ABN Resource + Lube Magazine: Engaging Employees With Your Sustainability Journey
Delivering sustainability in your company is going to be almost impossible if you don’t engage your employees with the mission. Many organisations are still trying to find the best practice on how to link sustainability with the employee’s daily work and the company’s operations in general.
In the article featured in the latest issue of the Lube Magazine, we offer a few key ideas to help you.
Plus we’d recommend subscribing to read the full December issue here, which includes the very best lubricant industry insights.
Create Sustainability Knowledge and Competence
Sustainability requires leadership and employees to be invested in the mission to deliver change. Without winning the hearts and minds of those in the organisation, affecting sustainable change will be significantly harder to implement. To do so, companies need to provide sustainability training for employees, and create systems and processes that enable employees to better integrate these ideas into their day-to-day operations. After all, in order to be able to support the company’s sustainability initiatives effectively, employees need to understand what sustainability truly means and why it is important.
Make Sustainability Visible Inside and Outside the Company
Measuring and communicating progress on key sustainability indicators always attracts people’s focus. Organisations should develop indicators to track the progress of their sustainability agenda, and share them with external stakeholders and employees. In the oil industry, many organisations also become more transparent about the environmental impacts of their products, manufacturing processes, labour practices, how sustainable their materials are, and areas they are working on to improve.
Showcase Higher Purpose by Creating Transformational Change
Organisations committed to sustainability can make a bigger impact by influencing and partnering with other like-minded businesses, whether its competitors or partners in the value chain. Lubricants companies can do it for example by helping suppliers develop more sustainable products or services. Another example would be taking part in industry associations to share examples of their sustainability programs to help others. Doing this fosters a sense of unity among employees because they see that achieving sustainability is not just about themselves, or even their own company, but rather a societal issue with global implications, all of which inspires them to join in.
Sustainability For Business Success
The mounting evidence shows that sustainability is imperative for business success. Those organisations that proactively make sustainability core to business strategy will drive innovation and engender enthusiasm and loyalty from employees, customers, suppliers, communities and other stakeholders.
In this article, we covered only a few workplace practices that are crucial for organisations that aspire to be sustainable. If you would like to explore more, we highly encourage you to read our report “Towards a Sustainable Future: An Overview of Sustainability within the Lubricants Industry”.
