Sustainability Progress Is Stalled at Most Companies

While many companies talk the talk of sustainability, claiming to be integrating environmental and societal concerns into their business models, far fewer walk the walk: Managers typically treat sustainability as someone else’s problem and relegate it to a department or even a single individual.1 On the other hand, companies that have been successful in transforming their business models to be more sustainable have embedded sustainability into their corporate DNA. This means that they have endowed their employees with a sense of sustainable ownership, spurring them to engage in more sustainability-supporting behaviors. When every employee integrates environmental and social concerns into every business decision, sustainability progress is accelerated — an aspirational goal for all companies.

To shed light on the state of play in embedding sustainability and identify key bottlenecks, the Center for Sustainable Business at the University of Pittsburgh collaborated with The Harris Poll to conduct a survey of U.S. employees. We wanted to find out whether their employers were taking measures that our earlier research had identified as important to prompting employees to conduct business through a sustainability lens. Our survey drew responses from 1,056 employees, representative of the U.S. employee base. We defined sustainability for the respondents as “integrating environmental and societal concerns into business decisions and actions.”

We asked respondents to rate their level of agreement with a series of 19 statements about the status quo, such as “My company has a clear business case for improving our sustainability performance,” on a 4-point Likert scale (from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”). We also presented respondents with a series of 12 issues that could pose challenges to sustainability progress, such as “Sustainability is not built into our business strategy,” and asked them to rate the extent to which that is an actual challenge at their company (from “major challenge” to “not at all a challenge”).

Roughly one-third of the respondents asserted that their employers have made significant strides in their sustainability journeys. Although that number might sound low given the enormity of the task facing us, the good news is that there is momentum, which we can help accelerate by pointing out the roadblocks as perceived by employees. Below, we provide six key recommendations that emerged from our data for managers seeking to embed sustainability in the organizational culture and business models.