A hugely untapped resource

Personal values are a hugely untapped resource which needs to be released both to uncover an untapped source of creativity and employee motivation, and to successfully implement sustainability initiatives:

1. Employee motivation: Employees work better for organisations whose values they share. They are more motivated, more creative and deliver better results for their organisations.
2. Integration of sustainability: In most organisations who take sustainability seriously, it is relatively straightforward to develop the right strategies and processes required to integrate sustainability within the organisation. The most common barrier is getting sustained buy-in from middle management. Given the pressures they are under, managers understandably don’t prioritise the latest sustainability initiative from the corporate centre and quite often see these initiatives as barriers to ‘getting the job done’.

Generate enthusiasm

To achieve real change, it just isn’t enough to have the right sustainability strategy, structures, processes and indicators in place. You also need to generate enthusiasm for the change from those who will be responsible for delivering it. This is where personal values come in:

The sustainability agenda and the things it stands for are often closely aligned with our personal values as individuals, either because we have a close personal connection with the issues at stake or because we are growing increasingly concerned with some of the longer term risks.

Integrate sustainability into their roles

We have developed a programme that will help you explore how, by tapping into many emoloyees’ personal affinity with the sustainability agenda, you can empower and motivate them to integrate sustainability into their roles in a way that helps them achieve your corporate objectives, empower them by applying their personal values in the workplace and improve the corporation’s integration of sustainability.

The programme aims to answer the following questions:

• Are the values of your organisation and those of its employees aligned?
• How can managers and staff be empowered to integrate their values within the workplace?
• How can such an intangible and subjective aspect take root in the ‘manage what you can measure’ corporate environment?
• What does values-driven leadership entail?
• How does a leader aggregate different value sets to create a coherent and inclusive corporate value set?