3 reasons why 2025 should be the year you focus on employee engagement

For years, Shelton Group’s recommendation to our clients was, “work from the inside out.” Meaning, start with communicating your sustainability story to your employees, engaging them in new habits and actions, and then start telling your story externally. 

Most folks didn’t have the patience … they wanted to go straight to the external piece. But I’m seeing some unintended consequences from that approach. Here’s why you should make employee education and engagement a priority this year: 

1. Employees are people, too. And people are voting with their wallets. According to our ongoing Pulse surveys, 90% of people around the world say a company’s environmental reputation has an impact on their purchasing decisions. For social issues, it’s 86%. While we haven’t asked that same question related to “where you choose to work,” we did track exactly this for one of our clients a few years back. In that study we found that over 50% of people who had recently joined the company said the company’s sustainability program played a big role in their decision to come to the company. And many consultants have identified the value that comes from continuing to engage employees in sustainability on an ongoing basis. So, it can hook great people into your company and – when you communicate your sustainability progress and offer opportunities for employees to be involved – it can motivate them to keep working for you. (See more stats on this in this article from ADP.) 
2. Money only gets you so far. We were just hired by a global manufacturing company with zero waste targets to understand why, even though their plant managers are financially incentivized to achieve the net zero goal, waste is still being generated. We haven’t completed a full assessment of why this is happening, but our working hypothesis is that they haven’t (yet) developed a “culture of zero waste” in their company the same way they’ve developed a “culture of safety.” Truly, if you think about all the things your company does to keep safety top of mind — from safety moments at the beginning of meetings to ongoing, mandatory training — and use that same playbook for sustainability, you can create new behaviors and attitudes that your employees will carry forward beyond their work life. And that can really change the world — and have real bottom line impacts on your business. 
3. When employees don’t know about your programs, they can say the wrong thing to your customers or consumers. I was in a retail chain store the other day that specializes in beauty. I had brought in two empty makeup containers so I could match new ones to the old ones and, after making my purchase, I asked the person at the register, “Can I recycle these here?” Doing what I do for a living, I knew I could, as I’ve actually heard the head of sustainability for this retailer talk about the partnership they have in place and the recycling drop-off boxes they have in their stores. So, really, I was asking, “Where’s the recycling bin?” What the cashier told me was disheartening and, frankly, shocking, given how hard I know this retailer has worked on this recycling program. She glanced in the direction of the doors and said, “We used to have a box you could drop them in by the door, but I don’t see it. I think we’ve done away with it because nobody was using it.” In fact, I walked to the other side of the entrance and found exactly the recycling drop-off station I was looking for, and it was nearly full of used makeup packages to be recycled. I’m not your average consumer, so I imagine most would have taken the cashier at her word and just tossed the packaging in the trash, relegating all that value to a landfill. Imagine how much affinity could have been driven with the consumer in this case — and empowerment and loyalty could have been driven with the employee — if, when she saw the used containers in my hand, she had said, “Did you know we have a recycling bin for those?”

No matter what size organization you work for, when you engage your employees in sustainability, you will drive loyalty, enthusiasm — perhaps even evangelism — that has a very real benefit to your company’s bottom line. So make 2025 the year of employee engagement in sustainability!