What Your Employees Know About Green Innovation That You Don’t

While working on a global launch of a green household product, I had the opportunity to speak to the project chemist about the product’s truly revolutionary ingredients.

“It’s incredible that you could come up stuff like this – it’s so much less harmful for the planet, and works as well as the old stuff. How long did it take to develop it?” I asked.

He answered nonchalantly, “Oh, we’ve actually had this stuff for years. It’s nothing new.”

“So why didn’t you introduce it years ago?” I asked.

With a shrug of his shoulders, he said “Because nobody asked us.”

A simple statement. But pure gold to any business leader looking for green innovation and employee motivation.

Engagement is the mot du jour these days. It’s being pitched as a new religion, buoyed by the social media wave. Behind all the hype, however, is a remarkably simple concept. If you need help, ask.

Jeremy Osborn is an entrepreneur from Vancouver, Canada. His company – Good Energy Research – builds software that helps corporations deepen engagement with staff, customers, and the general public.

His tool, in his own words, “closes the loop between top-down decision making and grassroots innovation.” And it seems to be getting the attention of green innovators – Osborn’s software is about to launch as the behavior change component of a workplace greening campaign run by the David Suzuki Foundation.

Worker engagement can be more than an idea pipeline for getting green innovation. When done properly, it can create tremendous goodwill among your staff, which ripples outward to create wonderful PR.

For example, Wal-Mart’s well-publicized greening had employee engagement as one of its central tenets. By introducing the concept of Personal Sustainability Pledges (or PSPs), Wal-Mart engaged staffers to create their own health or sustainability initiatives. In the words of the New York Times, “…the initiative could improve employee morale, and therefore productivity; reduce healthcare spending on a workforce with higher rates of heart disease and diabetes than the general public; and improve Wal-Mart’s reputation with the image-conscious consumers it is courting with costlier merchandise.”

Companies like Toyota have been tapping shop-floor intelligence for years, listening to employees for inspiration on reducing waste, reducing energy and increasing efficiency. The company’s much-praised lean production system incorporates constant feedback loops to ensure any wasteful activity on the shop floor is spotted and corrected quickly.

So where does this leave the CEO who is looking to introduce green innovation into their company?

The simple answer: ask your staff.

And while you’re touring the shop floor getting a feel for their sustainability priorities, remember they need your help and encouragement. That means management infrastructure that supports sustainability (aka a clear vision, goals and metrics), and a rewards and recognition program to support and reinforce sustainability thinking.

From experience, you also need to give the initiative project management structure, to prevent it from being cynically written off by employees as this week’s fad.

What should happen (and is happening in more and more innovative corporations) is that your green innovation pipeline will slowly begin to fill with ideas from your staff. When these ideas are recognized and implemented, that slow flow will become a river of ideas.

You’ll win by gleaning incredible thinking, higher employee motivation, and a wonderful PR tool.

And to think. All you had to do was ask.