In September the National Employee Education Foundation (NEEF) and the GreenBiz Group released a report on how businesses can foster sustainable practices in business by empowering employees.

Companies such as BT, Proctor and Gamble, Johnson & Johnson, Kimberley-Clark, and Cisco Systems participated in the research and development of the report by contributing their experiences on creating innovative tools for employee engagement.

The report identified 5 key steps that companies should incorporate into their workplaces to promote and foster a culture of sustainability and generously credited me with help in developing the model. The first two steps came from a model I presented to the group, but NEEF and the other participating companies fleshed out my simplistic third step ‘harness’ into three actionable stages.

1. Permit: granting employees permission to become involved in sustainability initiatives.

2. Educate & engage: providing employees educational materials and engaging them in sustainability activities.

3. Act: empowering employees to take action at work, as well as at home and in their community.

4. Embed: making sustainability a regular part of their organizations, including their human resource processes, operations, product or service innovation & development, and beyond.

5. Evaluate: measuring and evaluating employee engagement efforts to gauge impact, support continued integration into company culture and inform future employee engagement efforts.

For me,  the most important decision  for a CR practitioner involved in employee engagement is whether you want to take a ‘policing’ approach or a ‘releasing’ approach.  By putting ‘permit’ first, the model takes a ‘releasing’ approach.

As a newcomer to the role some years ago, I overdid the policing approach. I couldn’t understand why employees who were involved in designing energy intensive data centers were getting worked up about theirr use of disposable cups and single sided photocopying, instead of focusing on the energy consumption of the data center. But my attempts to take them away from the cups and copiers backfired. They lost enthusiasm. I learned quickly,   I have since found it most  fruitful (and certainly more fulfilling!) to take a ‘releasing’ approach to my role .  Use communications to give people permission to get involved. That serves to release the pent up demand that I find is nearly always present amongst employees, Then our role as CR practitioners is to harness that energy by helping our  people understand what is really material and how to apply their  core competencies.

As CR practitioners we should be in the business of releasing, rather than policing,  the potential of our people to support society and the environment.