The New Green Culture Inside America’s Top Companies

James Elsen, founder of environmental business and community portal sustainlane.com uses this story to illustrate why a company like Clorox recently decided to “green” their entire line of cleaning products, instead of just one. It makes sense from a business perspective, explains Elsen, “because once the green genie is out the bottle, you really can’t help but go all the way and turn every aspect of your business green. You’re rooting out the parts of your business that don’t make sense anymore.”

Of course, it hasn’t always been this way in corporate America. The history of the environmental movement had a rocky progression. From President Roosevelt’s creation of national parks at the turn of the last century to Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring, which highlighted the problems with industrial use of toxic chemicals, there have always been champions of the environmental movement in this country. But the cause has struggled to gain idespread acceptance.

“With the clean air and water acts by the federal government in the 1970s, we saw an explosion of NGOs, and environmental groups and foundations being born,” says Elsen, “but it was also in that period that the environmental movement became very politicized to the left. Environmentalists became pitted against business and progress, and that was kind of a death knell to environmentalism, because it was always on the wrong side of the economic development equation.”

The Greening of Business

All of that has now changed. “It wasn’t until corporations started to realize that they could save money by being green that the modern day green movement was born,“says Elsen.

And now it’s gone from being an option to an imperative. “Regardless of what your views are on climate change, it’s really irrelevant,” says Elsen. “This is an economic argument, and it’s about product innovation. And it’s about the realities of resource limitation on the planet.” With that kind of thinking come big shifts in the way corporate America is doing business. With so many brand-name companies like Starbucks and Wells Fargo adopting eco-friendly business practices—from shifting the products and services they offer customers to using energy-efficient equipment, and going paperless with bank deposits—it’s become a race to out-green one another in the public domain.

But what we don’t hear about as often in the news is the struggle internally in these organizations As these philosophical shifts are occurring on a large scale, affecting large populations of employees, how has corporate management been able to engage their employees in the green way of doing business, instead of doing “business as usual?”

“The growing trend right now is for companies to ask the question, ‘how do we engage employees and educate employees about what is happening?’” explains Joel Makower, executive editor and founder of greenbiz.com. “Even the most pro-active and progressive companies struggle to engage their employees in green practices and you can’t create wholesale shifts in corporate policies and practices without a huge employee buy in.” It’s one thing to convince the CEO of the benefits of going green, but the middle management often lags behind.

Cynthia Scott knows all about employee buy in. As head of organizational strategy for the environmental boutique agency Saatchi and Saatchi S, a sustainable group with the larger Saatchi and Saatchi corporation, she has the task of interacting with human resource departments in huge corporations and the goal of engaging employees in new sustainable business practices.

“We are entering a new world of doing business,” she says, “and human resource people are going to have to understand that they’re going to have to transition larger groups of people into a different way of living, acting and being in the workforce.” Wal-Mart came to Saatchi and Saatchi S (then called ActNow productions) when the big box retailer first decided to radically shift their business approach and adopt numerous green business practices, including designing energy-efficient stores and offering environmentally-sustainable products to consumers. To go along with large sweeping categorical changes in how they did business on the outside, Wal-Mart needed to figure out how to engage its 1.4 million employees.

Personal Sustainability Projects

The consultants at Cynthia Scott’s agency came up with something called PSP, which stands for
“Personal Sustainability Project.” The program was developed as a way for Wal-Mart associates
to embrace the company-wide commitment to sustainability as a business philosophy. As part
of the program, associates from all ranks of the company were taught about sustainability and given a chance to adopt their own PSP—a repeatable habit that positively impacts the environment, their communities, and their own personal health and well-being. PSPs could be anything that they personally cared about, from pledging to recycle, to eating healthier or cleaning up a local park.

The program was so successful that Wal-Mart claims, since the program began in 2006, nearly 20,000 associates have quit smoking; recycled 3 million pounds of plastic; and as a group, lost more than 184,000 pounds. More than 500,000 associates in the U.S. have adopted a PSP.

“It’s all about behavior change,” says Scott. “The PSP project cast a net wide enough around the topic of sustainability to include engaging employees in making healthy choices. Making healthy choices can be the first step to embracing environmental sustainability.”

With the success of Wal-Mart, Saatchi and Saatchi is currently in the midst of implementing similar “employee engagement” programs for well known companies like WellPoint, Frito-Lay and AT&T, all of whom have made sweeping green changes to how they do business, but need to green the inside of the organization.

But why would Saatchi and Saatchi, which is traditionally an advertising agency even be involved in employee engagement? “In traditional marketing,” explains Scott, who also teaches sustainable leadership at the Presidio graduate school in San Francisco, “advertising agencies try to engage customers to buy their products with ads, promotions and TV placements. But what we’re trying to do with employee engagement is line up the story on the inside of your organization, with the story you’re telling on the outside. That’s the promise.”

Currently Saatchi and Saatchi S is working to develop an iPhone APP for AT&T’s 300,000 employees, so that they can text one another about their individual sustainability project while they’re on the job. “If you’re AT&T and you have an army of employees, those people are your virtual marketing platform. And so you’d better be doing something to make them proud to tell stories, and it’s easy to be proud about anything your company is doing that is conserving resources, helping the planet by not dumping waste. Those stories are authentic and compelling.”

“Everyone wants engaged employees,” says Scott. “It’s not just about smiling or satisfied employees. It’s when the person really cares about what they’re doing and goes beyond their core job responsibility, where they will see something that needs to be done and do it.” Scott has a favorite story about employee engagement, and it happened within the ranks of her larger organization, the world-wide Saatchi and Saatchi network—where her boutique agency has been training the larger corporate community in sustainability practices. “We have this online site where people from Saatchi can share their personal stories, and an employee named Mr. Mujeeb wrote in from the Middle-east to say: ‘You are looking at the first person in Saudi Arabia who has ever asked the Xerox man for recycled paper, and the Xerox man does not know what I am talking about, but he promised me that he would find out.’” “Now, that’s employee engagement,” she adds with a laugh.

– Author Jenny Jedeikin writes about the environment, and is director of communications for national nonprofit, Cool the Earth.