Making key allies before you start engagement

Before you begin your employee engagement programme it is important to prepare, primarily by identifying the people within your organisation who should be involved early on.

 

These are people who should understand what the issues are and feed in how best to address them. This step is important to ensure the right people, that is the department experts, have been involved in determining the actions that need to be taken, and to get their buy-in. 

 

Allies from the following departments could be critical to the success of your programme:

• The board and senior leadership need to be vocal and visible, especially in the early days to set the ambition and give everyone a sense of permission to get involved;

• Human resources is critical as sustainability should feed into overall staff engagement. There is a huge opportunity to get HR behind sustainability work in terms of rewriting policy, employment contracts, linking sustainability to remuneration via performance management – all the different levers that can be pulled to embed this into people’s job descriptions and their roles within an organisation. If these drivers are in place it leads to a whole different conversation in terms of engaging staff compared with more passive approaches, such as hoping that people will get involved based on goodwill as an aside to their main job. Your organisation’s sustainability team should be able to provide support to help develop learning and development tools; 

• Finance is important, if they can be sold the business case it will open a lot of doors for sustainability across the business. For example, can you demonstrate reductions to costs and overheads delivered through energy efficiency and other sustainability activities? Putting a commercial lens on the conversation with other parts of the business makes them sit up and pay attention. Finance also provides data for carbon calculations, for example scope 3, if cost-based;

• Internal communications have a key role to play in finding effective engagement channels and format and creating messages that resonate with and inspire employees, as well as inform them;

• Procurement has a critical role in delivering sustainability, from sourcing to  supplier codes of conducts and questionnaires, as well as getting data from suppliers for scope 3 calculations;

• Marketing will determine how your organisation and its products or services are positioned with respect to sustainability and the benefits for brand reputation;

• Facilities in terms of activities like energy contracts, light bulbs/office supplies, recycling and informational posters, as well as being the contact point for building management for leased offices; and

• Team managers to keep the message going, oversee changes, and embed practices.

To help you build a powerful internal network, OckiPro has developed a series of Making important allies resources for each of the above functions. These insights provide information on how sustainability is relevant and can support the key functions listed above. They also outline each functions’ role in sustainability, how they can start to work with sustainability professionals, and key questions they might want to ask. 

 

Here’s an example for HR; access to the full set will be available as part of OckiPro membership, when it is launched mid-2023.