First of all, you have to be a sustainability expert (of course), but you also have to be adept at aligning sustainability to business objectives – essentially aligning the priorities of the business with policy, legislation and regulation, whilst identifying the opportunities that sustainable ways of working can make your organisation more resilient and adaptable to a changing climate – all for the benefit your employees, investors, customers, suppliers and the planet.
Many sustainability leaders have already developed highly effective strategies for aligning these priorities – effectively influencing the board room, and engaging key stakeholders across multiple parts of your organisation.
But how do you gain buy in from all parts of the organisation – focusing on a core question: How do I make a hugely complex issue relevant to all my colleagues, and enable them to want to make meaningful change in the work they do?
Well, presuming you have your strategy in place, you will need to start communicating the why, how and what with your colleagues – why do we need to do this; how are we going to achieve it; and probably the most important, what does this mean for you and your role?
Ultimately, do we need to tell people what they need to do – often needed but less effective – or instead do we need to paint a picture of what the opportunities and possibilities look like?
To do this, you’ll need to use every communications tool at your disposal: including digital comms such as online messaging, email, video conferencing, intranets, messages from the leadership team, Sharepoint sites, case studies, activity/volunteering days, posters; the list goes on!
You will need some, or all, of these tools if you are going to get this to stick, and here’s the rub – you won’t convince, persuade, or engage everyone… and that’s okay! Like your decarbonisation strategies, 100% may not be achievable yet, so setting yourself a realistic target, engaging as widely as possible and understanding as many perspectives as possible is enough… for now!
What we’re talking about is cultural change, and that doesn’t happen overnight, but it is key to the overall success of your strategy.
As the phrase goes, culture eats strategy for breakfast, and that’s where you need to get to.
Change the culture for enough of your business, and any resistance you face(d) will effectively be required to work in a more sustainable way – supporting an organisation that (for the most part) has realised how important sustainability is!
In the next couple of blogs, I will look at different approaches to engaging staff across the organisation and provide some real-life examples of how your peers are trying to engage their colleagues.
