Why candidates need your business to take climate action

Posted by HR GO Recruitment on 10 Jan 2020

• Facebook
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• email

Given the climate crisis facing the planet, you’ll already know your businesses needs to do more to reduce its carbon footprint.  

Even the smallest business has an environmental impact - whether that’s through the use of energy or water, office supplies, paper waste or emissions from heating and cooling systems.  

There’s now a recruitment case to be made, too. With public awareness growing with every extreme weather event or natural disaster, increasing numbers of employees are calling for their bosses to take more climate action.  

So how much your organisation works to actively reduce its carbon footprint is now playing more of a factor in whether candidates come and work for you - and ultimately become loyal, long-term productive members of staff.  

Candidates crave greener employers 

There’s plenty of recent research to show that candidates prefer to join environmentally-friendly companies. And this trend is particularly growing among people born in the 1980s onwards, like Millennials and Gen Z.  

According to one particular survey of 1,000 US workers, nearly 40% of Millennials say they’ve chosen a job in the past because that employer had a better sustainability agenda compared to another company.   

Those percentages are lower in older respondents. Only a quarter of Gen X employees (born between 1965 and 1977), and 17% of baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) said the same. 

And nearly half of respondents (including three quarters of Millennials) would take a pay cut to work at an environmentally responsible company. Over 10% of workers said they’d accept up to $10,000 less (currently around £7,600).  

When it comes to retaining staff, almost 70% said that a company needed to have a strong sustainability plan for them to stay as an employee for the long term. And around 30% have left a company because it didn’t have a corporate sustainability agenda.  

Socially responsible companies win  

There’s a solid business case for employers to commit to minimise their environmental impact. That’s not just because customers are asking more questions about what businesses they use are doing, and are using their spending power to demand change.   

But businesses that focus on minimising their environmental impact also save money, whether that’s because of reducing waste, going paperless or switching to renewable energy.  

At HR GO, where we work with candidates to find the next role that suits them, we see that people increasingly look for employers that align with their personal values and goals.   

It’s clear that younger employees in particular need to know that their employer is taking an active role in tackling the climate emergency.  

And clearly when it comes to the crisis facing the planet, they want to work somewhere where sustainability is baked into the fabric of the company.
 
So aiming for a more climate-positive business environment isn’t just good for the planet. It will also boost your employer brand and your bottom line.  

More information  

Find more on how your business can reduce its impact on the environment, here