As part of a corporate sustainability strategy, there is a growing trend to engage employees on multiple levels, both at work and at home. More and more companies are providing their employees advice and tips on how to green their personal lives. But a key challenge is how to measure and track the benefits of these programs.
AngelPoints, a provider of enterprise software solutions for employee engagement, has recently partnered with Saatchi & Saatchi S, the sustainability strategy firm that helped Wal-Mart create their Personal Sustainability Project (PSP) program, to create a new web-based platform to help make it easier to engage employees in sustainability and to track their progress.
As reported on CSRwire, “The newly launched PSP platform enables employees to chart individual and collective progress on a secure and reliable site easily accessed through a company’s intranet.”
The theory is if you can get employees engaged and excited about being greener in their personal lives, they will bring this excitement and energy to their jobs as well.
AngelPoints PSP
AngelPoints has a track record of success with their web-based employee volunteer management system. The new PSP is a web-based tool that enables employees to easily create and track PSPs: habits that positively impact the environment, their communities and their own personal health and well-being.
The tool makes it easy to chart individual as well as team progress across a number of impact categories, such as reducing your carbon footprint, improving health and wellness, reducing waste and connecting with others. It is currently being used by companies such as Saber Holdings and Alston+ Bird, with other key companies considering it.
“The idea of this is to help facilitate green teams, build awareness and get commitments from employees toward greater sustainability,” explains Andrew Mercy, CEO of AngelPoints.
Judah Schiller, Executive Vice-President of Saatchi & Saatchi S, describes PSP as a tool for “making sustainability come alive.”
Schiller stressed the importance of integrating health and wellness into one’s sustainability strategy. “This is a missing piece of the pie,” says Schiller. “There are cost savings possible from a well implemented PSP program that includes health and wellness.”
Key Steps: Create; Track; Results
The tool includes three key components. “It begins with creating and committing to a PSP,” explains Mercy. One aspect I particularly liked is that the tool sends employees e-mail prompts to remind them to take action, once they make a commitment.
“Tracking is where the rubber hits the road in terms of progress and accountability,” he continues. Mercy explained that many companies have made a promise of increased sustainability and the PSP tool can help them bring it to life by tracking the steps they are taking towards that promise and showing the final results.
The tool makes is simple and easy for employees to input their progress and simple incentive programs can be used to inspire teams to take the time to update their progress.
“The impact is important because that is where you can articulate the results and the ROI.”
An Interesting Piece to the Puzzle
Employee engagement is a key driver for increasing employee retention, attracting the best and brightest talent, fostering innovation and capturing cost savings from efficiency. However, to capture these benefits, there is growing pressure on companies to get their employees thinking about sustainability and incorporating it into their daily jobs.
PSP is an interesting piece to the puzzle and this easy-to-use tool could be an important component to a broader employee engagement strategy. For other best practices, see the post I wrote yesterday on the top strategies for getting employees behind sustainability.
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Deborah Fleischer is founder and president of Green Impact. She is a LEED AP with a Master in Environmental Studies from Yale University and over 20-years of direct experience working on sustainability-related challenges in both the public and private sectors. You can follow her at @GreenImpact.
