How to attract an environmentally conscious workforce

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More environmentally conscious employees want to work for organisations that actively contribute towards improving the environment

Many people understand that organisations' environmental consciousness is important for a sustainable future. Thus, prospective employees are committed to looking for companies that are aligned to their sustainability and environmental goals.

According to a study conducted by the Network for Business Sustainability, employees said that they were drawn to companies that are working actively towards environmental sustainability. In order to appeal to an environmentally-conscious workforce, you have to create a workplace culture that is actively involved in championing and upholding safe environmental practices and standards. Here is how to attract an environmentally-conscious workforce.

Promote recycling

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Recycling is environmentally-friendly because the process uses less water and energy for production.

The first step is to uphold a paperless workplace that avoids wastage of resources. This means transitioning to digital documents, but in areas where hard documents are needed, some of the things you can do include:

• Exploring your available options for using paper made from recycled material
• Cutting down your paper consumption by setting your printing defaults to double-sided printing
• Having recycle bins on hand in the office
• Encouraging your staff to reuse paper

You can also establish a recycling program and engage local manufacturing companies to partner with you and collect any waste materials from your company for recycling. Employees should be encouraged to properly dispose of papers and other materials at designated points to make the collection process easy.

Uphold energy conservation

Conserving energy inside and outside of the workplace is a major step towards being eco-friendly. The more energy you consume in your company, the more energy demand you'll create nationwide and across the globe.

Create policies and procedures that help your employees understand why energy conservation is key to upholding environmental standards. Once they understand the benefits, such as a sustainable future and a clean environment, they will take individual initiatives to conserve energy.

Think about renovating your workplace towards environmentally-friendly concepts. Sustainable renovations are a good place to start from. Carry out insulation and window upgrades that help your workplace to conserve more energy. Properly insulated buildings will require less heating and cooling, and therefore, will consume less energy.

Creating an eco-conscious workplace will attract other like-minded people to your company.

Make green thinking an integral part of your organisation

Take the necessary steps to champion and promote workplace practices that encourage employees to think about the environment. Employees should be included in setting up your company’s environmental vision and mission.

Engage employees actively and let them share ideas on how your organisation can go green and be more environmentally conscious. This helps them feel part and puzzle of the agenda and therefore actively work to achieve the goals.

Additionally, you could put in measures to encourage environmentally-conscious practices in your company with employee reward programs.

Incorporate green compensation and incentives

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Potential talents would definitely be interested in working for a company that rewards its employees for being eco-conscious. The HR department can implement a system that offers financial as well as non-financial rewards to employees for their environmental conservation efforts. Doing this will attract an environmentally-conscious workforce to your company. Here are some of the ways you can effectively do this:

• Promote monthly green challenges for your employees. Here at Airswift, during our annual Earth Week, we encourage our employees to educate our surrounding communities about environmental issues and how climate change impacts us. We also do our best to equip our teams with skills and knowledge for environmental conservation.
• Provide showers for employees who cycle to work
• Reward notable environmentally conscious employees with gift cards and other promotions.

Example: Earth Week

Every year, we at Airswift hold our annual Earth Week, a week-long event that coincides with Earth Day.

During Earth Week, we aim to promote and support our commitment to sustainability
in the following ways:

• Promoting values and behaviors that address environmental degradation and climate change in an inclusive and participatory setting
• Empowering ourselves and our communities with the skills necessary to take action to help fight climate change
• Maintaining new habits and remembering that even the smallest actions can have a major impact

Each Earth Week, we pledge a ‘donation’ of hours from the global working week towards volunteering and education. In 2021, our people pledged to contribute 600 hours towards achieving our goals and over-achieved on this, donating a total of 1,700 hours.

Download the ESG report

To understand more about our plans to contribute to a more sustainable future, download our ESG report.