Are you the Mother Duck or the Scientist?

Are you familiar with Gary Larson's The Far Side comic titled, "When imprinting studies go awry?"   It's a personal favorite as it illustrates a mother duck followed by her baby ducks and then, the scientist following all of them. As a reminder, you may recall from your science days that imprinting is the behavior of a young animal learning the characteristics of its parent.

As it is, today’s companies face greater pressure than ever before from shareholders, customers, and employees to become more sustainable. But how do you engage workers within your business to personally integrate sustainability into their everyday actions and decisions? Perhaps it starts with business as the mother duck and not the scientist.

Frequently, business leaders want their employees to exhibit behavior or take initiative only to be disappointed in a negative result. However, as we share in our business sustainability consulting, if you want to engage people in your company to be personally involved in taking eco actions and becoming more sustainable in their personal lives, then it seems only natural that the organization itself would lead those sustainability efforts by demonstrating value for the sustainability concepts they are asking their employees to embrace. On the corporate level, this takes the form as a formal sustainability plan or business sustainable strategies. Perhaps integrating alternative commuting programs , waste and recycling programs, or as Wal-Mart has done personal sustainability programs.

To extend sustainability concepts beyond the workplace and into employees living more sustainable lifestyle, we offer the following suggestions in our professional consulting with businesses:

Educate: Offer ongoing workshops, training, lunch and learns, and educational activities to educate workers on the environmental issues (energy, water, waste, and others) and the associated actions causing the problems. Identify new behavior and eco actions that individually workers can take to create new patterns of behavior and choices that support environmental solutions and are aligned with the company's overarching sustainability plan.   We've learned in our eco friendly training classes, the first part is educating; the harder part is changing the behavior. Ongoing education helps create lasting change.

Create individual employee sustainability programs: The basic premise of a personal sustainability program is to reduce your carbon footprint, lighten the load on the planet as well as reap the benefits of living a more sustainable lifestyle.    Eco actions taken in a personal sustainability plan can be anything from riding a bike to work or eating organic healthy meals or recycling. It can also be about achieving a personal goal, sustaining it, and building from that platform. Tying a program to incentive structures is one way of demonstrating its importance in the organization. Another option is to extend individual sustainability plans to groups or departments within the business and align goals/ metrics with the overarching sustainability plan of the company.

Engaging workers within your business to personally integrate sustainability into their everyday actions and decisions starts with the organization and its leaders. Leading the way and imprinting upon those the characteristics of eco awareness in daily life.