As Time Magazine recently reported, organizations of all kinds have begun making a gradual and powerful move toward sustainability as they recognize increasing convergences between economic and environmental interests. One increasingly-popular accelerator used by high-profile companies like Walmart is to engage employees in helping to achieve sustainability goals. 

My company, Brighter Planet, embarked on a nationwide employee engagement survey to uncover insights into the extent and nature of employee sustainability programs. After crunching, sifting, charting, and interpreting 30,000-plus data points collected from 1,055 survey-takers, we were disappointed to discover that most employers have only just begun interacting with employees around sustainability, and that their efforts leave much room for improvement. Yet we were heartened to identify key attributes of effective programs. 

Respondents represent a diverse set of demographics, organizations, and job roles. They perceive themselves as more environmentally-inclined than most Americans, and, across the board, are enthusiastic sustainability cheerleaders for philosophical reasons.

By contrast, respondents view their organizations’ interest in sustainability as saving money, one-upping competitors, or retaining employees.  Although 86 percent said their employer promotes employee sustainability in some arena, 67 percent wanted their employer to change their stance on sustainability and only 14 percent rated their engagement tactics as very effective. 

We found that size does matter. But since large companies tend to have sustainability directors and official policies, we were surprised to find that outfits with less than 100 employees are in fact twice as likely to promote sustainability. And their efforts are twice as likely to be effective at changing employee behavior. 

Sector matters too. Environmental organizations have the greenest workforce, but energy/utility and retail companies also rank above average.  Government and manufacturing workers are less green than average. The lightest green workforces are in technology and financial services, where only 20 percent of respondents self-identify as dark green -- less than half the survey average.

Retail, government, and technology sectors were found to be laggards in the effectiveness of their employee sustainability engagement.  Respectively, these sectors have workforces that are more green than average, less green than average, and lightest green. In addition to these three sectors ranking lowest on sustainability effectiveness, they are also less likely to promote sustainable employee behavior than those in the financial services, professional services, manufacturing, not-for-profit, energy/utility, or environmental sectors. 

While changing an organization’s size and sector to better its sustainability hand is admittedly unlikely, we did find three underlying attributes of successful programs that can be embraced by organizations of any type:

1. Visible advocacy from management increases the odds

In theoretical terms, survey-takers suggest that they thought top-down and bottom-up sustainability organizing would be equally effective within their institution. But in practice, organizations where sustainability advocacy comes from management or board levels were found to have higher effectiveness in their engagement programs.