Sustainability is a critical component of a company’s long-term success and everyone has a role to play in fostering a sustainable workplace. Building this begins with adopting a shared mindset, setting clear goals, and empowering each team member to advocate for positive change.

A sustainable mindset helps individuals view their daily actions and systems through a pragmatic lens. This perspective recognizes that everything is interconnected — connections that, once revealed, can help identify practical solutions/opportunities for positive impacts. A shared mindset is the foundation of meaningful organizational change, since it creates a shared language and value set, empowering employees to ask important questions, advocate for solutions, and collaborate to create positive change.

To have meaningful outcomes, companies need to implement actions into their short- and long-term goals that feasibly embody the “best practices” of sustainability. This requires prior planning, internal support, and the regular review/monitoring of associated initiatives. Many valuable frameworks exist to understand a company’s environmental impact, including Scope 1, 2, and 3 emissions, the “Triple Bottom Line” (TBL), and “Environmental Social Governance” (ESG).

Regardless of title or position, every team member can help create positive changes in their workplace. This can be anything from carpooling to launching a new corporate volunteering program. When recommending a new policy or initiative, it’s important to have a constructive attitude, come prepared with relevant data, and emphasize the alignment between sustainable initiatives and company goals. For example, if you’re recommending that your office go paperless, provide data comparing your company’s annual spending on printing supplies to cloud storage costs. Working collaboratively with like-minded colleagues can also help identify opportunities and gaps which one individual may not have recognized alone. To encourage this kind of collaboration, leaders should promote frequent dialogue about sustainability goals, provide a variety of platforms for sharing ideas, and empower all team members to contribute to these discussions.

A sustainable workplace needs a commitment from all members of an organization. By fostering a shared mindset, setting clear goals, and empowering all stakeholders, businesses can have a strong basis for their environmental impact. For relevant strategies and programs to build upon that foundation, please explore the other articles in this category.