Safety in Numbers
Brighter Planet's blog
Employee sustainability survey results: the good, the bad, the ugly
We’ve finally wrapped up the crunching, sifting, charting, and interpreting of the 30,000+ datapoints collected in our recent online survey about the employee engagement practices of US employers. Thanks to all of you who took the time to respond to the survey questions. Today we released the report that details our findings.
Mindy Lubber, president of Ceres (and Brighter Planet advisory board member), signed onto the cause with her contribution of the foreword. As she says, “This report from Brighter Planet both provides a benchmark for the status of employee sustainability programs in the US as they continue to evolve, and helps to inform their development by highlighting factors that contribute to their success. We look forward to watching employee engagement initiatives play an increasing role in helping our institutions to overcome the challenges of our time.”
Here are a few of the findings at a glance. Download the complete report to get the full results and insights.
- Most employers have only just begun interacting with employees around sustainability, and their efforts leave room for improvement. Although 86% of respondents said their organization promotes employee sustainability in some arena, only 16% said their employer collects data related to employee sustainability and just 14% said their employer had an official employee sustainability engagement policy.
- Small organizations are leading on employee sustainability engagement. Organizations with fewer than 100 people are nearly twice as likely to promote sustainability very frequently, and their efforts are twice as likely to be effective at changing employee behavior.
- The most effective engagement programs feature an organization’s management or board as the main advocate for employee sustainability. These programs are three times as effective as those in which an employee sustainability director was the main advocate.
- Employees are generally dissatisfied with their employers’ sustainability engagement efforts. Over 60% of respondents want to learn more about their employers’ and co-workers’ sustainability efforts, and 67% would like their employers to change their stance on sustainability.
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