How do you know your colleagues are engaged in sustainability?
I’ve spent a lot of time over the last couple of years trying to find an effective measurement of employee engagement in sustainability. You can easily measure your side of the equation – how many people have been through engagement processes or training courses – but measuring results is trickier.
Looking at the wider employee engagement literature, three measures of engagement stand out and some put them in the following order:
- Discretionary Effort
- Intention to Stay
- Advocacy
The second one is difficult to link to sustainability as there’s a whole bundle of factors will determine whether you stay in a job or go.
In my experience, the best in sustainability have difficulty keeping up with projects and initiatives springing up spontaneously all over the place, so discretionary effort in sustainability makes for a really good litmus test for successful engagement.
Advocacy – whether employees would boast about their employer’s sustainability efforts to a friend – makes for a second level measure.