The leading question
When a company takes up sustainability, how does people management change?Findings
- Talent recruitment and retention rise.
- Employee engagement — and productivity — improves.
- Employee expectations rise as well, with a potentially negative backlash if a company’s behavior doesn’t live up to its intentions.
“You’ve gone through this generation that have lived in cubicles,” says 36-year-old Cameron Sinclair, cofounder of Architecture for Humanity Inc., a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco that brings professional design services to communities in need. Cubicle culture may have started with a noble idea — openness and accessibility — but for many office workers, cubicle life turned into, as Sinclair puts it, “being holed away in a five-foot-high, fabric-panel square without any view of the world.”
Employees are hungry not just for a paycheck and some creativity in their job but for companies that pay attention to that world and ask them to, too. And increasingly, that translates into wanting companies to pay attention to issues around sustainability.
It’s not just charitable companies like Sinclair’s that are alert to the possibilities. Conversations with 70 thought leaders as well as responses to the Sustainability Initiative survey bear this out: of private sector companies, 57%... To read the complete article, login or sign-up using the form below.
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