A Guide to Workplace Climate Diplomacy

Become an agent of change by encouraging your employer to take climate action and hold them accountable.

Corporations have had free reign to destroy the planet with their products, carbon footprint and indirect emissions. The times are changing and corporations have to adhere to newer, stricter rules for climate neutrality. Companies can no longer get away with greenwashing as easily as they used to. Climate change is now another business aspect that organisations must learn to manoeuvre to embody sustainable business practices. Though climate policies are essential to the operational integrity of businesses, they are not taken nearly as seriously as they should be. These policies tend to be ineffective due to their framing, or there is no accountability mechanism to ensure that the right steps are being taken. As an employee, you can urge your employer to take more steps towards climate neutrality. So how do you navigate the climate and environmental policies in your workplace?

Assessing your workplace’s climate and environmental policies

Assessing your workplace’s climate and environmental policies is an essential step towards promoting sustainability and climate action. This can be done with the following steps:

1. Review existing policies

One of the foremost things you can do is review your company’s existing policies. You should begin by gathering any climate-related policies in your organisation. This includes ESG reports, carbon emissions profiles, sustainability initiatives, and any other document related to environmental practices.

2. Evaluate effectiveness

After reviewing the policies in place, you can evaluate the effectiveness of these policies. One way to measure effectiveness is by studying how well the intended outcomes of a policy were met. Policy goals may include sustainable energy consumption, lower emissions, waste management, water recycling, et cetera. You can start by finding out whether the targets for these goals have been met by their target dates. If the targets haven’t been met, you can delve deeper into reasons behind the failure of goal achievement.

3. Regulatory Compliance

After you’ve reviewed the policies and their effectiveness, it is an important step to make sure that those policies align with your regional environmental regulations and standards. Non-compliance can result in legal issues and damage to the organisation's reputation. There are regulations such as national level policies related to emissions and pollution standards, but there are international frameworks for ESG that can be adopted to adhere to stricter environmental performance. Compliance with ESG rules can have many benefits to a company such as attracting more investments.

4. Monitoring Policy Implementation

Monitoring policy implementation is key to measure policy effectiveness. Monitoring reports provide rich insights into why a certain policy was successful or not. Establishing clear metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) with date targets to measure progress helps keep track of the progress. You must regularly track and report on energy savings, waste reduction, emissions reductions, and other relevant metrics to ensure that the stakeholders involved are made aware of the growth of such initiatives.

Managing Accountability

Initiatives that do not have a direct impact on an employee's work, face challenges in creating a chain of command and maintaining accurate records. In such cases, interpersonal skills play a vital role in implementing policies. Establishing reporting mechanisms and periodic reviews to hold individuals and teams accountable for meeting specific targets is therefore essential. This fosters a culture of responsibility and ensures that climate and environmental policies are not only introduced but also actively followed and upheld throughout the organisation.

1. Managing collaboration

Collaborating effectively at various levels is a challenge, but if implemented correctly can have a massive impact on the company’s operations. You must engage with colleagues from various departments and levels within the organisation. Form cross-functional teams dedicated to addressing specific sustainability challenges. For example, creating a team to reduce the use of plastic in the workplace. You can also host regular workshops or training sessions that facilitate knowledge-sharing and collaboration among departments. These workshops can focus on sustainability best practices and their relevance to each department's role.

2. Creating Allies Through Conversations

Engaging in meaningful conversations can be a powerful tool for advancing climate and environmental initiatives offline. While it certainly is a serious issue that affects our lives daily, transforming it from an elitist concept into a topic for everyday discussions can be highly effective. By making it a common conversation at coffee breaks and lunch time, we can make this complex issue more accessible and easily understood by a broader audience. Encouraging open dialogues and debates at workplaces, company conferences and other fora can foster a sense of shared responsibility and encourage more employees and managers to become allies.

What if there are no climate policies in place?

In cases where your workplace lacks climate and environmental policies, it's an opportunity to take the lead. You must understand the challenges and benefits of introducing such policies, and back them with facts and to-the-point research. You have to present your case with facts that are both in the interest of the company and the environment by demonstrating how these policies could positively affect the company’s reputation while simultaneously cutting costs, mitigating climate-related risks, and attracting climate-conscious customers. For example, the vegan beauty market is on the rise—projected to reach $21.4 billion by 2027. A majority of these companies did not begin as vegan brands but saw the change in consumer climate and acclimated to it to produce higher quality products that have a high-value market.

References

Climate Business | Business Climate, Harvard Business Review, October 2007 https://hbr.org/2007/10/climate-business-_-business-climate

Goldberg, M. H., Maibach, E., & Leiserowitz, A. (2019). Discussing global warming leads to greater acceptance of climate science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 116(30), 14804-14805. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1906589116