Much has been written about how to involve employees in more environmentally friendly office practices, such as reducing paper consumption, carpooling, turning off computers at night, recycling, and composting food scraps. As important as these and many other behaviors are to greening an office, they only take a business so far down the sustainability path.

If your vision is to build a sustainable business operating from a triple-bottom-line (people, planet, profit) philosophy, then sustainability is core to your business strategy. Your challenge involves more than green office practices. It means creating a business whose success is measured by its social, environmental and financial contributions.

Executives can only achieve their vision of a sustainable business by engaging and involving their work force. They need everyone in their companies on board. The question is how to engage all employees in the practice of strategic sustainability.

Fully engaging employees in strategic sustainability

At the risk of over-simplifying what can be a complex undertaking, I’ll offer a 10-step approach to employee engagement:

1. Develop a strategic business plan that clearly articulates your social, environmental and financial objectives and strategies over a period of up to five years.  I’ve worked with companies that set very aggressive stretch goals such as zero waste or zero carbon footprint by a certain date to ones that set more pragmatic goals such as reducing waste or the carbon footprint by a certain percentage.
2. Share your business plan with each group or department. Ask each group to review their individual plan and goals with the intention of incorporating or expanding the practice of sustainability into their metrics of success. Each unit may be different: Purchasing may adopt social and environmental performance requirements in their procurement contracts with suppliers. Product development and design may adopt design for environment (DfE) techniques into their processes. This type of thinking leads to innovations such as creating products that are lighter, repairable, utilize rechargeable energy sources, use energy more efficiently, or require low impact cleaning by the user. Accounting may investigate new models for measuring and tracking social and environmental impact, in addition to financial performance such as the greenhouse gases associated with business travel.
3. Set department goals, both short term and long term (quarter, annual, three-to-five year). Companies may choose to make their environmental and social goals based on company totals or on a per unit or per dollar basis.
4. For each job function and individual, determine responsibilities and expectations related to achieving the department’s and the overall business’ sustainability goals. As much as possible, make this an exercise of co-creation between a manager and an employee. You want every employee feeling enthused and empowered to make a difference. You also want to let employees know their contributions to sustainability will be a factor in their annual performance reviews (see Step 7). Set goals that are SMART: specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, timely.
5. Provide training for each employee to grow competency and skills related to improving their individual contributions to your triple bottom line. Where possible, develop or seek sustainability training that is domain-specific, e.g., marketing, product development, manufacturing, customer service, human resources. This can include sending your employees to conferences or workshops or participating in industry or cross-industry collaborative working groups that are addressing specific issues such as water, logistics, fair labor and energy efficiency.
6. Check-in regularly (weekly, monthly, quarterly) to monitor progress on the sustainability front, such as in manager/employee one-on-ones or staff meetings. This enables mid-course corrections and prevents year-end disappointments in group or individual performance.
7. During annual reviews, evaluate each employee’s performance related to his or her individual and group sustainability goals. This reinforces the importance of achieving these to the company.
8. After their performance reviews, ask employees to produce new or revised 12-month SMART goals to help their departments and the company achieve sustainability objectives. Be sure to share with employees any changes to business or department plans so they can align their individual efforts accordingly.
9. Throughout the year, acknowledge and celebrate individual and group sustainability achievements across the company. Consider contests that motivate individuals and groups to out-perform each other and help make the sustainability journey about having fun and making a difference.
10. Work with each department to engage their stakeholders and report publicly the achievements and challenges. This may include summits with your supply chain, reporting achievements and challenges to the public through corporate responsibility reports or websites or engaging customers through customer surveys and communications.  The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) provides a thorough framework for corporate responsibility reporting.

We have seen great success with companies that take these steps to fully engage their employees. This strategic approach moves sustainability from theory to practice within a company. The more engaged employees are, the more they will help your business innovate, achieve industry leadership, reduce costs and increase market share.

I was reminded of the green vs. sustainability disparity as I was preparing a talk I gave last week to the Communicators Conference in Portland, Ore. In the talk I outlined a vision for what I called the “Sustainable Communicator.” If this vision came to pass today, I believe we’d see an immediate ratcheting back on the practice of green marketing and a spike in the practice of sustainability.

Let me explain.

First, consider these two studies from 2009:

• In its study entitled “The Road Not Yet Taken,” the Sustainable Enterprise Institute reviewed the public information disclosed by companies in the Russell 1000 Index and concluded: “evidence of any broad spectrum adoption of sustainable business practices is not to be found.”
• The Boston Consulting Group and MIT Sloan Management Review surveyed 2,000 business leaders worldwide as part of their study called “The Business of Sustainability.” The authors reported “a material gap between intent and action at most companies” they examined.

Which begs the question, if business is so slow to embrace sustainability, how can there be so much green marketing? I believe the explanation is this: Sustainability and green are two different concepts. They are not interchangeable. As The Natural Step Network tells us in their workshops, green is focused on details, tactics, environment and “less bad.” Sustainability is focused on whole systems, strategy, triple bottom line (not just the environment) and aligning with nature’s cyclical processes.

Retire green marketing

If I had my way, I’d retire green marketing, as I argued in a previous post. Green marketing in business is first and foremost product marketing. And as we know, you don’t have to be a sustainable business to produce a “green” product.

As the studies above indicate, businesses that adhere to the principles of sustainability and operate from a triple-bottom-line (people, planet, profit) philosophy are uncommon. That means the majority of “green” products are produced, marketed and/or sold by companies that fall far short of the sustainability ideal.

I’m not opposed to green products. We need more of them. But relying on otherwise brown companies to produce green products is at best a “less bad” situation (and clearly the primary reason for greenwashing). If we are to solve the pressing social and environmental issues of our time — clean water, peak oil, over-consumption, income inequity, population growth, climate change — we need businesses fully on board with sustainability.

Fusing brand, culture, sustainability

And here’s where the Sustainable Communicator comes in. This mythical professional fuses the practices of branding, culture change and sustainability into something completely new.

The Sustainable Communicator is a result of a fundamental shift in focus and responsibility:

• from marketing green products to building sustainable businesses
• from creating brand image to living your brand
• from specialist in communications to leader in sustainability, organizational development and branding

Yes, the Sustainable Communicator remains an expert in communications. That goes without saying. She is also a leader in sustainability, triple-bottom-line management, culture change and collaboration.

I admit this is a tall order and unrealistic in the short term. But if business is going to be truly sustainable, it needs new leaders to emerge in all disciplines, including communications. Because we know there’s a significant gap between what business intends to do and what it’s actually doing in the areas of social and environmental responsibility.

The need to close this gap is the impetus behind my firm’s recent formation of the Sustainable Branding Collaborative and 4D Branding process.

Closing the intent vs. action gap

Communications professionals have a major role to play here. We can’t continue green marketing and pretend the gap doesn’t exist. The buck stops with us, as storytellers, to only share what we know to be true and to accurately reflect where our companies are along the path of sustainability.

But storytelling alone is too passive, too removed from the ultimate need of businesses to move farther and faster toward become truly sustainable. The Sustainable Communicator is more than a storyteller. She’s a hands-on leader in transforming business. And its in that experience she recognizes green marketing is a thing of the past.

In the past decade, BP has positioned itself as a progressive global corporation — beyond petroleum, it would have us believe. In reality, it’s a gigantic oil company that, despite its energy diversifications, is determined to keep feeding our insatiable carbon appetite and making billions for it and its shareholders along the way.

To BP and any other business in an inherently dirty industry, spare us the green preening. A fossil fuel business is not sustainable, OK? 

If only BP would be so honest. Instead it continues to lead with a brand — symbolized by a logo inspired by the Greek god of the sun and bathed in pastoral green — that implies its core value is sustaining life for the planet and all its inhabitants.

Branding consultant Lisa Merriam tells it like is:

“The much-admired green sun BP brand died this week. This is a brand that never left the marketing department. No matter what they said the company stood for, they never lived it. Despite all those smug ads about wind farms and being ‘Beyond Petroleum,’ this shows they are just like any other oil company — their green brand is as dead as all of the wildlife washing up on Louisiana shores.”

While I side with Merriam on this one, the reality is BP’s green reputation hasn’t been warranted for some time, if ever. In April 2008, Sustainable Industries magazine, citing an anonymous source, reported:

(A) top-down decision has been made to pull away from touting any “green” initiatives in the media, and in fact major “green” advertising buys have been canceled. Recent press releases focus not on alternative energy successes as they did in (former CEO Lord) Browne’s time, but on BP’s ability to keep pumping oil, maintain its oil reserves and safely conduct deep-water oil drilling.

A look at the advertising BP features on its website seems to bear this out. Beyond petroleum isn’t an environmental message; it’s an energy security message, as copy in this current BP ad illustrates:

To enhance America’s energy and economic security, we must secure more of the energy we consume. That means expanding the use of wind, solar and biofuels, as well as opening new offshore areas to oil and gas production.

BP doesn’t tout alternative energy sources to help reduce global warming — an environmental message. In fact, it clearly is trying to sway public opinion in favor of allowing more offshore drilling — a decidedly non-green initiative.

While BP isn’t hiding its desire to extract and sell lots more oil, it wants to have its cake and eat it, too: lead with energy security and have us believe it also cares about the environment. Consider this BP advertising headline, “Hydrocarbons and low carbons living in harmony.” Right. And Monsanto has some genetically modified seeds to sell you organic farmers.

BP’s website has the obligatory environmental and society sections, giving the impression of their planetary concern. But look closely at BP’s statement on sustainability:

At BP we define sustainability as the capacity to endure as a group, by:

• Renewing assets
• Creating and delivering better products and services that meet the evolving needs of society
• Attracting successive generations of employees
• Contributing to a sustainable environment
• Retaining the trust and support of our customers, shareholders and the communities in which we operate.

Hardly the rhetoric of a company committed to advancing social and environmental health through its company operations. What it tells me is BP cares most about staying in business — “to endure as a group.” The closest it comes to an environmental promise — “contributing to a sustainable environment” — is so vague as to be laughable.

BP’s two-faced approach should not be dismissed as just another instance of greenwashing. It feels more insidious, a cleverly disguised deceit on a global scale. Its incessant search for oil — even in 5,000-foot waters in the Gulf of Mexico — puts BP anywhere but “beyond petroleum.” In the name of “energy security,” BP is willing to risk the kind of ecological calamity now threatening the Gulf region. That is not a risk a sustainable company takes.

The day BP stops drilling is the day I’ll start listening. Until then, let’s make no mistake about the kind of company BP is.

Sounds like a good reason to never make a promise. Or better yet, good reason to think long and hard before making one.

Countless branding books and consultants describe a brand as a promise. That’s an inside-out view. If I’m on the outside looking at your business, I don’t care whether you make a promise. I care whether you keep it. My guess is millions of Toyota owners feel similarly today about that company’s promise of quality.

Promises have no value until or unless they’re consistently fulfilled. That gets lost among many who make their living in branding, communications and design. I used to be among them. Branding meant communicating a promise and persuading others to pay attention. If I did that well, I was doing my job.

My certainty about all of this gave way as I delved deeper into sustainability and carved out a sustainable branding practice. Everywhere it seemed, marketers were jumping onto the green marketing bandwagon. Meanwhile, consumer complaints of “greenwashing” kept growing as marketers used one hand to paint their companies or products green and the other to cover their eyes to the brown.

Words and deeds

Sustainable branding is not simply marketing communications by another name. It’s aligning what you stand for as a business with what people experience from you. Greenwashing does the opposite: It misaligns words and deeds.

Companies have been saying one thing and doing another forever. What’s changed is the technology and desire to call them out. Social media tools such as Twitter and Facebook and user-generated sites such as Yelp will expose hypocritical businesses in a heartbeat. And nowhere is the B.S. radar on higher alert than when a company speaks of social or environmental responsibility. People may overlook the advertisement that overstates a product’s benefits. But many can’t wait to bust the company that promises — and fails — to do good.

Carefully researched, considered and cultivated, a brand moves a business toward competitive distinction and customer relevance. Unfortunately, most businesses leave brand management to marketing communications. They equate branding with names, logos, taglines, messages, advertising campaigns and a consistent “look & feel.”

Where the buck stops

What our businesses say and how we look matters when separating ourselves as a brand. But not nearly as much as what we do as a business.

Want your brand to stand out from the crowd? Then let your actions do more of the talking. Nothing communicates as convincingly as a company whose employees, culture and operations consistently deliver a distinct, relevant product, service or experience.

This doesn’t happen by accident. It requires a CEO and senior managers who ensure their company walks it talk. Unless your marketing department runs the company, the branding buck must stop with the people who have ultimate authority to motivate, train or cajole everyone to deliver on the company’s core promise.

Stepping onto the path of sustainability makes this more imperative than ever.

When you pledge to build a more sustainable company, it’s like handing a magnifying glass to your customers, employees and other stakeholders and inviting them to inspect your every move. Witness the emergence of greenwashing watchdogs.

Living the brand

The prospect of greater scrutiny frightens some executives. Others say bring it on. They know integrity and accountability have always been hallmarks of great companies. And they don’t fear the added weight of social and environmental responsibility that a commitment to sustainable business practices demand. They’re simply trying to do the right thing.

But even their firms may need help living their brands. That’s why I’ve formed a team of experts in organizational development, sustainability, research, design and storytelling.

I look forward to sharing more about our collaboration soon. But you can be sure we’re clear on one thing: Making a promise is the easy part of branding. It’s the delivery we need to worry about.

Or so it seems.

Look more closely, however, and the picture appears incomplete. Aren’t we forgetting the yang to the yin of change? It’s worth asking, because many of those we hope to influence value stability far more than change.

This yin yang of sustainability came to mind after watching a provocative video presentation by psychologist Jonathan Haidt about the moral roots of liberals and conservatives. His comments were made within the context of politics. I found them equally relevant to my work as a consultant in sustainable branding, where the role of values is crucial.

Liberals and conservatives

Haidt’s research finds that liberals in societies throughout the world share a common attribute of “openness to experience.” They value novelty, diversity, cross-cultural experiences. They’re comfortable with change. I would say some even insist on it.

Conservatives, on the other hand, value attributes such as safety and dependability. They seek order and stability.

“The great conservative insight,” Haidt told his mostly liberal audience, “is that order is really hard to achieve. It’s really precious, and it’s really easy to lose.”

Haidt was referring to civilized societies. He could just as easily have been speaking of business. The bursting economic bubbles and normal ups and downs of daily business make periods of stability precious indeed. As a businessperson, I love stability — and I’m a liberal.

I don’t know anyone who enjoys making decisions in the midst of chaos or disorder. That may be why businesses tend to be conservative organizations. They seek stability so they can reduce the risk of making poor, hurried decisions and increase the likelihood of success.

Resisting change vs. desiring stability

We’ve long been told humans resist change because we fear the unknown. Dealing with and overcoming resistance to change is how we often frame our most pressing business challenges. We all know the frustrations of executives trying to move their employees in new directions or “change agent” employees trying to persuade their reluctant bosses.

One person’s resistance to change, however, is another person’s desire for stability. There’s a difference. Seeking stability doesn’t automatically mean resisting change. Consider, Haidt says, the gods Vishnu the preserver and Shiva the destroyer, two of the three gods in the Hindu trinity (along with Brahma the creator). The worship of stability (Vishnu) and change (Shiva) are foundational in one of the world’s great religions.

In other words, change and stability, far from being enemies, need each other to create a world that’s whole. Or a business in balance.

The liberal narrative

I’d like to think sustainability is an apolitical issue. Still, Haidt’s liberal-conservative characterization helps explain why liberals dominate sustainability gatherings. We love talking about changing the world. It excites us. Gives us purpose. We’re driven to undo all the damage humans and institutions have done to each other and the environment. And we believe our arguments for change are unassailable: How can anyone ignore global warming, decimated ecological systems, the rich-poor divide? Things have to change.

That’s our narrative. And we’ve had some success in spreading its message. More and more businesses are awakening to their social and environmental responsibilities. If Walmart, of all companies, can enjoy acclaim among environmentalists for its sustainability leadership, positive change must indeed be occurring.

Still, the case for sustainability remains a murky work in progress. The disappointing Copenhagen talks proved how divided our world leaders remain on the actions and timetables needed to prevent the worst of climate change (there’s that word again). And despite some high-profile exceptions, business leaders have been slow to see the light of sustainability.

A balanced approach

We’ll reach and influence more people by attending to both sides of the sustainability equation: change and stability. When making the case for sustainability, especially in the realm of business, try speaking less to the need for change and more to the benefits of stability and order.

Demonstrate to executives how the adoption of sustainable business practices lessens the likelihood of disruptive change by creating more resilient organizations. Prove to employees that sustainable practices create a more secure work place. And show customers how your products and services respect their innate desire for reliability and dependability — while doing no harm.

Yes, achieving sustainability requires change. And it produces stability. We’d do well to remember both.

Special thanks to friend Thomas Joseph Doherty for pointing me to Haidt’s video.

My response surprised me. What’s wrong with being associated with a great cause and someone wishing me well? Nothing, of course. It’s just that sustainability is not a cause for me, at least not any longer. And wishing me well made it sound like, well, I’d need all the help I can get.

Sustainability, for me, has evolved into a mindset, a practice, a method of operating a company, a basis for business purpose and competitive distinction. Defeating poverty is a great cause. Pursuing sustainability is simply smart business.

The work of idealists and activists

I’m guessing many in business still think of sustainability, to the degree they think of it at all, as the work of idealists and ideologues. You know, those people whose ardent support for their cause make them appear a tad unreliable as business executives or consultants.

Sustainability in business is growing in awareness and practice. But the breadth and depth of adoption is not nearly as great as it needs to be. I worry the association of sustainability with environmental or social activism deters many in business from embracing it.

Causes are the perceived stock-in-trade of nonprofits, governments, NGOs and religious institutions. Businesses trade in products and services. Unless business leaders can draw a direct line from sustainability to greater success in selling their goods and services (and, fortunately, growing numbers can and have), they will leave sustainability to the green crusaders.

Causes tend to be long-term, sometimes never-ending, in nature: civil rights, smoking prevention, food safety, pollution control, wetland conservation, climate change. Modern business, perhaps to its detriment, dwells in the short term. For lots of reasons, only about half of businesses are still around five years after their founding.

Obsessing over health of business, not planet

As someone who started an employee-based business and operated it for more than 13 years, I don’t believe most owners or executives lose sleep over the health of the planet. They do, however, obsess over the health of their companies.

And it’s in that obsession where they must discover sustainability as the source for business wellbeing. Not a cause for which they have precious little time or resources to entertain. But rather a method of organizing and operating that improves their chances of keeping the doors open, bills paid, employees, customers and shareholders satisfied, and competitors at bay.

Prominent sustainability consultants Bob Willard and Peter Senge speak of the five stages and drivers of sustainability in business. Starting at a place of non-compliance with environmental standards and regulations, a company moves into the second stage of compliance in response to regulatory demand and public pressure. Stage 3 is moving beyond compliance to seeing the possibilities for ongoing cost reductions and reputation or brand enhancement. The next stage is making sustainability an integrated strategy for creating business opportunity and managing risk. The fifth stage is a mission-driven business that places sustainability at the core of its values.

Except perhaps at Stage 5, the motivation isn’t saving the planet. Businesses are driven by the desire to be in compliance, make or save money and become more competitive. They need to know they can achieve these and other goals by becoming more sustainable. That’s cause enough for them.