It’s been easy to pooh-pooh employee engagement as a soft, feel-good endeavor. You know: an annual Earth Day fair, a company campaign to recycle paper or use reusable mugs, or to carpool or take public transportation or bike whenever possible. Hardly the stuff from which profits and productivity are derived. And so employee engagement has been thought of as a nice-to-do activity to demonstrate a company’s concern, if not commitment, for the environment.

That’s changing.

So begins Joel Makower’s introduction to a new partnership between GreenBiz.com and the National Environmental Education Foundation (NEEF) that aims to transform corporate culture with sustainable practices. (Read the entire post, “Employee Engagement: This Time It’s Serious,” here.)

More on all of this soon… but first, what is NEEF?

"Staffers at NEEF practice what they preach -- the nonprofit's car is a Prius" -- Washingtonian mag

We were delighted to chat recently with NEEF president Diane Wood. Turns out NEEF is a group of 26 people in Washington who advance environmental education nationwide across a broad spectrum:

We work with teachers, pediatricians, public land managers. We collaborate with broadcast meteorologists, because when you think about it, they’re teaching science all the time. We developed Earth Gauge to support them. We have more than 200 meteorologists reaching up to 240 million households. At the end of the day people will change behavior when a trusted friend does so, and who is more trusted than your meteorologist?

See if your go-to meteorologist is on-board here.

And we work with business managers and corporate executives…. A few years ago we decided to learn from companies themselves.

NEEF formed a group of corporations, 20 or so – Cisco, Lockheed Martin, Ikea, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft among them  – and created webinars. “It was essentially a safe space to share lessons learned, Diane says. “We made case studies from the highlights. Bottom line: employee engagement was the number one most effective thing a company could do to succeed on sustainable priorities.”

NEEF’s new white paper was released this week: “The report, ‘Toward Engagement 2.0: Creating a More Sustainable Company through Employee Engagement,’ examines how companies are going from primarily ad hoc and self-organized employee engagement efforts, to providing more organizational support and structure for environmental and sustainability education,” Diane says.

Here is the five-step process, detailed in the report, for establishing a culture of sustainability in a company:

1. Permit: granting employees permission to become involved in sustainability initiatives.

2. Educate & engage: providing employees educational materials and engaging them in sustainability activities.

3. Act: empowering employees to take action at work, as well as at home and in their community.

4. Embed: making sustainability a regular part of their organizations, including their human resource processes, operations, product or service innovation & development, and beyond.

5. Evaluate: measuring and evaluating employee engagement efforts to gauge impact, support continued integration into company culture and inform future employee engagement efforts.

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Join NEEF’s National Public Lands Day on Saturday, 9/24 — not sure where the closest site is? Click here to find it. (There were 1,908 sites listed at this posting) Follow @NationalLandsDay and join them on Facebook: /nationalpubliclandsday. Find NEEF on Facebook and follow them @neefusa.

We’ll focus more on GreenBiz soon; for now you might like to sign up for their newsletter.