Building a Sustainability Culture: Brief 3

Evaluating, Measuring, and Reinforcing Cultural Progress

Instilling sustainability into a company’s cultural DNA is a new frontier for many organizations, requiring leadership by senior management and critical contributions from multiple functions. Companies are still exploring how to evaluate, measure, and reinforce progress in building a sustainability culture.

Insights for What’s Ahead

• Building a sustainability culture—one where everyone at the organization makes decisions and acts through the lens of sustainability—is contingent on two fundamental factors: developing a shared knowledge of how the company’s business intersects with sustainability and having the capabilities in place to implement change.
• Companies are generally in the exploratory phase of evaluating and measuring the extent to which sustainability is embedded into their organizational culture, but efforts are underway to educate and train employees on how sustainability pertains to their functional and individual roles.
• Consistently high turnover isn’t just an economic cost but an impediment to advancing the knowledge necessary to build a sustainability culture: the human resources and diversity, equity & inclusion functions are key players in setting cultural goals and tracking progress.
• Compensation alone isn’t enough to reinforce or reward progress; internal recognition from senior management validates that employee achievements are meaningful for the company.
• Communicating progress involves a combination of reach, frequency, and community building (that is, creating the channels and opportunities for employees to share their ideas).