Organisations face many barriers to engage employees on sustainability 

In a series of roundtables on employee engagement in sustainability, participants from a range of organisations reported numerous barriers to better employee engagement in sustainability. These included:

• a lack of a transparent process and tools to tackle engagement with sustainability strategies. Many organisations report that engagement is somewhat ad hoc, often without a clear business case or methods to measure progress or outcomes;

• siloed structures within many organisations, which see sustainability leads unable to make key alliances with colleagues in departments, such as HR and finance, that are critical to the success of engagement; 

• time, knowledge, employee empowerment and innovation pathways all being in short supply, making it impossible to develop better ways of doing established tasks; and

• a low knowledge of what best practice engagement looks like. While a few organisations report having made significant progress on employee engagement in sustainability, details of their success are difficult to come by. There are few opportunities for peer-to-peer learning.

The findings from the roundtables, which were organised by OckiPro, tally with other research* indicating that almost two-thirds of employees have little or no involvement in their employers’ sustainability efforts, despite the fact that 96% of business leaders believe employee involvement is important to delivering their sustainability strategy.

Research also shows that as little as 4% of sustainability strategies achieve their aims – three times less than other corporate transformation programmes. With growing evidence of the broad benefits of sustainability to organisations, and increasing demands from regulators, customers, and employees, this should be a major concern for business leaders.

Supporting sustainability leaders 

Based on its research and ongoing work with organisations that are trying to raise the bar on employee engagement in sustainability, OckiPro has developed a new membership service to support sustainability leaders. 

Emma Chynoweth, co-founder of OckiPro says: “We are on a mission to help organisations engage key stakeholder groups to bridge the gap between intention and action on embedding sustainability throughout their operations. We aim to help organisations meet their targets and legal obligations, and deliver value to society in the long term.” 

She adds: “From our research, we know sustainability professionals are looking for an employee engagement partner who can deliver insights and tools that are focused around people and real life problems, as well as provide opportunities to learn and network with peers. These features and future developments will help professionals to evolve as understanding of engagement grows.” 

Quotes from OckiPro research

• “Our ESG lead is missing an employee engagement partner. Not just to help educate and raise awareness, but to ensure engagement leads to results, that is, we achieve our targets and meet our commitments.” Sustainability champion, global software company 
• “Embedding sustainability requires a shift in culture. To achieve that we need to get into the hearts and minds of people,” Facilities manager, insurance business
• “Our sustainability obligations are mounting. We need to know who is responsible for making them happen, what training we need to do, and what are the absolute priority issues and people,” Vice president marketing, international software company 

The people behind Ocki have decades of experience providing information, insights and events to help businesses improve the safety and sustainability of their products. They have been researching the need for Ocki and the sustainability challenges faced by organisations for two years – translating what they’ve learned into a service that is designed to address those challenges. 

They have a detailed knowledge of sustainability and business, and are using that expertise to collaborate with organisations to accelerate engagement in sustainability. They are supporting members to improve business outcomes linked to sustainability, including greater efficiency, improved customer relationships, new business opportunities, and better staff retention and recruitment.

Find out more on OckiPro or contact Emma Chynoweth at emma.chynoweth@ockisustainability.com. 

*Additional research references

HSBC Future of Work Survey, 2021

WE Communications, 2023

Harvard Business Review, 2022

Bain & Company research, 2021