3 employee-focused tactics for advancing sustainability goals

This article is sponsored by Sodexo.

Employees form the backbone of most organizations — and what they do or don’t do affects progress toward sustainability milestones. Engaging employees on sustainability is an opportunity that organizations must embrace if they hope to succeed with sustainability goals and climate-conscious initiatives. 

Organizations of all sizes can bridge the gap between corporate goals and individual actions by recognizing the power employees hold and providing them with the tools and motivation to drive sustainability initiatives forward. 

At Sodexo, we have seen this firsthand — that the everyday actions of our frontline employees have accelerated our success and ability to meet sustainability targets. From preventing waste to eliminating nonessential packaging and sourcing responsibly, we aim to integrate environmental and corporate responsibility across the culture of the company and are committed to achieving our ambition of reducing carbon emissions by 34 percent by 2025.

Here are three effective ways you can help your workers to become sustainability champions: 

1. Make sustainability everyone’s job

When employees feel their daily obligations to their managers and their teams are piling onto their existing work, they’re less motivated to complete additional tasks that help the company overall. Sodexo seeks to design programs and trainings for frontline and salaried workers where sustainability isn’t treated as a separate initiative. Sustainable efforts that contribute to the company’s annual goals are baked into everything from our choice of produce suppliers to best practices for cutting vegetables to handling food waste. 

When frontline food service employees join us at Sodexo, our goal is to train them from day one on how we’re reducing our carbon footprint and how to track food waste, whether it’s generated in the kitchen or after a meal. This goal is part of our Better Tomorrow commitment to training 100 percent of general managers on sustainable practices. At one of our client’s sites, a worker tasked with slicing the tops off tomatoes weighed the resulting waste and found more than $25 of wasted food. Now, employees in that position are trained to use a corer or similar tool to remove the tough stem without throwing away edible parts of the fruit. 

Another popular initiative among employees at Sodexo is GOALympics, an annual contest among site teams, which rewards innovation in the spirit of food waste reduction. Teams record hundreds of thousands of pounds of food waste and hundreds of metric tons of carbon emissions that are avoided all while enjoying a bit of the friendly competition.

Sodexo’s line managers regularly keep an eye on food waste and adjust the menu based on consumer preferences. After noticing that students at a campus cafeteria were throwing away hamburger buns to meet their dietary preferences, a Sodexo line manager participating in Sodexo’s Plate Waste program saw the problem and addressed it by adjusting the menu to offer patties without the buns to cut down on wasted food. One of the winners, Patient Services Manager Stacy Daedelow, was chosen for her proposal to repurpose surplus food for employees, especially those experiencing food insecurity, to enjoy at home. Her idea grew from her personal experience of struggling to support her family while seeing chicken breasts thrown out at her part-time food services job. She asked for and received permission to take the leftovers home instead, and it made a positive impact on her well-being and her family’s health.

The takeaway: Frontline employees are the eyes and ears of your organization, and they are uniquely positioned to identify areas where sustainability practices can be inserted or optimized. Whether it’s streamlining waste management processes, implementing energy-saving initiatives or sourcing more sustainable materials, employees motivated to make positive change have the power to put it in motion.

2. Offer a ‘new normal’

Understanding consumer behavior and preferences is key to empowering employees to promote sustainability in food choices. In the U.S., where meat and dairy consumption is high, menu options labeled “vegan” or “vegetarian” can seem less appealing. But according to Sodexo’s Sustainable Food Barometer findings, consumers are still interested in sustainable eating. Nearly 50 percent of U.S. respondents in the 2023 study say they want to eat more sustainably at work than at home.

But a lack of knowledge about sustainable options or how to prepare sustainable meals can become barriers. Sodexo’s employees are shifting that perspective by offering plant-based options as the default, such as barista-crafted drinks with oat milk unless a customer specifically requests dairy milk. By prioritizing a plant-based option, our frontline employees actively promote sustainable eating habits and customers don’t lose out on taste or satisfaction. Defaults make sustainable choices easy for consumers, enabling them to act to address climate change.

Sodexo has partnered with the Humane Society of the United States on myriad initiatives, one of which is to provide plant-based cooking training for our chefs. We’ve developed more than 350 tantalizing plant-based menu items and are targeted to offer 33 percent plant-based menus by 2025. Enhancing our team’s understanding of the positive climate impact of plant-based eating and their skills in preparing dishes will support the delivery of craveable plant-based meals and help bridge the gap between consumer habits and sustainable practices.

The takeaway: To help employees in consumer-facing roles gain additional understanding and affinity toward plant-based menu items, encourage them to taste the dish and then take turns describing them. Focusing on flavors, ingredients and the uniqueness of a dish empowers them to focus on the enticing aspects of the food instead of calling out the fact it is plant-based or describing what it may be missing. 

3. Make it personal

Connecting your sustainability initiatives to personal experiences and concerns can significantly resonate with employees. While corporate pledges to address climate change may seem distant, highlighting local environmental issues or personal anecdotes can make sustainability as a concept more relatable.

Employees living in a coastal area prone to hurricanes or knowing a family member who lost their home to a wildfire, may have a deep personal understanding of the urgent need to address climate change. Companies can tap into a powerful source of motivation and engagement by acknowledging these personal connections and inviting employees to share their stories.

Recently, Sodexo’s leadership challenged employees around the world to present their best sustainability ideas through the Innov’Challenge, an engagement program aligned with the company’s corporate social responsibility goals. Employees submitted ideas across four categories, including emissions and resources, waste reduction, food and nutrition. Seven regional winners were chosen to travel to Sodexo’s global headquarters in Paris to pitch their ideas to senior leadership and received support to scale and implement their ideas.

As these examples illustrate, instead of being interpreted as abstract concepts or remote corporate goals, your sustainability efforts can become tangible actions aimed at addressing immediate and pressing challenges your workers and communities face. Companies can harness their collective expertise to drive continuous improvement in sustainability practices by actively seeking front-line employees’ insights and helping them become advocates for the greater good. Being part of a team effort and sharing common goals also contributes to a positive internal culture, increasing employee engagement and encouraging retention.

Reframing for success

In situations where sustainability isn’t a motivating factor, your employees can still help your company meet its goals as well as consumer needs. Reframing a cost-saving or waste-reducing effort as something that would bring value to your clients, or help their team reach operational excellence, can engage employees who don’t have sustainability top of mind.

Empowering your employees to champion sustainability practices within your organization isn’t just about having eco-friendly initiatives, but fostering a culture where sustainability becomes ingrained in everyday operations and personal values. Through strategies such as offering sustainable options as the default choice, connecting sustainability efforts to personal experiences and integrating sustainability into job roles seamlessly, companies such as Sodexo are leading the way in creating impactful change.