Employee Engagement Strategy

Did you know? Just one tradeshow can have the same C02 footprint as one year of powering everyday office equipment and supplies? 

We all know that too much C02 in the environment is bad, how do we find out how much carbon dioxide we produce? 

Benchmarking success in green living or business starts with closing the gap between awareness and action.  Here's where the tried and true adage applies: "What gets measured, gets managed." While expressed more frequently in a business setting, it applies to our personal lives as well.  For instance, if you want to lose weight, first you have to know how much you weigh to benchmark your success.  Similarly, in living a sustainable lifestyle, you first need to know the areas of your environmental impacts to measure your success.  

Carbon calculators offer visibility to reduce emissions, but consistently taking eco action to reduce impacts can be overwhelming.  What if there was a quick, easy and long-lasting way to make a difference?  Is offsetting the answer?  From our sustainability consulting perspective, offsetting is not a substitute for reducing or eliminating emissions or other environmental impacts.  However, there is a time and a place for carbon offsetting.  

• Offsetting can be a partial solution that complements other approaches,
• Offsetting can be seen as part of maintaining the balance of life,
• Carbon offsets offers a path to eco action and raises eco awareness,
• Offsetting schemes can be used as an interim measure until other solutions are developed – efficient emission-free fuels and renewable energy sources.

What options are available for offsetting?  Introducing the Green Air Project.  GAP is a social enterprise that helps individuals and businesses offset their carbon footprints in the most sustainable and positive way- by planting trees.  As you know, at Taiga Company, we love trees!  

Why choose Green Air Project? 

• Business Sustainability: Green Air Project's offsetting of carbon dioxide by planting large numbers of trees is a viable option to a businesses' corporate sustainability plan. The program can also aid in increasing employee engagement and retention with employee participation. 
• Transparency:  Clients and other stakeholders have access to a businesses' sustainability strategies with a company-specific website and code to track how many trees have planted.
• Affordable: Businesses, individuals and families can all participate and benefit.  At $10.00/ tree, enough to offset the average American’s CO2 emissions for a month, the trees are professionally cared for including: tree- Lease and preparation of the land, professionally planting the trees, maintenance/weed control, making fire lines and maintaining them on the property, security, boundary maintenance, surveying of land and forestry service to manage the land. 

Green Air Project's offsetting of carbon dioxide by planting large numbers of trees is an easy to grasp sustainability concept for eco curious individuals and stakeholders.  Demonstrate your commitment to sustainability by taking sustainable leadership and eco action.  Visit Green Air Project website today to get started. 

Over the last few years, our sustainability consulting has probed the broad question: can social media save  the world?   Today, we narrow that inquiry and ask: How could social interactions make or break your business.  Social media success is no longer defined by how well your company communicates its message to the external world.  It is rapidly becoming a critical business sustainability skill and a business sustainability catalyst.  

To aid in this discussion, we leverage the Harvard Business Review post, Collaboration Will Drive the Next Wave of Productivity Gains.  This article discusses the basic building blocks of business success and progression.  Focusing on technology, the author demonstrates how companies must move beyond abortion and implement sustainable business change with their technological advancement.

“Ineffective capture and transfer mechanisms hinder most companies' ability to capitalize on creative concepts and solutions. Deploy knowledge-management metrics to effectively measure the capture of innovative ideas and build systems to disseminate these ideas broadly across the enterprise.”  -Corporate Executive Board Views

In addition to the tradition business value drivers of out-bound communication, our sustainability consulting also encourages the equally viable social avenues to value.  An effective should communicated and align with the organization’s business objectives and resources, specifically the interests of its key stakeholders.  We find the leading “socially-geared” companies are responding and creating sustainability advocates by:

• Cascading business sustainability strategies down through organizational and individual performance goals.

• Informing, motivating, and actively engaging employees in the company’s business sustainability programs. 

• Integrating Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) into the business processes, corporate performance, and employee recognition.

• Actively engaged with key stakeholders on sustainability issues, including employees to understand how sustainability issues are affecting the business. 

• Performing transparent reporting on sustainability concepts and sensitive issues, with both positive and negative results.

Sustainability and social media together offer a refreshing and innovative approach to business.  Our sustainability consulting offers information and access to resources that can help your business discover the value of social media for sustainability.  Visit with us at Taiga Company  to learn more.

As the world continuously adapts to shifting expectations for more sustainable business practices and end products, executives are feeling the need to redirect their resources or sharpen their innovation strategies.  In our professional consulting, we see leading businesses shifting the emphasis of their research and development to include less conventional sources of inspiration.  But from were where will the next breakthrough come? 

The Forbes Magazine post, Reverse Innovation and the Myth of Cannibalization, examines the traditional challenges of low cost idea generation in the corporate world.  Describing how innovation typically trickles down from highly funded sources, new research may now reveal that personal and business sustainability concepts may actually be breaking this top-down mold. 

“We are likely to see the reverse innovation phenomenon in a wide range of industries such as ultra-low-cost transportation, renewable energy, clean water, micro finance, affordable health, low-cost housing, and many others.” -Vijay Govindarajan, Professor of International Business at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business

Through our direct engagement with companies and business leaders seeking to inspire and motivate sustainable action in their organization, we find business stakeholders as a valued source for new ideas. Our professional consulting works with clients to step outside of the confines of the business to leverage employee, supplier, and end consumer thinking. In doing so, sustainability concepts naturally find their way into the new developments within the company.

At Taiga Company, our business sustainability programs are tailored towards the encouragement of business sustainability, innovation, and expanded eco awareness as an asset of the organization - particularly through stakeholder engagement. Contact us to learn how your business can leverage social media engagement to tap into the reverse innovation occurring around the globe.

"If you can imagine it, you can achieve it; If you can dream it, you can become it." ~ William Arthur Ward

What do you imagine for yourself?  Is there something you dream of becoming or doing?  In as much as Earth Day is a calling for eco actions, it is also a source of renewed inspiration.  We talk about renewable energy, innovative sustainable business strategies, and employee engagement but at the essence of it all is a quality of human inspiration.  Inspiration in which each of us connect with and renew our spirit is what enables us all to powerfully live our values of sustainability.

For us at Taiga Company, our inspiration is found in nature - and especially so from the view of two wheels.  Also, knows as bicycles.  We call it green cycling and we celebrated Earth Day 2012 by participating in the first race of the Rocky Mountain Endurance Series. The series opened its mountain bike racing season at Lake Pueblo State Park with an estimated 650 riders racing the 66 miles long course that took riders along the state park’s arroyos, single track and bluffs over looking Lake Pueblo, Colorado.

When the connection is made between the natural environment and the actions taken to support the environment, it becomes even easier to continue and expand upon that type of lifestyle.  Hence, one of the reasons we love riding our bikes through natural environments.  

Leading by example, we find the easiest way to promote a sustainable lifestyle to others is by sharing with friends, neighbors, and in the community.  Enjoy the views taken from our Earth Day delight and see if you aren't inspired to go for a stroll!  

It can be argued that business sustainability and economic growth are the ultimate goals of most companies; however, new evidence shows that these efforts are not exclusive.  To achieve results, we have witnessed how leading organizations are enabling a stable work environment  with a rich innovation culture.  

Our sustainability consulting finds that successful business sustainability cultures focus on communication and learning.  We believe that by allowing for flexibility and promoting innovation across the value chain, an organization can capture the interests of current and future employees.  But what are others saying?

The New York Times post, Disruptions: Innovation Isn’t Easy, Especially Midstream, provides its own unique perspective on sustainable organizational development.  This article explores the characteristics of some notable pioneers in technology over the past few decades.  While reversed for their monumental business successes, there is an essence of simple idea generation.  It is this spark and the catalyst that our sustainability consulting chases.

“The challenge of creating something small and disruptive inside a large company is one that many face today.”

The ability to remain open to test new ideas and innovative strategies has proven to be a successful business sustainability strategy.  Businesses who continuously assess and reassess the needs of their internal and external stakeholders are often more adaptive to the dynamic landscape of today’s business.  Leveraging Innovation Excellence’s view, we get an inside look into how leading companies now perceive managed creativity.  These organizations:

• See innovation as a competency:  Innovative companies treat it as just another core skill

• See innovation as a competitive weapon: Innovative companies use innovation to differentiate themselves

• See innovation as a process:  Innovative companies don’t treat innovation as special, unique activity. They see it instead as an ongoing “stream of effort” along with quality, leadership, productivity, and other imperatives.

• See innovation as both systematic and opportunistic:  The most innovative companies flex between different styles of creating opportunity

The business world too often approaches sustainable development with traditional structured implementation processes.  In contrast, our professional consulting has observed that those who excel are those who step outside the traditional business structures to add and spontaneity to their long-term business sustainability plans.  At Taiga Company, we maintain an open culture as part of our core values, and our sustainability consulting encourages clients to include active engagement as part of an overarching business sustainability plan.  

Oftentimes we associate our business sustainability consulting practice to that of a garden.  We plant the seeds of sustainability concepts as we counsel business leaders and employees on the how's and why's of business sustainability.  A combination of factors makes it such that taking eco action is not always a first priority or it may not be "the right time."  As a result, we frequently find our social media engagement and sustainability consulting to be much like a gardener planting and nourishing seeds with intentions of sprouting eco awareness in others.

We believe by giving others the freedom to explore and discover the value of sustainability concepts, it fertilizes the foundation for sustainability concepts to germinate and fosters eco actions to come.   Sustainability and social media together offer a refreshing and innovative approach to business. But, can social media be a catalyst for green businesses?  At Taiga Company, we think so!  By building strategic relationships with key influencers of sustainability in the social space, we all create and empower sustainability and its mainstream adoption.  Here's how you can build strategic relationships for your sustainable business too: 

1. Identify key influencers - select a handful of sustainability professionals for social media or key leaders in the space.  
2. Connect - follow, like, subscribe to their social media streams and platforms.
3. Engage - show your support by retweeting, commenting on blog post, and liking Facebook updates.
4. Social - introduce others to key influencers, share mutual interest whether that be a resource, website, blog, or topic of interest.
5. Promote: offer to interview a key influencer.  Or, review their book, product or event.   
6. Comment - offer feedback, honest opinions, or additional viewpoints.

Because sustainability concepts and definitions are still subject to interpretation and debate, the ‘active’ engagement and dialog with key influencers cannot be overlooked when building effective business sustainability programs and a social media marketing strategy. The propagation of sustainable information to effectively communicate business sustainability successes is becoming a more active dialog.  Find your voice! Connect and engage in the green twitterverse! 

Because most adults spend a majority of their waking hours at work, a sustainable working environment is critical.  The work site, organizational culture and working environment are powerful influences on behavior.   A component of increasing employee engagement has been wellness programs.  Traditionally, they have been used as instruments to address weight reduction, reduced stress levels, improved physical fitness, health, and well being.  Until recently, corporate wellness programs have been a "nice to have" program.  However, new trends point to wellness programs as "must have" programs as success evaluations of these programs are shifting.  

Traditional evaluations of wellness programs as part of employee engagement strategies have focused on ROI.  Yet to qualify the ROI for wellness programs has been elusive.  There are some notable metrics as mentioned by Elaine Cohen, author of the CSR for HR, “It is estimated that employers spend $13 billion annually on the total cost of obesity. Approximately 9.1% of all health care costs in the United States are related to obesity and overweight. Workplace obesity prevention and control programs can be an effective way for employers to reduce obesity. They can produce a direct financial return on investment (ROI) by lowering health care costs, lowering absenteeism, and increasing employee productivity.” 

However, because financial indicators  of success can be difficult to ascertain, many experts in the field are arguing that VOI (value on investment) is the more comprehensive and inclusive metric because it can be self-defined by the company to include attributes that are important to their own business success.  For instance, in addition to improvements in health care costs and reduction of healthcare claims, a VOI for a company might include recruitment and retention rates, measures of morale, quality-of-life indicators and absenteeism metrics. 

Worksite wellness and sustainability are linked: 

• Enhanced recruitment and retention of healthy employees
• Reduced health care costs
• Decreased rates of illness and injuries
• Reduced employee absenteeism
• Improved employee relations and morale
• Increased productivity 

In as much as worksite wellness is becoming more on the norm and less of the exception, so too is business sustainability.  By providing employees with wellness programs not only provides access to improved health, but it also demonstrates corporate social responsibility. Sustainable business strategies embedded in the core operations of a business captures the benefits a wellness program aims to make and more.   As with any successful program, leadership is critical as is participation and engagement.   Unite wellness programs with the corporate sustainability plan to engage your workforce. 

“Great risk management is simply the movement of information from the informed to the empowered.  While employees are often fearful to share observations about compliance risks due to concerns about retaliation, some companies are markedly better at enabling and encouraging employees to do so.”

An engaging lead-in to the recent Corporate Compliance Insights post, The Importance of Integrity Capital in Corporate Culture, the article spotlights one of the major areas of business development our sustainability consulting foresees throughout 2012.  Corporate culture change, rather than process analysis, will be a key focal point in 2012.  

Leveraging Corporate Compliance Insight, our sustainability consulting practice explores the many steps in implementing a value-driven management program.  As the article explains, this process begins with corporate self-assessment:

• Know the marketplace in which you are operating
• Know which regulatory agencies apply to your business
• Set clear expectations for ethical behavior
• Hold employees at all levels consistently accountable
• Assess your suppliers and customers.
• Reexamine your existing policies that govern organizational behavior

Over the past several years, our sustainability consulting practice has found that the top performing companies are taking a more strategic approach to business integrity by aligning core values with business sustainability activities.  Yet, it is not uncommon for executives to falsely believe their business is exempt from sustainability risk.  Consider how asking the following questions from a business sustainability perspective differ from the traditional approach and how the remainder of your 2012 could be different.  

•    What business are we in?

•    What are the industry risks?

•    What's our unique positioning within the industry, and what gives us competitive advantage?

•    What are the strategic imperatives that are tied to our overall strategy? 

•    What are the processes that are tied to the strategic imperatives, and then the risks that are tied to those?

Early adopters of a pro-environment policy are answering these questions differently.  Business sustainability reshapes the business conversation.  By evaluating business risks through the lens of sustainability, small businesses are benefiting from the tangible and intangible rewards of going green.  

Are you looking for ways to green your business?  Our small business resource offerings include:

1. 15 Small Business Tips to Going Green
2. Sustainability: A Small Business Differentiator
3. How Cloud Computing Helps Small Business to Reduce Emissions and Improve Productivity
4. IdeaScale: Small Business Tool for Stakeholder Engagement
5. Social Media Advancing the Business Sustainability Conversation
6. Telecommuting: help your Business, help the Environment
7. The Growing Role of Virtual Conferencing and Webinars in the Sustainability Meeting Landscape
8. 5 Ways to a Greener Website
9. A Guide for SME's: How and Why to go Paperless
10. Intuit's GreenSnapshot: Do You Have it in Your Green Biz Toolkit?
11. CRM: Golden Nugget for Sustainability in Business 
12. Top 10 Benefits of Bicycle Commuting Programs for Businesses

“When it comes to energy and the environment, most people want to do the right thing. But how many people actually contribute to improving energy use and environmental impact is another story.”

This quote from the GreenBiz post, How Businesses Can Use Games to Spur Greener Behavior, speaks to the heart of most business sustainability concept implementations: transforming thought into action.  Focusing on employee action, the article offers a light-hearted approach to stakeholder engagement.  By applying principals of gaming in a traditional business setting, many companies have already witnessed great success in increased eco awareness.  

Research reveals that leading business sustainability companies place an emphasis on sustainability as an integrated business process change consistent with economic recovery business improvement.  As we have discussed frequently, the key is to create alignment.  The GreenBiz article poses several questions:

• How do we obtain enough information to compare to our peers?
• How do we define the intrinsic and extrinsic rewards to spur action?
• Is your organization driven by social pressures or internal drivers?

Our sustainability consulting finds the gap between awareness and action is often the biggest challenge in the implementation of any change.  In terms of business sustainability progress, the action step represents the single largest opportunity.  We spend a considerable amount of time exploring avenues to accelerate global eco awareness into true impactful business action.  

The concept of gaming presented in the above article may offer one method.  Combined with other social media engagement strategies, your company could not only raise the eco awareness of its business sustainability stakeholders but motivate action.  Visit us at Taiga Company to learn more.

Oftentimes we associate our business sustainability consulting practice to that of a garden.  We plant the seeds of sustainability concepts as we counsel business leaders and employees on the how's and why's of business sustainability.  A combination of factors makes it such that taking eco action is not always a first priority or it may not be "the right time."  As a result, we frequently find our social media engagement and sustainability consulting to be much like a gardener planting and nourishing seeds with intentions of sprouting eco awareness in others.

We believe by giving others the freedom to explore and discover the value of sustainability concepts, it fertilizes the foundation for sustainability concepts to germinate and fosters eco actions to come.  We share with clients that thoughts and actions are like stones thrown into still waters:  they create ripples that spread and expand as they move outwards.  The stones we toss at Taiga Company via our social media outreach  include: knowledge sharing, tips, stories, reports, engagement,  and white papers of sustainability success.  We intend to inspire eco action through our social media engagement.  

Whether you are full on with sustainable business strategies and green living, or find yourself to be eco curious, it's easy to be a gardner of eco inspiration by connecting with us.  You'll find resources, information, tools at the tip of your fingertips in our tweets, blog posts, and facebook updates:  glowing examples of businesses leading and benefiting from sustainability initiatives as well as the ease of living a green, sustainable lifestyle.  We invite you to join us! 

1. Subscribe to the Taiga Newsletter 
2. Follow on Twitter 
3. Fan us on Facebook 
4. Watch on YouTube 
5. Join us on Google + 
6. Subscribe to Taiga Company's Blog 
7. Connect on LinkedIn 
8. Enjoy green cycling! Ride your bike with us in Golden, Colorado 

A common held belief is that employees with a vested interest in the success of the company become much more aligned with the goals of the organization. Therefore, how could linking business sustainability concepts to employee success support both interests?  Our sustainability consulting investigates.

Scanning a recent GreenBiz article, 5 Ways to Boost Employee Engagement, we find complementary evidence to our own believes around stakeholder engagement value.  Focusing specifically on the negative impacts of a disengaged workforce, the post offers some helpful tips based on research findings.  

• Connect employees with the people they serve: Interaction increases empathy for customers, motivating employees to do a better job serving them. 

• Get personal: Employees who know their manager well “as a person” are more likely to be engaged. 

• Allow employees to help colleagues via employee support programs: Employees who support co-workers in need experience increased commitment to the organization. 

• Commit to corporate social responsibility (CSR): Research shows that employees who are satisfied with the organization’s commitment to social and environmental responsibilities demonstrate more commitment, engagement and productivity. 

• Invest in workplace wellness: Employer-sponsored programs that support employees in adopting behaviors that reduce their health risks and improve their quality of life -- also known as wellness programs -- raise engagement levels and directly impact the bottom line. 

Business sustainability presents the unique opportunity to increase profitability, gain and maintain a competitive advantage over one’s peers, and create meaningful work for your employees.   The key is in value alignment.  How can organizational values and employee values find common ground?   Our sustainability consulting offers information, resources and tools to build stakeholder engagement strategies into a business sustainability plan.

To meet the growing demands of business sustainability and maintain a competitive advantage over the competition, leading companies are taking a much harder look at their talent pool and the skill sets that will be required for future success.  Because having the ‘right’ people in place will be essential to corporate stability, our professional consulting deems ‘sustainable’ talent management top business priority.  But what are others saying?

“Flat organizational structures and legacy career plans that focus on technical skill development make it difficult to provide mid-career professionals with the leadership and execution opportunities they need to advance.  Leading R&D organizations differentiate between education and experiential learning. They make business rotations a core part of R&D employee development and develop compelling career paths for both technical and managerial roles.”  -Corporate Executive Board Views

Building upon these comments we turn our attention to the Harvard Business Review post, Bring Back the Organization Man.  Focused on both talent acquisition and development, the article offers insight into varying sustainable talent management approaches around the world.  Where one model may work in the US, there may be other considerations in other parts of the company.

Our sustainability consulting believes that the ability to identify, select, develop, and retain quality employees can set an organization apart.  We find that progressive companies are developing specific business sustainability strategies to attract and manage their top ‘green’ talent.   These organizations are utilizing an expanded view of talent management that encompasses alternative skills and less traditional lifecycle of an employee’s career.  Leading ‘green’ talent organizations are responding by addressing the challenges of:

• How to determine the characteristics needed in a sustainable workforce?

• How to differentiate and attract top talent?

• How to develop, engage, and retain top performers and sustainability leaders?

• How to conduct effective employee retention and succession planning to ensure a diverse sustainable leadership pipeline for the future?

The ability to plan and take action to address resource demands has long been a defining characteristic of a successful business.  Our sustainability consulting works with companies to understand the value of the ‘right’ talent as part of an overall business sustainability plan. 

A major component of any corporate sustainability plan isn’t so much how a company carries out those strategies but also how it communicates it to its many stakeholders.  There is an emerging role of social media for stakeholder engagement and for businesses to communicate their broader corporate responsibility agenda.  Within our sustainability consulting, we've discovered that social media executed successfully, can be a powerful vehicle to build sustainable business communications by engaging with stakeholders. 

When businesses create an account on Twitter, they must consider the right “Brand Voice.”   The same holds true for sustainability professionals, consultancies, and personal branding.  Shaping transparency and authenticity through a series of 140 characters can be a challenge much less the effort of connecting and sharing relevant content with key stakeholders.  What are social media success best practices for defining your voice on twitter?  Consider how leveraging one of the following suggestions can aid in your social media marketing strategy.   

1. Subject Matter Expert:  Are you an expert on renewable energy? Water? Energy Effcieincy?  Sustainable supply chain? While these topics all fall under the umbrella of sustainability, each are sustainability concepts that garner unique insights, information, and expertise.  Tweeting your knowledge and insights on the topics garners credibility for your brand as well as powerfully contributes to the sustainability conversation.  Good examples include: @packagingdiva for sustainable packaging, @elainecohen for HR for CSR and @DRMeyer1 for sustainable supply chain. 
2. Community Builder: Are you passionate about generating momentum on sustainability concepts?  Perhaps spreading information on sustainable lifestyles or green business is your twitter calling.  Build the green twitterers by promoting relevant content and key green influencers by rewtweeting, commenting, recommending others to follow. Host and participate in twitter chats.  
3. Green Nay Sayer: Do you have a critical eye or a provactive perspective?  By asking questions and probing conversations, you have the opportunity to invoke further explanation.  Questioning invites innovation. A good reference point is @JenniferWoofter as she offers a provocative and different perspective on business sustainability topics. 
4. Reporter:  Spring season brings May flowers and also sustainability reporting and conferences.  If you have a pulse on what's new, be the go to tweep for sustainability reporting and upcoming conferences.  Post upcoming conferences, engage with attendees, recap conference findings and promote conference engagement.  @RealizedWorth on twitter offers several excellent blog post on employee volunteering and CSR conferences.
5. Idea Generator: Sharing content is great but eco action is better.  Providing inspiring, easy ways to go green throughout the day is like a green public service announcement encouraging others to take action.  Connecting the dots between eco info and eco actions is a big gap to fill.  Tweeps doing it well on twitter include: @greendreamin and @SCJGreenChoices.  

The propagation of sustainable information to effectively communicate business sustainability successes is becoming a more active dialog.  Find your voice! Connect and engage in the green twitterverse! 

With new tools and strategies changing the way the business world communicates and exchanges information, social media is becoming the transparent, engaging, competitive advantage that business sustainability delivers.   However, to effectively harness the power of social media to create business sustainability value, our sustainability consulting explores the key components for success.

The GreenBiz post, Building a Global Brain to Solve Sustainability Puzzles, summarizes an evolved concept of ‘corporate communications’ discussed at a recent business sustainability conference in Washington DC.  Expanding social media engagement beyond the simple spread of information, today’s social business leaders ask: how do we take collective intelligence a step further.

"We're facing some pretty big problems in the world today.  And the way we've been tackling them has struggled to keep up.  The idea of pooling minds and resources holds great promise for sustainability.”  -Tim O'Reilly 

Our sustainability consulting practice believes that social media engagement tools offer an evolved approach to stakeholder participation.  By expanding the scope of contributors and encouraging increased feedback, a decision maker opens the ‘suggestion box’ to a variety of untapped view points. In building an active social media engagement strategy, there are several things to consider:

• Begin with a Clear Vision:  What are your social media goals?  Is it to increase website/ blog traffic? Promote brand image and credibility? Communicate and engage on CSR/ sustainability related topics?  Clearly identify your traditional sales objectives combined with your sustainability metrics and design a social media marketing strategy that delivers results to both. 

• Identify Stakeholders and Online Communities:  Stakeholders are a bit easier to identify, but online communities can be centered theme based and centered on sustainability concepts such as recycling, CSR, water, energy, social investing.  Or, they may be geographically based.  Consider shareholders, partners, employees, customers, suppliers, local communities, and NGO's. 

• Social Media is an ‘Always-On’ Platform: This implies being present to the ongoing conversation: listening, contributing to the conversation, providing timely feedback, and incorporating that information into products, services, and ongoing dialog.

Social media success is no longer a defined by how well your company communicates its message to the external world.  It is rapidly becoming a critical business sustainability skill and a business sustainability catalyst that is affecting the bottom line.  Our sustainability consulting offers social media for sustainability tools to assess the market, your competition, and your own efforts in the social space around your business.  Visit with us at Taiga Company to learn more.

What can the World’s Most Ethical (WME) companies teach us about business success? Well, on average, companies that go beyond simple ‘ethical’ claims out-perform their peers. In fact, this past year’s WME honorees generated 30% greater returns than the S&P 500, demonstrating a strong correlation between responsible actions and business success.  the 2012 business year is well underway.  How is your business embracing sustainability? 

With the changing landscape of business and greater evidence now pointing to sustainability as critical component to future business success, companies that are ready to get started today can make some quick progress.  Our sustainability consulting encourages clients to go beyond a simple vision and focus on business and culture change. Over arching sustainability concepts discussed in our eco friendly consulting include: 

• Review current performance as an opportunity for sustainable improvements.
• Define a corporate sustainability vision.
• Encourage stakeholder discussion in business change.
• Get employees engaged in the business sustainability direction of the organization.
• Create motivation and enthusiasm to promote innovative thinking and business sustainability implementations rolling.

By raising organizational eco awareness, encouraging employee participation, and taking specific actions to promote business sustainability, your organization can have a positive impact on the environment and facilitate the sustainable lifestyle choices of your employees.

 To contextualize these concepts, we offer a few ideas from leading companies with whom our sustainability consulting is currently working:

• Office Energy Consumption – Evaluate the average energy use per square foot of office space and implementing best practices to reduce: energy consumption studies, efficiency practices, equipment modifications, etc.
• Employee Commuting – Offer employees incentives to ride public transportation or participate in car/van pooling.
• Sustainable Design – Consider materials selection, energy consumption, manufacturing, product use and operation, and final disposition, early in the product development process.
• Water Conservation – Manage water entering the company and look for opportunities to reuse water.
• Management Systems  – Raise eco awareness and company commitment through established sustainability policies, standards, metrics, and self audits.
• Environmental Philanthropy – Beyond just corporate volunteering efforts, provide access to technology, engineering support, information and research that benefits the local community and the environment.
• Packaging – Focus on using as little packaging material as needed and making packaging as recyclable as possible.
• Recycling and Waste Reduction - Anywhere there is a trash can, there should be a recycling bin.
• Resource Conservation – Consider material and energy consumption across the entire value chain…reduce, reuse, recycle.
• Go Digital – Reduce paper use and get contracts and documents signed more quickly by using electronic signatures.
• Sustainable Partnering – A key aspect of business sustainability is making sure that you manage your supply chain and partner with companies with similar values.
• Sustainable Education and Development - There is always more you can do to make your business more sustainable.  Encourage education and innovation within the organization.

Companies becoming more environmentally, socially and economically responsible are driving innovations in sourcing, products, and services.  While some argue that sustainability is a passing trend, profitable businesses are not. Sustainable business strategies are designed to bring eco awareness and sustainability concepts to employees, customers, and suppliers which brings value to the organization and also broaden and expand sustainability concepts into the communities and lives of the individuals.  Which sustainable business strategies will your business kick off in 2Q 2012? 

While business sustainability and economic growth are the ultimate goals of most companies, evidence shows that these effort are best served by a strong and stable work environment.  Our sustainability consulting finds that successful business sustainability cultures focus on communication and learning.  We believe that by allowing for flexibility and promoting innovation across the value chain, an organization can capture the interests of current and future employees.  But what are others saying?

The Innovation Excellent post, What an Innovative Culture Looks Like, provides its own unique perspective on sustainable organizational development.  This article focuses on leadership’s role in the process.

“An innovative corporate culture is one that supports the creation of new ideas and the implementation of those ideas. Leaders need to help employees see innovation in the right light.”

The ability to remain open to test new ideas and innovative strategies has proven to be a successful business sustainability strategy.  Businesses who continuously assess and reassess the needs of their internal and external stakeholders are often more adaptive to the dynamic landscape of today’s business.  Leveraging Innovation Excellence’s view, we get an inside look into how leading companies now perceive managed creativity.  These organizations:

• See innovation as a competency:  Innovative companies treat it as just another core skill.

• See innovation as a competitive weapon: Innovative companies use innovation to differentiate themselves.

• See innovation as a process:  Innovative companies don’t treat innovation as special, unique activity. They see it instead as an ongoing “stream of effort” along with quality, leadership, productivity, and other imperatives.

• See innovation as both systematic and opportunistic:  The most innovative companies flex between different styles of creating opportunity.

The business world too often approaches sustainable development with traditional structured implementation processes.  In contrast, our professional consulting has observed that those who excel are those who step outside the traditional business structures to add and spontaneity to their long-term business sustainability plans.  At Taiga Company, we maintain an open culture as part of our core values, and our sustainability consulting encourages clients to include active engagement as part of an overarching business sustainability plan.  

Is there a reason to do employee engagement right?  In fact, are there dangers of a disengaged workforce?  Some would argue low employee morale, broken culture, loss of productivity and unmet performance objectives as symptoms of a disengaged workforce.  Engagement begins with what an organization values.  Where do employees rank among business sustainability stakeholders? Who is ultimately responsible for their engagement?  And how do they directly contribute to your business success?

In an attempt to answer these questions, our sustainability consulting focuses it attention on the post, Employee Engagement: Why Do It If You Can’t Do it Right?.  Contained within, an Environmental Leader guest writer and professional consultant explores the relationship between employee engagement and company success.  

“Leaders who are embracing employee engagement as a tool for supporting their sustainability efforts would be well advised to think through why they desire employee engagement, what they are trying to achieve, and how they intend to carry it out.”

Providing us with some insight, a recent GreenBiz article, 5 Companies, 5 Different Takes on Employee Engagement, discusses the many faces and complexities of a stakeholder engagement strategy.  Specific to employee engagement, the post cites are a number of motivating factors which drive today’s companies.  Some of the noted examples in the article include:  

• Encourage a Public Commitment: Motivate personal sustainability practices in support of a business sustainability pledge.

• Define a Shared Vision:  Encourage specific business sustainability action.

• Provide Personalized Data: Help employees understand their individual sustainability opportunities through personalize participatory information.

• Expand a Corporate Initiative: Foster personal development opportunities through specific business sustainability programs.

• Nurture a New Method: Create energy and enthusiasm in the workplace.

As our sustainability has frequently discussed, business sustainability presents the unique opportunity to increase profitability, gain and maintain a competitive advantage over the competition, and create meaningful work in the process.   This belief is supported by the above stakeholder engagement strategies which find a common thread in value alignment.  When you consider what other businesses have achieved through employee-inspired and driven leadership, can you foresee opportunities within your own organization?  Our professional consulting at Taiga Company works with clients to enable employees to leverage their eco awareness and take inspired business sustainability actions for the benefit of the organization.  When employees feel educated, inspired and empowered, the real magic can begin.

“As many of us are wrapping up our 2012 budgeting and planning process, one thing continues to worry even the most seasoned senior executives: Market Volatility. Twenty-eleven has been a year in which volatility reached historic levels, and one in which even the most experienced of global investors increasingly worried about risk as the year progressed. In this kind of market even the best spiked egg nog may have difficulty calming the fears of the investment community.  Innovation executives can’t help but worry about how the broader investment climate will affect their 2012 innovation plans.”

This excerpt was taken from the recent post, Innovation Planning in Turbulent Times, which captures the impacts of the recession on business through the actions of several global leaders.  Highlighting the links between innovation and business success, the article describes how these “super giants” viewed turbulence as opportunity.  Our sustainability takes note of this success and the post-recessionary insight:

• Improve satisfaction with your innovation investments
• Identify the breakthrough trends impacting your industry
• Optimize your portfolio to better balance breakthrough and incremental innovation
• Reduce the risk of your innovation investments

Through our direct involvement with companies and business leaders seeking to define creative and sustainable solutions within their organization, we find that aligned and motivated stakeholders  are a ripe source for new ideas. Thus, our sustainability consulting works with clients to step outside of the confines of the business to leverage employees, suppliers, and end consumer thinking.   

Taiga Company  subscribes to the belief that a focused social media engagement strategy can ensure that business sustainability concepts and innovative solutions naturally find their way into new product developments within your company.  Our sustainability consulting offers information and resources to business and individuals at every level of this stakeholder engagement evolution.

The link between business sustainability and a thriving business community is more visible today than at any time in recent past.  Our sustainability consulting continuously probes the questions:  "How does a business define its role in the community?" and "How does it know if it’s succeeding?". 

Leveraging a real world example from Environmental Leader’s 2012 Insider Knowledge Report, we examine Intel Corp’s view on community engagement.  Defining the larger community as the “Fourth Stakeholder”, Intel warns of the business sustainability risk that comes from disregarding the greater community needs related to the supply chain, human rights, and environmental causes.

Taking this view of managed community risk, our sustainability consulting defines a key component of a business sustainability plan to be an assessment of where the organization currently resides in relation to environmental, social, and economic impacts.  Utilizing stakeholder impact metrics, knowledge of corporate culture, and sustainability vision, a company is better suited to identify partners to compliment and expand upon its sustainable business strategies.  Assessing the organization’s relationship with the community, we advise a company to focus on: 

• Shared interest
• Creating a win/win outcome
• Meeting commitments to the local community
• Delivering on social business targets
• Building local trust
• Improving stakeholder relations
• Developing a skilled local supplier base

At Taiga Company, we believe that no one company can stand alone in today’s business environment.  Each company exists in a matrix of business and community stakeholder interactions.  These value adding relationships include the interests of employees, supporting organizations, and the community as a whole.

Can social media change the world?  Can it make our world a better world?  How is it advancing the sustainability conversation?  What role does it play in business sustainability today?

GreenBiz recently provided a business perspective on the social landscape with its post, The Social Intrapreneur's Push from Innovation to Company-wide Integrity.  Referencing Michigan's Ross School of Business work on the subject, GreenBiz discusses the climb of “Mt. Sustainability” from an insider’s perspective.  Consistent with our own sustainability consulting perspective, the business sustainability journey begins and ends with the level of engagement of a company’s resources.

“Training and education does not end with new workers. Integrating sustainability throughout the enterprise requires ongoing education of employees at all levels.”

Our sustainability consulting advocates that to be effective with its business sustainability communications an organization must have a defined strategy.  This strategy should communicated and align with the organization’s business objectives and resources, specifically the interests of its key stakeholders.  We find the leading “socially-geared” companies are responding and creating sustainability advocates by:

• Cascading business sustainability strategies down through organizational and individual performance goals.

• Informing, motivating, and actively engaging employees in the company’s business sustainability programs.

• Integrating Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) into the business processes, corporate performance, and employee recognition.

• Actively engaged with key stakeholders on sustainability issues, including employees to understand how sustainability issues are affecting the business.

• Performing transparent reporting on sustainability concepts and sensitive issues, with both positive and negative results.

Sustainability and social media together offer a refreshing and innovative approach to business.  The question is: do you want social media be a catalyst for your sustainable organization?  Visit us at Taiga Company  for more information and access to resources that can help you discover the value of social media for sustainability.