Exclusive Book Excerpt: The Truth About Green Business

Engage your employees to get traction for action

Gil Friend's new book, The Truth About Green Business will be released by Financial Times Press on May 29.

We're pleased to give you an exclusive early look -- condensed from "Truth 40: Engaging Employees".

Part X: The Truth About Green Management:
Truth 40: Engaging Employees

Highly engaged employees outperform their disengaged colleagues by 20 to 28 percent. A 2004 study of 28 multinational companies found that the share prices of organizations with highly engaged employees rose three times faster than industry averages.

Building your green strategy into the daily life of your business means changes in behavior, not just technology. But how do you get your employees aboard? And how does the "We've always done it this way" sentiment change?

Clean technology gets a lot of attention, but people are the heart of greening a company. What people do each day is where the DNA of your company (its culture as well as its policies and operating procedures) is "expressed." Changing the DNA is one thing; having that show up as different behavior on the ground -- in everything from purchasing to design to customer service -- is quite another.

How to engage your employees
Engaging your employees takes thoughtfulness, commitment, heart and, above all, respect.

Know the value. Managers often assume they can't afford to engage their employees; but the value of an employee who knows the right thing to do -- or how to figure out what that is -- outweighs the effort needed to engage them. Employees who are engaged in greening create value through added efficiency, waste reduction, and process improvement.
Get everyone on same page. A shared mental model, like the Natural Step (TNS) management framework, provides a common sense of direction and a shared vocabulary for discovering new opportunities. When Ikea trained its entire workforce in the TNS framework, it was surprised to find suggestion boxes stuffed to the brim with good ideas.
Listen to your employees -- even ones you think might not think of as innovative. When the Scandic hotel chain engaged its workforce in learning and working with the TNS framework, management was surprised to find that many of the best ideas came from the chambermaids; they weren't highly educated, but they were "face to customer," and once equipped with the right questions they saw things that no one else could see.
Start a Green Team representing a cross-section of the company, with different functions and levels of seniority. Get management support if at all possible--if only to give your green champions some free time to drive the process. (Look what a gold mine 3M's "15% rule," which encourages people to spend 15 percent of their time on projects of their own choosing, has been for that company's patent pipeline!) But be prepared to proceed and show value as informal "skunkworks" if management isn't ready.
Show the results directly, whether in management reports, control charts or performance dashboards, so people can see how their "drop in the bucket," in the words of David Gershon, helps fill the bucket.
The bigger picture
This isn't just about profit. It's also about impacting people's lives by giving them control in their jobs and their impact on the environment. (Wal-Mart's personal sustainability plans challenge employees to make change in their personal lives as well as their work lives.) That kind of engaged employee isn't just good for the employee -- though it certainly is. It might be the best thing for your profit, too.