Find out how engaged your employees are in sustainability

OckiPro is developing an Employee Engagement Survey that can be used to assess levels of engagement.

The template questionnaire could be used as the basis of a dedicated sustainability engagement survey, or incorporated into wider annual employee engagement research, or alongside an employee survey on commuting and home working to inform carbon tracking, for example.

The questions cover 4 core areas:

• An organisation’s sustainability credentials. The initial questions give employees the chance to assess how seriously the organisation takes sustainability and whether they feel that senior management have sufficiently engaged with the issues and are living the company values.

• Employee involvement in sustainability. A second set of questions focus on how well-equipped employees are to play a part in sustainability initiatives, including whether they have an appropriate understanding of company strategy, the skills and knowledge they need and feel empowered to take action. It also asks how their contribution is measured, which is important as organisations become more sophisticated in their strategy and look to incorporate sustainability into employee objectives. Organisations that are only just beginning to take action should not be concerned by low scores on later questions in this section. The feedback will provide a baseline for improvement.

• Employee familiarity with key sustainability terms. This section assesses employee knowledge and that there is a general understanding of sustainability basics. Once this has been established, organisations can move on to providing training on more complex issues. Training priorities should be developed function by function, as some teams will need a more detailed understanding of key topics, for example making claims or avoiding greenwashing within marketing. This section can be expanded to incorporate terms of particular relevance to the organisation, helping to assess that there is a common understanding of key terms featured in the company sustainability strategy and that they are consistently used across the organisation.

• Importance of sustainability to employees. The final section gives employees an opportunity to state how important sustainability is for them, providing context to earlier answers about how well the organisation is doing to tackle these issues. If sustainability is less important to them, they may take a more lenient view of company actions.

In line with general employee engagement assessments, such as the Gallup Q12 survey, the questions are based on a 5-point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Results can be translated into a score out of 5 (based on ‘strongly disagree’ = 1, ‘disagree’ = 2, and so on) to create a heatmap. Scores of 4 or more indicate levels of high engagement; a score of 2 or below indicate a need for greater attention and should be the focus of the engagement strategy in the following months.

The tool will be part of OckiPro’s membership, when it is launched mid-2023. 

If you would like to input into development of the tool, or would like more information, please contact info@ockisustainability.com.