How to engage your team in sustainability | New Zealand

How do you get your team engaged with your sustainability initiatives?

Getting buy-in from your team on sustainability, ESG, or B Corp is one of the most common challenges organisations face. You can have the strategy - but if it's carried by just one or two people, it won't be as successful as if your entire organisation is on board.

The reality is that sustainability sits at the hardest end of the change spectrum. Getting your team properly engaged with environmental or social sustainability initiatives usually requires a culture change - which has one of the lowest success rates of any organisational change initiative (compared to restructures, technology change etc.) - and yet it's exactly what embedding sustainability requires.

If you've ever sent a company-wide email about a new initiative and watched it disappear into the void, run a training session that didn't stick, or found yourself carrying the load while colleagues nod politely and return to business as usual - you're not alone. These are symptoms of a deeper challenge: Most sustainability communication appeals only to the rational brain (logic), when research shows that knowledge alone has the weakest effect on behaviour change.

This interactive 2-hour workshop gives you a practical framework for shifting that. Using a model drawn from behavioural science - you'll explore how to work with three different levers of change: The rational brain (which needs direction), the emotional brain (which needs motivation), and the environment people operate in (which needs to make sustainable choices easy) in order to create lasting sustainability change in your organisation.

Why this approach works

The research is clear: Habits, access, and social support have far greater impact on behaviour change than information or even incentives. Yet most sustainability engagement strategies rely heavily on communication and training - the weakest levers available.

This workshop flips that approach. Drawing on behavioural science research and the facilitator's 25+ years of hands-on experience designing and delivering engagement programmes across industries, you'll learn why building habits has almost double the impact of providing information, why removing barriers is nearly five times more effective than training, and why peer influence consistently outperforms top-down mandates. You'll also explore why some common approaches - including some you're probably using right now - actually backfire.

What you'll cover

• Why sustainability engagement fails - and the common pitfalls to avoid

• How to communicate the right message to the right people in the right way

• How to build internal momentum without burning out your champions

• Practical tools for removing barriers and making sustainable choices the easy ones

What to expect

A hands-on session with group work, breakout discussions, and practical templates you can use straight away.

You'll leave with:

• A clear framework for diagnosing where your engagement efforts are falling short

• Practical techniques for each of the three levers of change

• Ideas for activities you can run with your own team

• Access to workshop slides and supporting resources and templates

This is an interactive session - come ready to participate, share your challenges, and work on real scenarios.

Who it's for

Sustainability leads, B Keepers, managers leading internal change, internal comms teams, and executive teams - anyone trying to get their organisation on board with sustainability and ready to move from strategy to culture.