Webinar.
Introducing Sustainability in an Engaged Workforce

Welcome and introductions

Camilla Brambilla Pisoni of Ambassify hosts this session on introducing sustainability in an engaged workforce, with two guests bringing real customer stories.

Wannes Van Giel is founder and CEO of BigTrees. A climate activist for many years and a member of Belgium's youth association for nature education and environmental protection, he still describes himself as an activist disguised as a marketeer. His first campaign, Thursday Veggie Day, spread internationally and shifted Belgian diets toward plant-based eating. After winning a Climate Action Award with the city of Ghent for a local sustainable food campaign, he now grows sustainability inside businesses through his marketing agency.

Lisa is Marketing Coordinator at Unique Belgium, a leading HR partner and staffing agency operating three brands: Unique, Unique Career and Express Medical. She manages organic social media content across all three, having joined the marketing team in February 2022 after working as a project consultant for Unique Career.

Where we actually are on warming

Wannes opens with the alarming half of his argument before turning to the hopeful one.

Current policies put the planet on track for almost four degrees Celsius of warming, against a Paris Agreement target of staying well below 1.5 degrees. We are not on course.

Asked how much the Earth has already warmed, an audience member answered 1.2, which Wannes confirmed as close. The current figure sits somewhere between 1.1 and 1.2 degrees.

The cost, in lives and in euros

That degree and a bit is not abstract. Climate change and its consequences already cause an estimated ten million deaths a year.

Wannes puts that in perspective deliberately: COVID caused roughly seven million deaths over three years globally. Climate change already kills more people annually than the entire pandemic did.

The economic damage runs to 190 billion dollars a year. And agriculture is exposed directly, with France losing 40% of its crops last year. The loss is both economic potential and food supply.

Sustainability as the economic driver of the decade

Wannes's central claim is that sustainability is the single most important economic driver of the coming decade, and EU policy is what makes it concrete.

The EU has committed to reducing its climate impact by 55% by 2030 against a 1990 baseline, and to climate neutrality by 2050. Ambitious, but as he points out, the EU has so far always hit the targets it set itself.

His sharpest practical advice follows from that: if you are going to communicate climate targets for your own company, they need to be more ambitious than the EU targets, or they are not worth communicating at all.

There is also money attached. The Green Deal ties Commission policy on subsidies and penalties to these climate targets, so applications for funding or new projects stand a better chance if they are Green Deal compliant.

Greenwashing is now regulated

A point Wannes flags as easy to overlook. Claiming that something is sustainable, biological or better for the climate without proof is no longer permitted.

The EU taxonomy is effectively a list of terms defining what each claim means and what evidence is required to make it. If you intend to make sustainability claims, check them against the taxonomy and the Green Claims Directive first.

European citizens are already convinced

Businesses and politicians often assume they still need to persuade people that sustainability matters. Wannes's advice is not to waste time on it.

According to the Eurobarometer, 93% of the EU population believes climate change is either the biggest challenge of today or among the top three.

A UK study found that 79% of consumers are changing their buying behaviour for sustainability reasons. Increasingly people choose smaller brands whose sustainability promises are more truthful and which let them live a more sustainable lifestyle. The younger the consumer, the stronger the effect.

Even the World Economic Forum, which Wannes characterises as the large capitalist conference in the snow, now lists the five most important challenges facing the economy as all ecological: climate change, biodiversity loss, loss of natural resources, and lost working capacity from extreme heat, extreme rainfall and drought.

CSRD, and why it reaches every department

This is the regulation Wannes says will pull the whole company into scope.

The Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive, launched by the European Commission under Frans Timmermans alongside the Green Deal, obliges large companies to report on sustainability performance to the same standard as financial reporting. Truthful, data-based, and compliant with the system you have installed.

You fall under it if you meet two of three thresholds:

• More than 250 employees
• More than €40 million turnover
• More than €20 million in assets

That captures roughly 12,000 companies in Europe directly. But because those companies need data from their suppliers, around 50,000 companies are affected indirectly.

The scope of what must be reported is what makes this a whole-company problem. Carbon footprint scope one and two covers emissions from fuel you burn and electricity you buy. Scope three, which is usually the heavier figure, covers everything you buy and everything you sell, making you responsible for the entire value chain. Beyond carbon it also covers waste, water, transport, value chain control, human rights and employee satisfaction.

Which means producing a compliant report, or genuinely making the business more future-proof, requires every team, white collar and blue collar alike.

From linear to circular, a worked example

Wannes illustrates the point with a company that designs and manufactures office furniture and interiors.

A linear economy takes raw material from the earth, makes something, and discards it at end of life. Recycling improves on that, but as he puts it, it is still doing the bad thing in a few more loops. What you actually want is to keep materials out of the waste stream and in use indefinitely. There is significant profit in it.

But that shift is not a management, marketing or communication decision. It reaches into every function:

• Designers. A circular chair has to be designed to be circular. His example is a Herman Miller chair designed without glue. Eco-design is a design skill, so designers have to be motivated.
• Buyers. Designing without glue means different materials, so purchasing has to be on board to source differently and challenge the supply chain to deliver more sustainable raw material.
• IT. If you want materials to come back to you at end of life, you need to know where they are. In construction, that means logging materials in a building information model. Right now the industry has little idea where its aluminium, steel or reusable chairs actually are.
• Logistics. Materials coming back from clients need handling and storage for reuse rather than disposal.
• Blue collar workers. Someone has to not put valuable materials in the wrong bin.
• Marketing and sales. Circular products need a different sales process, because customers have to get comfortable with reused rather than new.

That list is the argument for why internal communication matters so much.

Marks & Spencer, training staff first

Wannes's first example is not a BigTrees client but a case he rates highly.

Marks & Spencer ran a campaign called Look Behind the Label, aimed at making their clothing more sustainable and being open about what was actually in it. The mechanism was training every employee in sustainable fashion, so staff knew what they could discuss with customers.

It worked. M&S sold considerably more sustainable clothing, using BCI cotton and recycled material, than competitors did.

That success led to a broader campaign, launched internally first: Plan A, so named because there is no Plan B, targeting net zero by 2040, a decade ahead of the EU. The internal phase focused on improving carbon literacy across the business, giving colleagues a real understanding of the emissions associated with how products are sourced, made and moved. That knowledge let staff recommend alternatives to customers and explain changes on the shop floor.

The outcome was not only environmental. M&S calculated that Plan A saved £750 million in costs over ten years, alongside higher employee satisfaction. Wannes underlines the sequence: the first thing they did was train their own staff.

Shared mobility, not just electric cars

A counter-intuitive example about company car fleets.

Switching employees from combustion engines to electric is the obvious move. But a conventional car shared between two people is already more sustainable than an electric car used by one.

So the higher-value change is getting people who drive electric company cars comfortable with sharing them, turning a company fleet into shared mobility. That requires training rather than procurement. Wannes cites a Belgian company doing both: electrifying its fleet, and teaching people how to swap, change and share vehicles.

Reynaers Aluminium, combining online and offline

A BigTrees campaign, and the one closest to the theme of the session.

Reynaers Aluminium faces a stark challenge: 96% of their CO2 emissions sit in their raw material. Aluminium is energy-intensive to produce, though once made it is endlessly recyclable. Addressing that requires the whole workforce.

Following the M&S logic, the campaign educated employees truthfully, using an internal platform such as Ambassify for the online component. But it also ran a deliberate offline version, because the online channel reached mostly white collar staff who use smartphones and laptops routinely, while blue collar workers needed something else.

The offline placements were unusually concrete:

• Toilets carried facts about a specific sustainability challenge and how the company intended to act on it.
• Beer mats in the cafeteria explained how any employee could get involved.
• Door handles showed how much carbon a given change would eliminate.

All of it funnelled toward the Reynaers Act Academy, which trained employees in sustainability and in how to be a force for it inside the company, covering commuting, purchasing, and conversations with clients.

The city of Ghent

BigTrees trained the entire workforce of the city of Ghent in sustainability, with around 50% of staff taking part.

The training culminated in an event the workforce organised themselves, for 5,000 residents, on living a more sustainable lifestyle. Partly on the strength of that work, Ghent became a finalist for European Green Capital.

Wannes's conclusion

Two things he wants understood. Sustainability is the single most important topic of the next ten years, and progress needs to be fast, thorough and real. And it cannot be done without engaging every employee.

Unique Belgium, turning a charity drive into an engagement campaign

Lisa presents how Unique Belgium used Ambassify to raise funds for De Warmste Week and Viva for Life, two charity campaigns run by Belgian radio stations at the end of December. As a company operating in both the Flemish and French-speaking parts of Belgium, they deliberately picked one cause from each.

The idea was a talent auction involving all roughly 300 employees. Anyone could offer a talent, colleagues could bid on each other's, and every amount raised went to one of the two causes.

Phase one, collecting talents

The campaign opened as a form campaign in Ambassify. The copy explained what they were doing, why they were supporting these two causes, where the money would go, and how to take part.

Examples did a lot of work here. If you make a great lasagne, sell a lasagne to your colleagues. If you play guitar or piano, offer a private concert. A submission deadline was included.

The form itself asked colleagues to describe their talent and, optionally, to set a starting amount. As Lisa notes, if you need to buy ingredients for the lasagne, you can reasonably open at five euros. They also asked for a photo, because with 300 people spread across Belgium not everyone knows each other.

To launch it, the general director sent a separate mailing explaining the auction and how to set up an Ambassify account, since participation required one. Setup steps were included for anyone who had not yet done so.

Phase two, building anticipation

Next they created custom tabs to host the auction, one for the Dutch-language side and one for Viva for Life in French.

Every talent submitted got its own campaign with a title and a short description of what a bidder could expect. Reactions stayed switched off at this stage, so the tabs functioned purely as inspiration and encouraged more people to submit.

Once the tabs were live, a promotional message went out from within Ambassify linking back to the original form, and the deadline was extended by a few days. That combination, examples plus extra time, brought in more participants.

Phase three, running the auction

With 47 talents submitted, individually and by teams, including a homemade limoncello, the auction opened.

A spotlight campaign explained how to bid on colleagues' talents, with an "I understand" button, which doubled as a way of tracking who had read the instructions and intended to participate.

Reactions were then switched on, because the reactions were the bidding mechanism. People could see each other's bids and outbid them, and clicked an "I made a bid" button each time.

Only one point was attached to the campaign. As Lisa explains, collecting Ambassify points was not the objective. Engagement and money for the two causes were.

At the close, the marketing team posted a wrap-up as the final reaction, naming the winner and the highest bid, followed by a mailing for each campaign explaining how participants should contact each other and transfer the money. That last step was a lot of manual work, but she considered it worth it given the results.

What the campaign delivered

The main goal was raising money, and they raised around €1,000 for the two causes. But Lisa lists several outcomes she describes as nice-to-haves that turned out to matter:

• Community growth, since participating required creating and actually using an Ambassify account.
• Higher engagement on unrelated Ambassify campaigns during the same period, because people had learned how the platform worked.
• A stock of social media content, from the photos submitted and the auction itself.
• Colleagues getting to know each other, including new joiners, and notably Dutch-speaking and French-speaking employees bidding on each other's talents.

They plan to repeat it at the end of the year and make it better. Lisa credits Laurens at Ambassify with substantial help on the project.

Q&A, do any companies reward employees for acting sustainably?

Wannes offers two examples. IKEA operates a reward system tied to employee engagement with sustainability. Unilever certainly used to make bonuses dependent on sustainability targets under CEO Paul Polman, though that policy caused significant internal conflict and he is unsure of its current status.

His more interesting point is about where to aim such schemes. Getting employees to act sustainably themselves is worthwhile, but the impact of employees helping customers act sustainably is far bigger. IKEA now sells an extensive range of jars and containers for reducing food waste, and trains staff to recommend them. That aligns employees' sustainable actions with the business itself.

He closes with a line he says he repeats often: if people commute to the coal plant by bicycle, that is not really sustainable. It is far more sustainable if those same cyclists help transform the business into renewable energy. It sounds impossible, but Ørsted in Denmark did exactly that, moving from oil to renewables with the help of its employees.

Q&A, what stops companies running sustainability advocacy?

Asked for the main reasons not to, Wannes says there is no good reason, only hurdles. Two dominate.

The first is that there is always something more important in operations.

The second is the "yes, but": the belief that changing the business will cost clients, cost money, and disrupt operations. His answer is that it does not. Even ArcelorMittal, the Ghent-based steel company, actively motivates employees to help make the business more sustainable.

Fear of change, in other words, is the biggest obstacle.