Webinar.
Building a Culture of Sustainability through Employee Engagement

Welcome and the webinar series

My name is Camilla Brambilla Pisoni, and I work for Ambassify as a content creator and creative copywriter. This is the first webinar in our series Sustainability for Companies, and it covers building a culture of sustainability through employee engagement.

Today we will look at why sustainability, and why we believed our platform was the right tool to help sustainability and CSR managers engage their workforces. Then the importance of employee advocacy and engagement in building that culture. Then a content library of actionable campaign examples you can use to involve your employees. And finally the features we built specifically to support this kind of work.

Why sustainability, and what employees actually want

Let me start with the statistics, because they make the case better than I can.

88% of people interviewed by Harvard Business School say they want to know about their company's CSR efforts, and 84% would tell their friends and family about it.

That tells you employees care. They want to know their company is socially responsible, they are proud of it, and they want to show it, be involved, and contribute. Which means connecting with them directly, involving them and formalising their efforts is not only likely to succeed, it can also win you the internal buy-in you need to move initiatives forward.

80% of people find it critically important that company values and culture are lived from the bottom up for them to be genuinely impactful. That one statistic shows how much employees care that the whole workforce is involved in creating a work environment reflecting what the company claims to stand for.

Then the retention numbers:

• 70% of millennials say they would stay with a company that had a strong sustainability plan.
• 56% said an employer ignoring sustainability was just as bad as ignoring diversity and inclusion.
• 40% said they would look for a new job if their employer did not prioritise sustainability.

Sustainability in the workplace is no longer optional, and I think everyone knows that. But the reason is not only that the planet needs it or that it is urgent. It is that employees expect it, want it, and actively look for it. Some are even willing to take a pay cut to work for an employer that genuinely devotes time and energy to it.

So employee retention, recruitment, employer branding and engagement are all heavily influenced, sometimes determined, by sustainability. All of those elements come together in our platform, which is why we made sure it could work as a tool for sustainability-related engagement.

Why engagement is the missing piece

CSR and sustainability leaders face many challenges, and I do not need to list them for you. But what emerged from our own conversations and research is that among those challenges sits a big question: how do you engage the workforce and win its buy-in?

Getting employee buy-in is essential if you want your CSR strategy to be as effective as it can be. For every initiative to thrive you need real involvement, and that involvement has to come from the bottom up.

You do not just need good culture and good values. Those values need to be lived.

This is often where things stall, because plenty of employees approach these issues with scepticism, aversion, or simply disregard. So what makes the difference? The short answer is a strong company culture and strong values. Easier said than done, I know. But it matters enormously that companies and managers uphold those values and mirror them in their daily work.

Our mission, and what engagement really means

Ambassify's mission hinges on exactly this: building and leveraging genuine connections between people, inside and outside the organisation.

We believe in it because people are the only difference between you and every other company out there. They are your only remaining USP. Not your service or product, not your culture, not even your brand. Just your people. They are the lifeblood of the organisation and it would not stand without them.

Here is the definition of engagement I want to work from: engagement is the emotional connection employees have to their company, and their willingness to go the extra mile, because the company's success is a matter of personal pride.

That is clear enough, and it contains the elements we have already seen. Its weakness is that it does not do justice to how complex increasing engagement actually is.

Engagement does not happen by magic. For it to exist, something has to encourage, stimulate and enable it continuously. We think it ultimately comes down to how far employees can identify with the organisation's values, and how much they can see themselves in its goals and culture.

Many factors feed into that: culture, value and goal alignment, health and wellbeing, the relationship with management, professional growth, and more.

An employee who feels valued as a person, which is where personal growth comes in, and as the most important resource in the company, and who believes in the company's mission, is an engaged employee. And that employee is your most valuable asset.

Advocacy as a gateway to engagement

Designing initiatives that generate engagement is hard, and sustaining engagement long-term often takes even more effort.

This is why we offer what is effectively a shortcut: employee advocacy.

You can use advocacy to ease people into initiatives, some low threshold, some higher, depending on your preference. These are initiatives that make employees feel more involved in company life, company goals and daily workings, more appreciated, and ultimately more engaged.

Over time you can experiment further. You can start asking for inputs rather than outputs. You can become genuine collaborators, and give people the tools to contribute to the organisation's growth and goals. That is what produces engagement.

The elements you are working on throughout are the same: trust, value alignment, recognition, and emotional connection.

The two-way link between sustainability and engagement

So how does this connect to sustainability? The link runs both directions.

On one hand, promoting sustainability-centred initiatives acts as a catalyst. It can reach employees who are not particularly engaged, who are not up to date with your goals or do not understand your values, and spark a connection with the company they could not see before.

On the other hand, employees who are already engaged are more likely to want to help you hit your sustainability goals and your SDGs, and they are actually able to.

What to communicate, and how

The platform gives you the tools to share your goals, your strategy, your stance and your commitment. Concretely, you can:

• Talk about your position and your commitment, which SDGs you are working on and why.
• Explain what actions you have already taken, what you plan to take, and the reasoning.
• Let people decide at an individual level how much they want to contribute, and then let them actually do it.
• Let them share their own initiatives and actions. There may well be activists in your workforce.
• Let them act as ambassadors, internally toward less engaged colleagues who do not know about your commitments, and externally on social media, where they can spread the word about your achievements.

Example, 250 trees and the article that followed

Here is a customer example about raising awareness externally and generating ambassadorship in the process.

This customer took part in a contest where they planted 250 trees in under an hour. They wrote an article explaining the action and their participation, then asked employees to share it on their own social channels.

The response was remarkable, which is exactly what the statistics predict. Employees care about this, and they want to be able to show it, talk about it and take part.

Transparency is the precondition

When it comes to bringing employees together behind a common cause, transparency is crucial.

That can seem hard to achieve, but with the right tool you can give employees a space where you are transparent about your intentions and share your goals. The side effect is that you can also listen to them, and be active in that space alongside them, which generates engagement and nurtures the relationship.

An advocacy platform amplifies this by creating an online community space where you gather employees, curate the content they can access, and share goals, projects and initiatives.

In practice that means turning your initiatives and goals into campaigns, sharing them, and making employees part of the strategy. Give them a clear idea of what their efforts are for, and the bigger picture each individual action contributes to. Then encourage them to advocate for you, which triggers involvement and a feeling of belonging to something larger.

Example, a company-wide talent auction

Another customer example, this one turning a company goal into a campaign.

They organised a company-wide talent auction to raise and donate money to De Warmste Week. The response was substantial, and they even split the action between Dutch speakers and French speakers inside the platform.

The customer who ran this campaign is presenting in the final webinar of this series, so I would rather let them tell their own story in detail.

The content library, four levels of action

Very practically, you may be asking how you actually do this. What kinds of action genuinely move the needle?

There are an enormous number of actions organisations and employees can take. What follows is not exhaustive, but it should show you the potential sitting in your own community. It moves from lower-threshold campaigns with smaller impact toward higher-end actions that can really shift a specific SDG.

Level one, outreach

Actions that benefit people or the environment but are external to the organisation. Philanthropy to NGOs, planting a company forest, taking part in a plastic-free month, and so on.

Wasteless Week. One customer promoted a group-wide initiative encouraging sustainable behaviour, in this case focused on digital and electronic waste. They created a document of tips on reducing and collecting waste, attached it to the campaign, and employees could simply download it. It spreads awareness and shows how easy swapping one habit for another can be. SDG 11 and 12.

A blood drive. A straightforward example of setting up a concrete action with your workforce, though it could equally be volunteering hours. You are calling on employees and working with them, which secures broad support and makes your own goals easier to reach. SDG 3.

Volunteering hours for a river cleanup. Relatively low threshold, but it builds community and encourages both internal and external ambassadorship. A simple demonstration of how far open communication and transparency go, and of letting employees choose individually how much to contribute. SDG 13 and 14.

Level two, housecleaning

Cleaning up your own buildings and workspaces, aiming toward zero impact. Energy efficiency in production, using energy only when necessary, a more sustainable travel policy, and similar.

Taking a stand against gender-based violence. This customer stated the company's position and then gave employees ideas and tips they could make their own, so they could show support and start conversations. Another example that encourages external ambassadorship. SDG 10 and 5.

A health-related workshop. This customer is also speaking in our final webinar, so I will leave the detail to them. The mechanic worth noting is that they awarded 600 Ambassify points each time an employee attended a health workshop, which adds internal motivation through our gamification system. SDG 3.

Introducing healthy food in the office. A leading-by-example campaign. It shows what can be done, how easy the change is, and how the same habit scales beyond the office. SDG 3.

Level three, supply

Setting sustainability requirements for all suppliers. Buying from regenerative local farmers, buying fair trade, demanding more transparency from brands.

Choosing environmentally conscious partners. This customer signed a partnership with an NGO and, to demonstrate the commitment, wrote an article and asked employees to share it across their channels. That spreads the news and raises brand awareness at the same time. SDG 17.

Banning single-use plastics, on their own premises and from suppliers. This customer is visibly reassessing partnerships and replacing suppliers whose commitments do not match their own. A genuinely active stance. SDG 14. In this case the campaign was simply an announcement to employees.

Level four, operations

Redesigning operations for optimal resource productivity through whole-system redesign. Rainwater capture, sharing infrastructure, rethinking the design cycle, lifecycle analysis.

Two short examples, both about sharing infrastructure, knowledge and experience with others. The first is a spread-the-word campaign about more responsible energy consumption the company is adopting. The second is about sharing infrastructure and expertise directly. SDG 13 and 17.

Platform, community goals

Community goals let an admin or community manager create a goal for the entire employee community and have people work toward it together, with objectives set inside that goal. It is fully customisable.

The important part is visibility. Employees can see the progress of the goal openly, see the effort being made, and see what each individual action and campaign interaction contributes.

Platform, reporting

Tracking and reporting progress matters, so we offer tailored reporting with detailed information about community engagement.

It goes considerably further than the headline numbers. You can track engagement by tag, by assigning tags to campaigns and actions, by campaign, by member, which lets you see how active people are and identify your most active ambassadors, or even by campaign within a specific tag.

Platform, custom tabs and tags

Custom tabs make things easy to find for both admins and members. You can create one for every relevant SDG, or for each macro topic you work on. We created ours for environment, equality, and health and wellbeing.

On the front end, employees can then find campaigns by topic, see what actions you are taking for a given SDG, and contribute where they care most. On the back end you can manage how many campaigns sit under each.

Tags work alongside them and are equally customisable. You can create as many as you want and assign as many as you want to each campaign. In our own community we created a tag for every SDG, and assign them as we build campaigns.

Platform, gamification and rewards

Our gamification system has three parts: points, rewards, and a leaderboard.

Every time an employee interacts with a campaign or completes a challenge they receive points, and you decide how many points each campaign is worth. Points rank people on the leaderboard, and can be exchanged for rewards.

Two things worth knowing. The entire gamification system can be left switched off if it does not fit your culture. And you choose the rewards. In our own community we included charity options, with donations to The Ocean Cleanup and Natuurpunt plus a free donation to a cause of the employee's choice. You could equally offer eco-friendly products, or anything else aligned with your culture.

Q&A, can employees create campaigns themselves?

At the moment, not directly. Only admins, community managers or creators can create campaigns. Creator is an alternative role we built for someone who can produce content and campaigns but not publish them. Those roles are the ones with back-end access.

What is possible from the front end, and what we do ourselves, is an ideation campaign: a campaign where employees submit their own ideas and input. They can suggest campaigns, describe actions they have taken, or propose actions they would like to organise. An admin or creator can then build a campaign from the suggestion.

Q&A, how do community goals and objectives work?

As a community admin you can create one, two, five or a hundred community goals for your employee base. You can create subgroups within a single goal, or run several goals in parallel.

We are working on three updates:

1. Linking specific campaigns to specific goals. If you are working on five SDGs with five corresponding community goals, each new campaign can be tied to one of them. An employee interacting with that campaign then contributes to that one goal rather than all five.
2. Measuring goals in units other than points. If the goal is to volunteer a certain number of hours, the target can be expressed in hours rather than Ambassify points. The same would apply to kilometres for a distance challenge, or any other unit.
3. A contribution button on the goal itself, so employees can add progress from actions taken outside any campaign, explaining what they did and why they think it counts toward the goal.

Closing

This was the first webinar in the series, and there are three more. One with Jorn Craeghs the following week, one led by Tim Riedel, and a final session co-hosted by Ambassify and BigTrees featuring guest speakers including two of our own customers telling their stories.

We are also organising a live event in early June, and we want it fully co-created, so we will send out a short survey asking which topics you would like discussed.