Sustainability

Communicating sustainability – the first step to generate a positive impact

What are my company’s environmental and sustainability policies? This is the question for 64% of the workers who had been interviewed for a survey made for a Treedom campaign to raise awareness on environmental issues (Treedom is the first website that makes possible planting trees from remote and following online the progress of the projects). The survey’s results, made public during Italy’s Overshoot Day 2022 (last May 15 our country exhausted the yearly resources for 2022, in just 137 days) were reported by press agency Adnkronos.That is to say that the vast majority of 7 thousand workers of a sample of companies in the largest European capitals would like to know more about the environmental and sustainability commitment of the company for which they work. One among five, on the other hand, confesses he does not know wether his company has a policy on these issues or not. The results of the survey are very interesting – they make us think about how much still is to be done and about the awareness, on the workers’ side, of the importance of the companies’ environmental choices on the Earth’s future. In fact, the survey highlights the point that, while business owners understand the need to enforce sustainability policies and to communicate them to their main stakeholders, their employees ae less aware of which actions are really carried on by the companies – less that a third of the interviewees are informed or aware of them. Certainly not a positive fact, if we consider that the best way of bringing forward the so-called “paradigm shift” is actually that of involving human resources in the governance’s choices.However, there is something on which we can work – that clear desire to be more informed of that 64%. A percentage that grows up to 70% if interviewees belong to Generation Z, people born approximately from the end of the Nineties and the first Ten years of the XXI century. Moreover, the 67% of the employees agree on the fact that sustainability is a main issue for the choice of the job for which they would apply and the 87% states that it affects their decisions.For the interviewees, the three main actions that business owner should consider for a sustainable policy are the prevention and reduction of environmental impact (51% in Europe and 67% in Italy), the guarantee of constant improvements (38% in Europe and 51% in Italy), a voluntary economic contribution to offset emissions (37%) and the return of resources to communities (28%).Goals, actions and results that demonstrate companies’ positive impact on environment must be transparently communicated to workers, also in order to dispel doubts and perplexities expressed by almost a quarter of Dutch, German and British employees, who said they were not sure of the actions undertaken by their companies. However overall the 72% agree on the fact that current plans are having a positive effect.According to the founder and CEO of Treedom, Federico Garcea, “in order to achieve sustainability goals the companies should not work inside a bubble – the work should be breathed inside and out” and the employees “should be involved in the sustainability route, so as to have a positive long-lasting effect”.
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