Welcome and why I do this

My name is Tim Riedel, and I come from an organisation called Planet Groups. I want to share how you can engage your workforce for sustainability, and then discuss how you and your company can drive the topic yourselves.

Planet Groups is a consultancy I founded in late 2020. In a sense I founded it for myself. My background is in human resources, and I only really woke up to sustainability and the climate crisis in 2019. Before that I thought what many people still think: that we have it under control, that we just need to develop green technology, and that we have until 2050.

Then my children went out demonstrating as part of the Fridays for Future movement. That is when I actually looked at the topic properly, and I was shocked. We have something like eight or nine years to turn this around, there are tipping points and irreversible trends, and we may really ruin the planet for good.

I was genuinely scared, and I decided I had to do something. Since I wanted to redirect my career anyway, I asked what talents I had that could contribute to the transformation. My first thought was that as an HR and change management person I had no talent for climate action at all. No education in it, no experience. But on second look, I had a lot of relevant skill and experience, because what I know is people, companies and change management.

Sustainability from the inside out

The core idea of Planet Groups is to establish sustainability in companies from the inside out.

A conventional sustainability consultancy comes from the outside, talks to your management, designs some solutions with you, involves perhaps two or three percent of your company, and then leaves you to execute.

What we do instead is start a process and a structure inside the company that drives transformation permanently and involves your employees.

Sustainability is management's responsibility, not the sustainability department's

Contrary to what some managers think, the sustainability department is not in charge of doing sustainability. Transforming your company is management's responsibility. The sustainability department helps: it provides education, awareness, tools, KPIs and measurement.

It is much like an HR department. Twenty, thirty, forty years ago managers used to say that leadership was not their responsibility, that HR did it. That was obviously an error. Leadership is a management responsibility. So is sustainability, and the sustainability department supports it.

Planet Groups works with the horizontal structure that sits alongside all of this, and it takes one of two forms:

Employee green teams, essentially an employee resource group, started and organised by employees themselves.
Ambassador programmes, started by company management to distribute sustainability topics throughout the organisation.

Either way, the structure drives sustainability from the inside out, and we support that process.

The promise: a planet that heals, jobs people love, businesses that thrive

That is a big promise, but look closely and there is a genuine win-win-win available.

Companies can realise that solving problems is a business case, and that engaging wholeheartedly lets them win and retain customers and drive growth and profitability. Which means growth and planetary health need not be a contradiction.

And there is a third win that matters for anyone in HR. You can offer employees the chance to do something good without having to leave your company. A job with purpose, a job that makes sense, a job that contributes to value creation. It is not complicated, but it is difficult.

Where we are on carbon

Two slides illustrate what is at stake.

Over the last 400,000 years, CO2 levels, temperature and sea levels have moved almost in lockstep, and there is a reason for that.

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. Without an atmosphere, the sun's energy would leave the planet immediately and it would be 35 degrees colder, which is entirely uninhabitable. For scale, during the last ice age, when Central Europe was covered by a hundred metres of ice, it was only six to eight degrees colder than now. So the atmosphere is a good thing. But carbon dioxide is its most prominent greenhouse gas, and adding more thickens the blanket, letting less energy escape.

Warmer air warms the oceans, changes weather patterns, melts ice and raises sea levels.

The numbers:

For the last ten to twenty thousand years, CO2 sat stable at around 280 parts per million.
During the last ice age it was roughly 200 ppm, with six to eight degrees of cooling and sea levels about 120 metres lower.
Today we are at almost 420 ppm, and still rising.

Emissions themselves are still rising, not just the concentration. We are not drawing carbon out of the atmosphere; we are adding more every year, and adding more each year than the year before.

We also do not know exactly how much time we have. There is a time lag and its length is uncertain. What we do know is that so far reality has outpaced every scientific prediction, so it is arriving faster than we expected twenty or forty years ago.

Which is why reaching net zero is not enough. We have to become regenerative and draw carbon back out.

And this is only carbon. There are other planetary boundaries, including the biodiversity crisis, the nitrogen and phosphate cycles, freshwater cycles and plastic pollution, several of them just as dramatic as the climate crisis.

2.7 degrees, and the cities that become uninhabitable

There is a visualisation by a Berlin-based newspaper, built on Climate Action Tracker data, projecting to the year 2100. If all governments deliver on their existing climate pledges, we still reach 2.7 degrees of warming.

At 2.7 degrees, roughly 3.5 billion people will not be able to live where they live now. And that is the scenario where pledges are met, which very few governments are actually doing. So we need to raise our pledges and then actually deliver on them.

The map shows cities becoming uninhabitable through drought and loss of drinking water, through heat waves, because above certain combinations of heat and humidity human beings cannot survive, through flooding as sea levels rise, and through extreme weather such as tropical storms.

Amsterdam is on it. So are the German coastal cities including Bremen and Cuxhaven, and Cologne and Düsseldorf. So are most Mediterranean cities, including Marseille and the Spanish coastal towns.

It is genuinely hard to understand why governments and companies are not responding with more vigour. The founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research put it this way: we are putting our children onto a global school bus that will, with 98% probability, end in a deadly crash.

Let that sink in, from someone who knows. Whether or not you have children, you would not want any child on that bus. And 2100 is seventy-seven years away. Our grandchildren will still be alive.

The lemming problem, and why it is also good news

There is a cartoon that captures this well: lemmings following each other over a cliff, committing collective suicide. The German caption reads, roughly, turn around now, after we have come so far?

We are locked into running in the same direction because we are part of a social and economic system. That system feels like it forces us to keep doing what we have always done, because everyone else expects us to deliver on it. Most mornings we do not really ask what we are doing. We do it because we did it yesterday.

Being in a system is both frustrating and comforting. Frustrating, because one lemming changing course changes nothing. Comforting, because we orient our behaviour on what others expect of us, and so do they. So if we change, and if we are vocal about changing, everyone notices, and that makes them question their own behaviour.

Research suggests that somewhere between 3% and 25% of a group needs to change direction before the whole group follows. In business, the law of innovation holds that once 16% of a market tips, the early adopters plus the early mass market, the whole market tips. That is achievable. But we have to actually do it, and be loud about it.

Where employees fit into systems change

Employees can play a huge role in driving that systems change.

It is easy to call on politicians to change something, and easy to call on company leaders. But they are inside the system too, and subject to pressure from other stakeholders: investors, clients, newspapers, sometimes their own employees and middle management. Politicians are pressured by companies. Consumers are targeted by enormous marketing investment. We are all locked into each other.

So think of the system you are in as a field with its own energy and momentum. The task is to shift that energy toward the tipping point, and employees can shift it. Once the early mass market tips toward sustainability and regeneration, companies genuinely transform, then whole industries, then politics.

The engagement cost of doing nothing

There is another reason green teams matter, and it is squarely an HR issue.

Many more employees now see what we are collectively heading toward, and they do not want to be part of it. They feel a distance between what they want to do and what they stop doing the moment they walk onto company premises. Then in the afternoon they try again.

That is dissonance: the feeling of not being aligned with your own purpose. Sooner or later it makes employees sick and burned out, or it makes them leave.

So if you care about retaining employees, winning new ones, or engagement at all, you should not let that happen.

Green teams versus climate ambassadors

There are two basic models, with plenty of hybrids in between.

Employee green teams are founded and organised by employees, so genuinely bottom-up. They are usually not representative, since who joins is largely coincidence. The advantages are high intrinsic motivation and real credibility with the workforce, and because they are unplanned they stay open to surprise. Their aim is to raise awareness and to develop project ideas within departments, then bring them to management's attention.

Climate ambassador programmes are founded by company management and tend to be more representative. The advantages are faster implementation and easy alignment with corporate objectives. The aim is also to raise awareness, but they additionally act as an interface, carrying topics from management out to the workforce and business units.

What both models need from you

Green teams need awareness and education, professionalisation of their work, and structure, because they usually do this on top of their day jobs without relevant training. They need internal and external networking, help with communication, help with strategy work, and a continuous coaching process. That last one matters because they are constantly running into organisational barriers, which drains energy and requires support, reassurance and fresh ideas about the next step.

Ambassadors need something similar but not identical, since they already start out more aligned with what management wants. They need process support, external networking and communication support, and strategy work, because it is still a change process. They also face a specific risk: management may not be fully committed to letting them change the organisation, which creates a double bind where they are asked to drive change but generate conflict when they propose more change than management wanted. They need coaching too.

The success factors are the same for both:

Continuity.
Resonance and consistency from top management. If top management marginalises them, they will eventually run out of energy.
Time resources. This is the hardest one. Because the work sits on top of an already full job, it slides down the priority list continuously. Nobody can do this on top of a 120% role.

How we work with them

One of our tools is the Climate Solution Game, which we run regularly to build awareness, generate ideas, create networks and support strategy work.

Around that we build a rhythm of regular meetings and project work, plus a coordinating group we call the planet circle. That is a representative body that keeps realigning what the green team or ambassadors are doing, synchronising what comes up from the teams with what comes down from management. It makes sure ideas from inside the organisation actually get management attention, and that management's direction is understood and properly spread. Getting that alignment right is what drives transformation through the whole company.

Sustainability has to be on the business agenda

This is the most important thing I can tell you.

If you treat sustainability or regeneration as something extra, a moral or ethical matter you do because employees want it, it will never gain traction and it will never reach the main to-do list.

If you think you can do normal business from nine to five and then do sustainability from five to five thirty, it will never work. It has to be inside everyone's job from nine to five.

So instead of designing products and then doing sustainability, you design sustainable products. Instead of doing sales and then doing sustainability, you build regeneration into your sales process and into what you actually offer.

That holds for every function: product management, production, logistics, marketing, finance, HR. We publish climate action by job family on our website, because every job family has to answer the same question. How can I do what I already do in a regenerative way?

The fish model, and why the head is the product

We use a model shaped a little like a fish, and the head is the crucial part, because the head is your product impact. That is how you make money.

We should not fool ourselves. Making money may not be our purpose, but it is certainly our target, along with keeping the company viable. We sell products and services and customers pay us for them.

So the question is not only how we make money now, but how we make money in ten, twenty, thirty years, and how we make money by regenerating the planet.

Get the products right and much else follows automatically. Consider how product shapes political interest: if you sell long-distance airfares you will want aviation fuel subsidised and no carbon tax. If you sell train journeys or hiking trips, you want a high carbon price and fewer long flights. If you sell solar panels, you want a high carbon tax. If you sell combustion engine cars, you do not.

We call that scope zero: your non-tangible impact on the climate system through how you interact with politics, finance, media, the communities you operate in, civil society, suppliers, employees and shareholders beyond their work for you. It is crucial, and with the right products in place it largely takes care of itself.

Then comes the ordinary value creation cycle: production, overheads and general operations, distribution, the emissions when customers use your products, and ideally bringing resources back after use through circularity. You do have to bring emissions and resource extraction down. But you should not start there.

Most companies I know start with emission reduction and never get to offering new products. Emission reduction alone is not inspiring, it involves very few of your employees, you do not make money from it, though you may save a little, and it does not involve your customers at all. That is precisely why it never gains traction internally.

Start with strategy. Start with your products.

You also have to address the harm you still do, through offsetting, regeneration, renaturation and carbon removal. If I sell yoghurt or gym shoes, I should make production as regenerative as possible, but for the negative impact that remains I have to ask how my customers and I together can make up for it, so that buying the shoe has a net positive impact.

Without a comprehensive view of your sustainability agenda, involving your employees will never gain the traction you need.

Scope zero to scope four

Scopes one, two and three are the standard Greenhouse Gas Protocol emission scopes.

Scope zero is your impact on the climate system, as described above.

Scope four is product impact: how you actively help your customers be regenerative, and how your products build value toward a regenerative economy.

The eight pillar model

These are the areas we think will be crucial:

Renewable energies
Regenerative materials
Everything that makes consumption circular
Smart infrastructure, making better use of what we already sell
Precision and regenerative agriculture, meaning plant-based and soil-health-improving
Carbon removal and renaturation
Water cycles, fresh water and irrigation
Everything that strengthens the cohesion and resilience of communities

You need to use products, components and materials that support this agenda, and offer solutions that support it.

The dishwasher problem

I recently interviewed someone applying for a managing director role in Latin America. He described the drought, the political instability, the inequality, the corruption, the lack of access to drinking water.

Then his strategy for all of it was: how can we still sell as many dishwashers as possible despite these problems?

That is the wrong question. We do not save the planet by selling more dishwashers, and we do not save it by selling more sustainable dishwashers either. We save the planet by solving the problems we have. Sustainable dishwashers may be part of that, but they will not be the core of the solution.

So ask what skills, talents and technologies you have that genuinely offer solutions to the problems we are currently living through.

How you will make money in twenty years

It is important to understand where you want to be in twenty or thirty years and how you will make money in a regenerative economy. It is equally important to understand that the way you make money now is not viable for the next twenty, thirty, forty years.

The core paradigms ahead are circularity, regeneration, customer retention, networking, collaboration, and the wellbeing contribution of your products.

That does not mean the old paradigms disappear. Growth, turnover, sales, competition and profit will still be there. But the new ones are added on top, and you have to integrate both.

The ladder from harmful to regenerative

Sustainable means adding no additional harm, which means you could do it forever.

So ask which part of your business you could genuinely do forever. If you use any non-renewable material, metals or minerals for example, then by definition you cannot, unless your process is completely circular or you are mining from waste.

Most companies today are still at the stage of trying to have slightly less negative impact. No company is yet at genuinely adding no additional harm. But what we actually need is restorative and then regenerative business models: virtuous cycles that regenerate the planet as a by-product of operating.

We have mapped this for many industries, including food and agriculture and media, looking at the value chain, the outreach in scope zero, and the product impact in scope four. The question is always the same: what good can we do with the talent, customer relationships and technologies we already have?

And there is a commercial logic here. If we genuinely solve problems with our products, we will be more economically viable than if we push products through a marketing machine without solving anything, or while creating problems. That is not resilient and not viable. Nor is engaging your employees in an agenda that contributes to destroying ourselves. It may work for a while, not for long.

The evidence that this pays

One study compared the most climate-aligned and least climate-aligned companies from 2013 to 2020. In terms of dividends and share price, the most climate-aligned companies performed six times better.

Why? Better products. Higher customer retention. Higher employee engagement. Genuine added value. They moved first, differentiated themselves, were more customer-centric and more agile, and created real win-win solutions.

Which means that whatever your business goals are, being a fast mover, customer retention, employee engagement, customer centricity, adding value, the answer to all of them turns out to be sustainability.

Four success factors

Be strategic. Do not do this instead of changing; do it as part of a change process.

Be consistent. See it from your customer and product perspective first, then align everything else. Internal operations and all communication have to line up with your products, your purpose and your brand.

Communicate in all directions. The transformation is a change process, so treat it as one.

Be clear on your targets. Communicate them well, set milestones, measure, analyse the gaps, then reiterate and adjust targets and strategy collaboratively. If people cannot see the North Star, they will not follow you.

Q&A, what is the Climate Solution Game?

It is a three-hour interactive session, run online or face to face. The first part builds understanding of the transformation. The second develops ideas that can become part of the sustainability strategy.

So it serves three purposes: awareness building first, then project generation, then connection, because it works as a team-building tool as well.

Q&A, small and medium companies versus large ones

An attendee observed that legislation gives SMEs the feeling they have more time, but that ecosystem pressure will probably reach them faster than expected.

I agree. SMEs may have more time in terms of EU reporting requirements, but they feel pressure from large customers directly, because any large company decarbonising its supply chain pushes that onto its suppliers. Add rising carbon prices and rising prices for virgin materials, and the business case for circular and regenerative models changes on its own, while customers begin asking for it.

So I do not see smaller companies moving more slowly. Larger companies have more resources behind the agenda, but that is not the same as changing more. There is research analysing the leading large companies in each industry on climate action, and it found a large gap in credibility and in following an integrated approach. Some smaller companies are well ahead.

The difference tends to be awareness. Large companies are aware, which does not mean they are changing. Smaller companies are sometimes not even aware.

Either way the logic is the same: differentiate yourself, retain your customers, and offer them what they need to be part of the solution, because your customer is in the same position you are. What are you offering them so they can succeed in this transformation? If the answer is nothing, you will be out of the market.

Look at the German automotive companies in China. Volkswagen had something like 37% market share in combustion engine cars and around 4% in electric vehicles.

So ask yourself whether you want to be the Kodak or the Nokia of the next decade. If not, get moving and engage your employees. But engaging your employees instead of moving, or hoping they move for you, will not work. You have to move, and ask your employees to be part of it.

Q&A, will this legislation follow the GDPR pattern?

Honestly, I do not know. I am not an expert on EU legislation, how fast it will arrive or how strict it will be.

But here is the thing: if you are serious about acting, the reporting obligations will not be your problem. You should not be moving because of legislation. Legislation helps pick up the slow movers and the laggards and get them going. Do not move because you have to report on it. Move because it makes sense, and then the reporting takes care of itself.

Reporting obligations are definitely coming, so be prepared for them.

Closing thoughts

There is a good German saying, from Erich Kästner: Es gibt nichts Gutes, außer man tut es. There is nothing good unless you do it.

We have to act. Talking alone will not regenerate the planet, and our children will have no future. It makes sense for your company to get in motion.

And it is far more fun to be in motion than to stand still, cleaning up, responding late and fighting off consequences. It is much more enjoyable to be proactive, be part of the solution, and find your purpose in regenerating the planet.

So thank you for your attention, and engage your employees.

Webinar. How to Successfully Engage your Workforce for Sustainability

Tim Riedel