Employee engagement
Employees' involvement and connection with workplace activities or goals.
Example
Climate programmes can invite staff input and voluntary participation.
The catch
Activity counts alone do not show environmental results or lasting commitment.
In more depth
Employee engagement, explained.
Employee engagement on climate pays off most when it reaches the decisions people make in their jobs. A buyer who rewrites a procurement specification or an engineer who redesigns a process can change more than a year of office recycling. Green teams without budget or authority tend to fade once the early enthusiasm passes.
Engagement also works against diffusion of responsibility, since staff who own a named target lose the excuse that someone else is handling it. Tie programmes to decision rights and to the company's largest emissions sources, and watch for a visible office initiative quietly standing in for harder operational changes, an organisational cousin of moral licensing.