Why Making Good on Green Promises Can Be a Win for Retailers
Retailers that take the lead on engaging employees on environmental sustainability can strengthen culture, talent retention, and employee satisfaction.
Evolving labor expectations have forced retailers to reassess long-held beliefs about employee values and contemplate their cultures.1 Along with a fair wage, employees seek employers whose values are consistent with their own. Providing a clear purpose, offering flexibility, and making authentic commitments to diversity and sustainability are important means of engaging a growing part of the workforce. For instance, 40% of employees across industry sectors said they would consider leaving their job if they couldn’t trust their employer to fulfill its diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments, and a quarter (26%) said they would consider switching jobs to work for a more sustainable company.2 This reflects employees’ growing demands of their employers, particularly around openness and authenticity.
Given that there were 1.1 million unfilled jobs in the U.S. retail market as of April 2022, cultivating an attractive work culture is no longer a “nice to have.”3 When it comes to sustainability, embedding it into the DNA of organizational culture is not just the right thing to do for the planet — it can also be a key component in employee attraction, retention, and satisfaction.
In a recent study of 750 U.S. retail employees, we explored the perceptions of senior managers (including the C-suite, directors, and vice presidents) of their companies’ sustainability initiatives and how front-line workers see these efforts playing out.4 (See “The Research.”) The data shows that retailers demonstrating authentic sustainability efforts might have better success attracting and retaining labor.
References (13)
1. R.R. Sides and L. Skelly, “2022 Retail Industry Outlook: The Pandemic Creates Opportunities for the Great Retail Reset,” PDF file (New York: Deloitte, 2022), 7.
2. K. Prabhakar, C. Brodzik, D.M. Gest, et al., “Build Trust in Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Commitments,” Deloitte Insights, Jan. 13, 2022, www2.deloitte.com; and “Global State of the Consumer Tracker,” Deloitte, accessed June 2, 2022, www2.deloitte.com.
