Use Green Teams as Team Building for Employee Retention

According to Winning Workplace's post, Key Employee Engagement ROI Metrics: Tenure and Turnover, there is a connection "from team building efforts designed to keep employees engaged, motivated, and satisfied, and their ability to hold onto them longer, on average, than other small employers."

Upon first glance, the idea of a corporate green team may seem fairly simple—a small effort that allows a subset of employees to gather around a shared interest. In practice, however, green teams can be much more powerful than that. They can inspire, activate, and engage employees to create meaningful changes within a company.

However, sustainable businesses strategies aimed to increase profitability and productivity through employee retention can gain a competitive advantage over the competition by leveraging green teams as team building initiatives within the organization. Sustainable business leaders are looking for ways to advance the corporate sustainability plan and team building via green teams is another solution.

Winning Workplace's post shows the impact of higher employee tenures and lower turnover on the bottom line to include:

Improved ability to promote from within (saves on recruiting costs).
More time to implement practices to capture and run with employees' best bottom line-enhancing ideas.
More time for managers and even their subordinates to improve vendor relationships, to lower costs and/or provide more value for the business.
Typically stronger relationship-building with customers or clients, due to their interactions with the same people month after month, year after year.

How can green teams help?

Green team meetings allow participates to meet, collaborate, and discuss on topics unique to their position in the organization. Namely, issues and areas of specific interest in how it relates to their job, their departments, and the overall organization.
Green team meetings leverage synergies that result from brainstorming sessions and sustainable business strategies implemented in other departments.
Green team meetings foster socialization, and greater team work.
Green team meetings allow for grassroots sharing of ideas, as well as a means to disseminate essential information related to the corporate CSR vision.
They provide "on the ground" alerts to hot topics and cultural trends within the organization. They embark on eco activities and expand eco awareness as a result of those activities.
Green team meetings help foster a collaborative culture in the organization which helps organization to achieve its objectives collectively.

Employees are often argued to be the greatest resource of a company. When employee’s values resonate with those of the corporation, they are more productive, loyal, and their work is meaningful. Green teams functioning as team building initiatives within the organization have the capability to align the corporate sustainability within the organization.