Do employees value their company more when environment, health and safety are a core company value?

Gil: Well, I think the answer is "yes" -- and I suspect the person asking the question does too -- but I haven't seen the proof.

I've searched, but haven't been able to find any studies directly addressing the question as asked. Employee retention, though, may be a good measure of what employees value, has been included in the GRI core indicator set, and is showing up as a reported measure in corporation sustainability reports.

The costs of attracting, hiring and retaining employees are extremely significant, both strategically and economically.

Tom Zosel, 3M's legendary pollution prevention manager, told me many years ago that company environmental policies were a significant factor in 3M's recruiting efforts at colleges and universities; their recruiters found that the best engineering students just wouldn't consider signing on to a company that didn't have credible environmental initiatives.

David Brereton, et al., argue, in their 2003 paper Employee Turnover as a Sustainability Issue (PDF), that:

"[T]he negatives associated with high workforce turnover include:

• high ongoing recruitment, replacement and training costs
  
• decreased productivity due to loss of site specific knowledge and work group
  
• synergy and declining morale amongst remaining employees
  
• reduced capacity to develop workforce skills and build human capital
  
• difficulties in establishing and maintaining a positive safety culture
  
• greater population instability in mining communities and a potential weakening of the social capital of these communities.

Doug Freeman, co-producer of Sustainability at Work, observed that: "Every one of the individuals [at eight companies] interviewed for our video agrees that it's just smart business to move toward sustainability because it reduces costs, improves employee retention, benefits communities, attracts devoted customers and pays off on the bottom line in healthy profits."

A number of studies back this up. For example, this one asserts that "green buildings can yield gains in labor productivity, employee retention, retail sales and manufacturing quality and output."

And as Rod Wille, senior vice president and manager of sustainable construction at Turner Construction, noted in this survey:

"With many decision-makers, a near-term cost bias often overshadows the reduced long-term operating expenses due to energy efficiency, labor productivity, occupant wellness and the resulting decrease in liability that are apparent in a lifecycle cost analysis for a green building project. Turner has learned through nearly ten years of experience on more than 80 green buildings that the application of learned efficiencies can more than offset any upfront costs of green buildings to a level comparable to traditional, non-sustainable methods. Beyond the important environmental, social and energy conservation factors, it is now increasingly clear that green buildings make economic sense."

Correlation is not causality, of course. And linking company values to employee loyalty and performance may not be as obvious a connection as the impact of work environment. But I suspect this is one of those places where common sense is as useful a metric as statistical analysis.

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Gil Friend, systems ecologist and business strategist, is president and CEO of Natural Logic, Inc. -- offering advisory services and tools that help companies and communities prosper by embedding the laws of nature at the heart of enterprise. Sign up online to receive his monthly column via email. Read Gil's blog here.