How to be a greener employee in an unsustainable workplace

Ask about your company’s CSR policy

Though in no place is it writ into federal law that companies must have a transparent strategy for social accountability, CSR or ‘corporate social responsibility’, is a form of soft law. It’s seen as best practice for all legitimate firms and businesses to have a CSR policy in order to avoid transnational tort liability and a bad reputation.

Examples of CSR initiatives would be internal policies such as improving labour practices, reducing their product’s overall carbon footprint, embracing fair trade, offsetting emissions from work related travel or exports, or engaging in charitable giving and volunteer efforts within local communities.

As a rule, big companies generally have CSR commitments on their website, and at the very least it should be available for employees to review. By asking your line managers to review the CSR you’re guaranteed a win/win – either you find out how your company is thinking about sustainability, or your employer is politely reminded that they’re in serious breach of common business practice.

If you do find that your company doesn’t have a CSR business model, suggest that one should be made. There are plenty of templates available that you can point management towards, such as this one, and ex-Facebook Sustainability leader, Bill Weihl, is building a ‘Climate Voice’ movement here.

Sow the right seeds in company discourse

You don’t need to be the loudest in the room to make the biggest impact. Sometimes, the best environmental advocacy is a few well-placed comments.

When new initiatives, products, or projects are introduced in company meetings, simply asking about their carbon impact can be incredibly valuable. If your company has no in-built sustainability department, these questions might have been overlooked.

Moreover, it’s entirely possible that by breaking the climate discourse barrier you’ll encourage colleagues to think differently too. Often those who didn’t grow up surrounded by climate stats are ignorant rather than malicious and are actually looking for Gen Z guidance on how to be woke in this new, scary world.

‘Simply bringing up “could we reduce our carbon emissions at all?” in meetings on staff get-aways, product design, supply chains, or simply moving offices, does NOT have to be pushy and can suddenly switch the group consciousness to reduce tons of CO2 emissions’, says Kathleen Benson, Co-Founder of the You Change Earth project.

Regardless of whether your company operates in the primary or secondary sector, chances are at some point it involves itself with other businesses, either as partners, or as a cog in a production line. One great way of ensuring an ethical portfolio is by certifying your business in bed with other responsible conglomerates. If your bosses are considering switching suppliers, distributors, mergers, or getting involved with a new business partner in any way, blemishes on their human or environmental justice records should be aired in a public forum. And, to ensure you’re a solution-oriented employee, do your own research into ethical alternatives you could suggest.

Once you’ve introduce the concept of a corporate climate footprint to the office, the cat’s out of the bag. The objective is to prompt potentially willing yet impotent colleagues into thinking about corporate ethics the way you do. The more it’s on their employee’s minds, the more pressure employers feel to cave to common consensus. You can stage your own quiet coup d’état.

Form an environmental committee, but keep it low key

If you’re anything like me, the idea of going around asking people to join your new green group feels a bit cringey, or potentially cliquey. But there are ways of going about it that aren’t overtly stratifying.

A great way to start is by finding out if anyone you work with lives in your area, or on your route in. Carpooling is socially responsible, and, again, it’s all about getting the cognitive ball rolling regarding the ease of reducing your carbon footprint (also, you’ve landed yourself a captive audience to casually bring up any potential climate sins you’ve identified in your shared workplace).

Once you have identified others who might be interested in pivoting your employers towards greener practices, they’ll likely be happy to help research climate solutions for your office. It’s easier to approach governing bodies about energy use if you have cheap, local solutions to offer, but doing this for all sectors of sustainable evolution is a daunting task for one person. Asking your colleagues to do even a small amount of investigation will likely have a big impact on them – often, people are only notionally aware of their carbon footprint and can only be shaken into action with stark statistics – and having backup is empowering when speaking out.

It’s no coincidence that the world’s greenest office building is in The Netherlands. In Dutch, there’s a  novel term, ‘nieuw werken’, that, loosely translated, means: a new way of thinking about work and work environments. It’s defined as the trend towards designing workspaces and work cultures that nurture and enrich the individual holistically, thus maximising productivity.

The potential end of businesses as stuffy, traditional workspaces, even the end of the regular 9-5 model (COVID-19 has showed us that it’s both easy and environmentally efficient to work from home), raises the most fundamental questions about human experience, and we should never doubt our agency as workers regarding the standards we accept. As William Reynolds, another co-founder of YouChangeEarth, memorably told me as I prepared this article, ‘…a few employees as advocates often have more power than thousands of customers to get management to pay attention to the climate.’

It’s time that our morals as well as our creative energy was decolonised from unsustainable work practices. Those 90,000 hours can work for us, or they can work against us; we should inhabit that period consciously. It’s time for nieuw werken.

Whilst these are just a few simple suggestions on plugging in your environmental conscience at work, the guys over at YouChangeEarth have an extensive ‘Use your voice as an employee’ guide that includes advanced eco ratification ideas like asking for a sustainable retirement plan. In fact, their whole website is a treasure trove of resources and tips for the Gen Z environmentalist – we thoroughly recommend it.