Many of us wish we could work for companies that prioritize sustainability. And some of that credit goes to the lowly cubicle.
“You’ve gone through this generation that lived in cubicles,” says Cameron Sinclair, cofounder of Architecture for Humanity Inc., a nonprofit organization that brings professional design services to communities in need. Cubicles were designed to create open and accessible workspaces, but many office workers dislike, as Sinclair puts it, “being holed away in a five-foot-high, fabric-panel square without any view of the world.” Employees want to be able to look out, both literally and metaphorically. In regard to the latter, that translates into them wanting companies to consider sustainability.
It’s not just companies like Sinclair’s that are alert to these possibilities. A recent survey found that 57% of private sector companies expect their employees’ interest in sustainability to affect their organizations. Thirty-seven percent already highlight sustainability initiatives in recruiting. And 43% have their employees designing products or processes for reuse or recycling.
Managers care about sustainability in large part because it helps with hiring. Among the companies surveyed, 35% of respondents said that improving sustainability-related communications would most benefit their organization’s relationships with consumers. Sixteen percent of the companies were also concerned about their relationship with employees.
“People are hungry for the opportunity to work professionally in a way that is consistent with building a sustainable world instead of one that undermines it,” says John Sterman, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management and director of MIT’s System Dynamics Group. “The idea that ‘I’m going to work in a corporation that may have the impact of further degrading the capacity of the planet to support life and then in my spare time I’m going to use the money that I’ve made to do good deeds’-- that just doesn’t cut it for people anymore. You can’t have that kind of dissonance.”
The risk of asking people to care is that “you have to then walk the talk,” says Richard Locke, a codeveloper of MIT’s Laboratory for Sustainable Business and an MIT Sloan School deputy dean and professor. “If you start selling [sustainability], people are going to check on you.” Jeffrey Hollender, cofounder and executive chairperson of home products company Seventh Generation Inc., says the inherent challenge in sustainability is how it raises the bar. “If you disclose nine things but forget to disclose the tenth, there is a tremendous feeling of being let down,” he says. “The pressure that you have to exert internally to maintain those standards and provide that disclosure is incredibly high. And you have to be very willing to admit you’re wrong when you fall short of those expectations. We have experienced both this wonderful exponential support, but we’ve also experienced tremendous disappointment and anger when we fall short of those expectations.”
The biggest challenge organizations will face is educating everyone sufficiently on the issue. Twenty-three percent of survey respondents cited outdated perspectives on sustainability as their largest roadblock. John Hofmeister found this to be the case when he was president of Shell Oil Co. “One of the biggest obstacles is educating everyone to come to a fairly comfortable level of knowledge and understanding of what it’s all about,” he says.
This article is adapted from “Does Sustainability Change the Talent Equation?” by Leslie Brokaw, which appeared in the Fall 2009 issue of MIT Sloan Management Review. The complete article is available at http://sloanreview.mit.edu/smr/.