of the team. We finished the session with our ‘Pledge Tree’, which is now full of commitments inspired by our newfound knowledge.

But the impact goes far beyond Green Monday itself. Shared experiences not only deepen our understanding of the issues but also strengthen our team culture. Coming together sparks meaningful conversations and roots new ideas within the fabric of our team. It creates a foundation of shared understanding and a launchpad for continuous conversation. Internally run events and impactful communications have a lifespan that impacts culture in the longer term.

But what did Green Monday teach us about fostering a sustainability culture?

Creating a sustainability culture

Our journey with Green Monday unearthed valuable insights into fostering a workplace culture that prioritises the planet. Here are key takeaways:

• Keep it achievable: For Green Monday we curated a series of engaging sessions covering a variety of different sustainability-related subjects, but crucially we started conversations on topics that are within individual control. We steered clear of topics that require expensive or extreme lifestyle changes. Our goal was inclusion, and showing we can all make a meaningful difference.
• Keep it positive: It can be hard to talk about environmental destruction while keeping it positive, and inevitably falling into sustainability fatigue. We focused on fun, positive and personally beneficial behaviour changes, making the sessions insightful and interactive.
• Keep it safe: While no one can reasonably deny the impact of climate change, our knowledge of how to combat it and our understanding of our personal responsibility may vary. We made sure to keep a safe and respectful environment, creating an opportunity for everyone to feel safe and to learn from each other.
• Keep politics out of the conversation: While how you vote may be one of the most impactful ways of protecting our planet, ultimately to stay in our lane and keep the conversations inclusive, safe and fun for everyone, we were careful to stick to the facts and keep politics out.
• Make it measurable: We asked our team to complete a survey on how far along they are in their sustainability journey on a variety of topics. As we continue these conversations and learnings throughout the year, we will then be able to survey our team again and (hopefully!) show real impact. Our ‘Pledge Tree’ is also full of quantifiable goals, that we can look back on to show our impact.

If you’re seeking ESG communication experts to engage employees with sustainability communications, look no further. Talk to us; let’s make sustainability a focal point in your workplace conversations.