Room for Improvement - Employees Are Taking More Action at Home Than at Work

“Room for improvement”, together with “could try harder”, the comments I most dreaded on my report card at school. However, “room for improvement’ there is for us sustainability managers in the employee engagement space.

This is my third post adding my personal thoughts on the results of a survey of IT Professionals on Green IT that BT conducted in June 2009. The full results came out in September.

In my last post, I observed that companies appear to be leading their employees' attitudes. Companies with clear and proactive policies in the climate change space have employees who report more proactive attitudes to the issue.

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From the attached chart, I noted that participants in the survey report a higher level of activity on key environmental activities at home than at work. The difference is consistently of the order of magnitude of 10 percentage points. So for example, of employees who believe human activity is a major cause of climate change, 90% report recycling more at home, but only 77% report recycling more at work. Although respondents with less firm convictions on the causes of climate change report less action, they still consistently report more action at home than at work. (This is not the case for travel; however, a direct comparison is not possible as the ‘at home’ question only referred to commuting, where the ‘at work’ question referred to all business travel.)

The implication is that there is potential for corporate responsibility and sustainability practitioners to increase action amongst employees by 10 percentage points simply by bringing it up to the same level as the level of action employees take at home. If the conclusion of my earlier post is correct and companies are leading employees' attitudes, then let’s make sure we are taking full advantage of that in terms of action in the workplace.