A2X Consulting

When you run a small business, doing so sustainably is a great thing. It’s become more and more popular to make sure you’re taking good care of the environment, and this is for a lot of very good reasons. We’re all starting to notice how important it is that we do our part to reduce our economic impacts and find more sustainable and environmentally-friendly to do all of the things that we need to do. Modern technology has given us a lot of interesting and convenient capabilities, but some of these have come at a pretty significant cost to the environment. Now that we’re getting a little more advanced, however, a lot of attention has been turned to finding a way to make things a little better for everyone. A great way to make sure your business is following this example is to make sure you have sustainable practices in line, but an even better way to make sure you’re doing this right is to make sure that your employees are spreading the word and repping your company’s good practices in their off time. It’s great to do what’s called “embedding” sustainability in your workforce, and we’ll talk about five ways that you can go about effectively doing it.

1. Understand How They Feel. See if you can survey or somehow figure out how your employees feel about your company and its present state of sustainability. Whatever movement you make is going to be reacted to by the people that you employ, and you can make sure you anticipate this adequately by understanding the way they feel about their company and its sustainability at present. This will also help you understand how to best communicate with them, and where you might need to stress things.

2. Train Them. Saturate the training process with plenty of emphasis on making sure that sustainability is a main focus in operations at your workplace. If you can make sure that you’re training your employees to be as sustainable as possible, then you can rest assured that they’ll be taking this training with them even when they leave the office.

3. Communicate with Them. Reach out to your employees in the ways that they value the most — whether this is new-fangled social media or plain old email, there’s some preference as to how your employees want to communicate, and you’ll do well to know what it is. This way you can get the information you need to get to your employees about your company and its sustainability when you need to.

4. Lead By Example. The best way to make sure your employees are spreading the word about and practicing your model of sustainability is to do a really good job of setting it. Make sure you’re doing everything in your power to be as sustainable as you can so that your employees really feel inspired.

5. Make It Easy. Not all of our employees have gotten their online LLM degree — if you can really reach out and make it easy by giving your employees multiple ways to learn about and practice sustainability, then you’ll really increase your likelihood of these ideas truly being internalized. There are a ton of ways to get your employees more in line with your ideas about sustainability, and with the right strategies it’s not too hard at all!