Finding Your Green Matzo Ball – Stirring Sustainability into the Company Soup

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Ever been to the offices of a company with a major corporate sustainability initiative (or at least a major green marketing initiative), where from the outside you’d assume that the workers have blood as green as Prince Baron (Timothy Dalton) in Flash Gordon? 

And then you get there and you’re offered a half-pint water bottle – taken from a display stack of a thousand – and offered a seat under the halogen heatlamps of the conference room? Lunch creates its own private landfill and the ventilation is so poor you find yourself drifting off mid-meeting? 

Maybe this is why employees’ faith that their companies’ are actually doing anything meaningful about the environment is at a new low, as measured by the monthly Green Confidence Index. I’d question my company’s commitment to the environment too if all I saw was a sea of plastic bottles filling the bins – even if we did recycle (check out the Story of the Stuff’s Story of Bottled Water-- a must see if you’re having any doubts).

On the other hand, sustainability campaigns that remain a secret, internally, will have the predictable result of not going anywhere. It’s the same general principal that Dr. Strangelove laments to the Russian Ambassador:

Of course, the whole point of a Doomsday Machine is lost, if you *keep* it a *secret*! Why didn't you tell the world, EH? 

And when you reinforce that silence with clumsy or empty messaging and gestures that suggest the opposite – the wall of bottled water, the space heaters littering the cubes, the single sided printers – you dig yourself further in the hole.

For specific techniques on engaging employees and successfully addressing the social side of environmental initiatives, check out Fostering Sustainable Behavior, a terrific online resource from Doug McKenzie-Mohr, or the Fun Theory from Volkswagon (check out the Piano Stairs first).