Ep. 12: What Gen Z wants brands to know about communicating sustainability

Companies have always been trying to engage young people on sustainability. But for some reason, this is getting harder. While Millennials were among the first to more heavily weigh social and environmental factors into employment decisions, Gen Z is taking this trend into hyperdrive. Companies hoping to attract and retain the best talent must tell authentic sustainability stories that are capable of persuading young people that they are committed to sustainability.   

In this episode, Mike speaks with Daniel Gonzalez — a recent Master’s graduate from the Yale School of Environment — to get a deeper understanding of what Gen Z is looking for when it comes to sustainability communication, and offer some candid advice to companies looking to do better.

Read the full transcript of the conversation below. You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and YouTube.

TRANSCRIPT

Mike Hower: Hey, everybody. I'm here today with Daniel Gonzalez, a recent graduate of the Yale school of the environment, where he earned a master's in environmental management. The reason I brought Daniel on here today is to talk about communicating sustainability to younger audiences, particularly Gen Z.  

Companies are always looking to engage younger audiences with their sustainability communication. And at first it was Gen Y, which I'm a member of, and now I'm too old. So now it's Gen Z. Now, with Gen Z being one of the most engaged generations around sustainability, companies are struggling to figure out how to effectively communicate social environment impact to them. 

Thank you for being here today, Dan. Should I call you Dan or Daniel?

Daniel Gonzalez: Daniel.

Mike: Daniel. Okay. I'll try. I'll try to use my Spanish. I do speak a decent amount of Spanish. Okay. Daniel.

Daniel: Cool. Yeah, that works. Now the pod is only going to be in Spanish for the next 20 minutes.

Mike: My Spanish is definitely not good enough to have a good podcast conversation, but I could do my best.  Daniel and I were talking before we started recording that I spent a year down in Colombia, where he's from.

Anybody who's ever been to Colombia, good on you because it's a great country. If you haven't been there, you should get there. And today is not to talk about Colombia, but they actually are doing a lot of cool sustainability work down there, especially in transportation in Bogotá. Oh, and Daniel, you're also an EDF Climate Corps alum. I always want to plug that because I think it's a great program and a great network. Diving on in, as I mentioned, I'm a Millennial. When I first started out, everyone was talking about the importance of engaging us on social environmental impact. So now that we're getting older,  the emphasis has moved to Gen Z and I guess was it Gen Alpha is after you. So, what makes Gen Z different when it comes to connecting with its members on corporate sustainability that might be different from maybe my generation? 

Daniel: The first thing I'd want to say is, like, I'm on that cusp between Millennial and Gen Z. I am Gen Z,  but, early Gen Z. So, there's the Gen Z that — they're very young in my eyes — and I have, like, were not born with TikTok, but, like, have experienced TikTok in a way that I didn't. Where mostly, you know, I've experienced it through Instagram, right?

And another important or funny thing is that a lot of the times when we think about generations, we also talk about the social media that they grew up with. And that's a way that we've bucketed people. , but there's so much more obviously than just the social media. So things I think about for Gen Z as a generalization, because we're all different and oh, that's another caveat.

But the reality is a lot of Gen Z won't work for a company whose values don't align with their own. And that's just point blank period. That's it. And so if your organization doesn't have, you know, whether it's a strong DE&I commitment, strong sustainability commitment, they're less likely to work for you.

And that's an issue for businesses because you're losing talent. You're losing your entry level and sometimes mid level talent because you do not have a commitment to the values that some of the Gen Z people that you're trying to hire do have. And so that's one of the business imperatives for identifying good corporate social responsibility, ESG goals, all that stuff.

I think another part too is just a bit of a dissatisfaction with the current system and the way things are done because we recognize that in our lifetimes — but definitely our children's lifetime — climate change is going to have an impact that it's just, I mean, I don't want to, I'm not someone who wants to base climate change on fear. But we do recognize that there will be more extreme weather events. There'll be more flooding. Our lives will be filled with more difficulty, based on a problem that we didn't create. And yet we're still in this mindset that we're going to keep continuing business-as-usual. And that just doesn't resonate, I think, with a lot of Gen Z.

You can't connect those dots. And so for businesses, I think they have a really critical question to start thinking about. It's when they're engaging Gen Z, not just, you know, what is our sustainability commitment or our DE&I commitment, but how are we going to be authentic to what we're saying as well, and really be realistic about what their goals are — while still like entertaining and like retaining some of this younger talent.

Those are some things that come to mind. There's also social things and political pressures. Like, do we like to vote? Do we not like to vote? Like all this different things that might be a little bit outside of the scope of the sustainability world. 

Mike: I’d like to dive into that a little deeper. As Gen Z is evaluating job prospects, how are you figuring out if a company actually is walking the talk on social environmental stuff? Where are you actually looking for that communication? I'm assuming you're not just diving into the sustainability reports, but how are you figuring that out?

Daniel: Yeah, there's a difference here between someone who's Gen Z who cares about climate change and someone who's Gen Z and who's going to work in climate change. Because as someone who is working, who's like, my career is going to be dedicated and has been dedicated before school on climate issues and sustainability issues.

I do look at the sustainability reports. I do talk to some of their sustainability team and ask them questions. I think that's not the norm for people  whose career isn't sustainability, but want to work at a place that does have that value alignment that we were talking about. 

I think for them, it's usually through word of mouth, and this isn't different from, like, all generations go through this, right? You talk to a cousin, or a friend, or a coworker, or someone who has worked at this other company, and they say, yeah, it was great to work there, or no, I hated it there.

But the questions that you're asking about that company are a little bit different. It's not just now, do they pay me $100, 000? It's not just now was the management team great. It was their promotions. It's like, did they care about climate change? Were you working on things that felt impactful to you?

That's a big difference than I think some of the older generations for the career side. Yeah, the sustainability reports talking to some of the sustainability teams and you just, you also just, you know, working in this field, who's doing the work and who's not, you know, which tech companies are trying to  put in the money and who hasn't.

So yeah, those are some of the things that come to mind.

Mike: Yeah, that definitely resonates with a lot of the companies I work with. One of the selling points for investing in sustainability communication is we're trying to engage not just Gen Z — but all age groups on socially focused work. And it's not just Gen Z. They probably care the most, but people of all ages want to have meaningful work today, which I think is a great trend.

And they're trying to figure out “how can we communicate with these prospects?” And then also our existing employee base it's a lot more expensive to find new talent and train new talent than to keep who you have. So, I think the business case for that skin is stronger and stronger.

I want to talk a little bit about TikTok. I will admit that I tried my hand at TiKTok and I gave up. I think that officially means I'm old because there's a social media platform that defeated me. I am on Instagram, so I guess that's kind of like TikTok now with the videos, but curious, again, not just TikTok, but just all social media platforms. I think we were talking earlier before we started recording — my generation, we were  just coming of age, we were kind of entering our college years when Facebook got big and then Instagram eventually, and all these. You guys grew up with this stuff, like you were children when this was already around. And then TikTok came out and all these other, there's all these other ones. I have younger cousins that I don't even know what they're on these days. I think companies sometimes struggle to know, even with social media, how do we communicate sustainability here?

There've been a lot of companies that have kind of made missteps where they  put out a message that they couldn't back up. And then they got a lot of blowback, just from what you've seen and maybe, from your own experience and maybe folks in your network, what seems to resonate well in social media when it comes to a company's communicating impact and what doesn't go well?

Daniel: Yeah, there's so many thoughts on this. I'll start off by saying that there's a generation that is really in tune with social media and Instagram and TikToks of the world. And some my age are like starting to say it's just caused so much harm and I'm going to get off it completely. I'm in the middle. I used to have a TikTok. I don't know if it defeated me or if I defeated it. Still up in the air, but I deleted that. I deleted my Instagram as well. And now my social media is only LinkedIn. Now granted, I do use LinkedIn a lot. So, I don't know if it's, you know, I still spend a lot of time on social media. 

I think the decisions for me were mostly that it was giving a false sense of what reality is. Both for ads that you're receiving, but also the friends and the people that you're following. Um, celebrities and whatnot. But all that being said, the question of how organizations communicate sustainability goals still is an important one. Whether it's through, you know, TikToks or Instagram reels or all sorts of social media or reports. There's a couple of things there. One is what happens, you asked this in your question is what happens when a company commits to something and then gets it wrong. And then is sometimes accused of greenwashing. And it's sometimes that's legally, fought, fought in the courts.

Sometimes it's just a big hit on brand and reputation. And actually in one of the classes I'm a teaching fellow for, we talked to a large, I think it's fortune 100 company. that does a lot of work on cereals basically. And I asked him directly, your company was involved in greenwashing. It's not just on the reports. Like there's actual evidence.

The sustainability director, I think it was Chief Sustainability Officer or one of the director level roles. How do you take responsibility for it and what do you do moving forward? And I asked that in class, and they responded pretty candidly with a couple of things.

One is, if you did wrong, admit it. I think one of the first things that Gen Z, and other generations too, but definitely Gen Z, can read through is some of the BS that is told. And so, just admit that you're wrong, and that goes a long way. The second thing is to rectify your mistakes. I wish we had, like, a beautiful solution to climate problems, but the reality is it's probably hundreds of solutions, and they're all not perfect, and it's kind of just pieces put into a puzzle that for some countries will work, and some countries it won't.

So really, it's about trying to figure out after I've made this mistake, what do I do now and how do I rectify it? Maybe that means stronger reporting. Maybe it means that the processes of data collection have to change. Whatever it is. All those things have to happen. And then you could go out and say, look, we did something wrong.We admit it. Here's how we're fixing it, and you move forward. There is a huge cancel culture right now, where one company does one thing wrong, and immediately the entire company is canceled. I do think that's an issue within our generation, that just, it's just not a sustainable way of living, because then you cancel everything and nothing gets done and like the whole society collapses, which is a bit dramatic, but I do think that is a problem that a generation faces. But it's because we've seen so much perfection in social media as if no one commits any wrong in social media. And the reality is we commit wrong probably every day we make mistakes and we're just not capable of admitting them,  and moving forward.

So those are some, some quick thoughts on that. 

Mike: That's really interesting. And it resonates a lot with, I think what I've seen working with lots of companies and even in my experience as a journalist the traditional corporate communications strategy for most businesses, I like to call it the “Mad Men” era where it was like, “let's just make ourselves look as good as possible, sweep under the rug anything that makes us look bad.” And that's kind of what the traditional marketer was trained to do. And today, you can't do that to your point, because I think also because most audiences are pretty cynical cause we've been burned so many times, not just Gen Z. I think of all groups that you can sniff it out.

Like if it's something just sounds too good, you don't trust it. Right. And so, especially when it comes to sustainability, as you mentioned, it's an imperfect effort, right? You're never going to be perfectly sustainable. You're going to always have missteps. And so, you know, telling the full story of like, hey, you know, we tried this. It didn't work out. We set this target, we're going to miss it cause X, Y and Z — but we're going to work on it to improve it. That is the most compelling storytelling and typically the issues have been, legal teams have been afraid of, if we, you know, we can get sued for making commitments that we don't fall through on.

But now with  all the new rules around this, I think more lawyers are coming to the table. I actually have a lawyer coming on the pod to talk a little bit about how companies can navigate that new era.

And it is very fascinating. And I think having that courage to talk about your mistakes and the things that don't go well, I think that's, that's slowly starting to come out more. And I know I try to encourage my clients to do more of that. But yeah, it's almost like you might as well say nothing if you're not going to tell the whole truth.  

Daniel: This is like a perfect time to to partially plug but also share one of the concepts I've been working with with a friend of mine. Her name is Sandra.  She's a director at Kion now on sustainability and supply chains, but worked at Amazon and has just a really interesting career.

And we've been talking one on one about this issue for, for quite a while. And so you have the greenwashing, which is a company saying they're going to do something, they don't do it. And it's like, it blows up on them. There's the green hushing side of it, which is  a company is doing amazing sustainability things, but doesn't want to say anything for fear of retribution, for fear of lawsuits and whatnot.

And what Sandra and I were coming up with, and we've termed it green gauging, is an in between where companies can still share some of the sustainability challenges that they faced, maybe some missteps along the way and aren't afraid of doing so, but also aren't saying I'm going to solve climate change on my own because that's not what a company's role is, or it's not in their ability to do.

And we have an article on LinkedIn. I'll share it with you afterwards, but we have an article in a few coming up where we kind of explore that concept a little bit more in depth. Literally, to give sustainability groups and directors and CSOs this new idea of framing sustainability in a way that doesn't hurt their brand, but also continues the work that really needs to be done.

Mike: I wrote an article on my blog a couple of months ago, it was more focused on writing about sustainability, but one of the points was letting go of your corporate ego in the sense of like, no one company is going to save the world.  You're just not. And I don't know why we think they will.

It's a thing and I think that's definitely one of my missions with this podcast is to help companies figure out how to communicate this more authentically. And actually there's something I've brought up a lot too, is oftentimes the folks responsible for communicating these issues are not sustainability experts.

They're general marketers or communicators. So a lot of times they're not in the weeds on this stuff, so  it's impossible to really know this. If you're not living and breathing this stuff every day, you're not going to know what is accurate, what is even considered interesting a year, two years ago saying we're doing net zero would have been a big deal.

And now it's table stakes. Right. But if you're not nerds like us, you're not going to get that. So that's also to plug my own services, that's usually where I come in to help out, I'll go between the sustainability team and the marketing team and  speak both languages. I think increasingly, so you're going to need to make sure that the stuff you're putting out there is accurate and honest. And honestly, I think a lot of greenwashing that I've seen in my experience has been actually unintentional. That's because it's more out of ignorance than not knowing like, oh, I'm not the technical person that understands this so we're putting out communication around that. I think a lot of it's just, it's not like, like you were saying earlier, like a lot of companies are just getting called out as like, you're evil for doing this, but a lot of it's not that sometimes maybe it is.

But no company wants to get sued. No company wants to piss off a bunch of their customers. So I think,  approaching sustainability communication, maybe with more of like a growth mindset of like, “hey, you know, you could do better on X, Y, and Z” and give them a chance to improve versus just shutting them down or canceling them.

Daniel: Yeah. When you think of like the word, like net zero, for example, if you're not a sustainability professional, you kind of get a sense you're like, okay, we emit carbon. We're trying to get to zero. You have no idea of the hundreds of reports that go behind building a net zero strategy and plan and report it. You don't think about the data collection, the aggregation, the verification. You don't think about like, and there's so many. Things that happen for a company to say, we want to be net zero. And you just hear those words, net zero, and that's it. That's like the summary of all of these things.

But in reality, there's so much that goes behind it. Unless you're, like you said, living it every day. You're not, you just don't know that. And so part of that is bridging the gap between the sustainability teams and marketing. And sometimes even legal and, and business as well.

Mike: Awesome. So. Don't have Gen Z members on this podcast very often. So I want to take  the opportunity to  learn a little bit more, what are you the most worried about?You specifically, but also maybe — I know you can't speak for millions of people — but if you were to extrapolate what generally what Gen Z is worried about when it comes to sustainability, obviously climate change, but what is keeping you up at night?

And then what are you most optimistic about?

Daniel: There's a couple of things here. One is trying to reconcile this capitalistic world and this world of consumption with the greatest challenge of all time. I think personally, I think of humanity thus far, which is climate change. I talk to business leaders pretty often about their goals and, you know, they'll talk in terms of return on investment. They'll talk in terms of cost of capital and revenue. Right. And yet you still have this crisis on the other side where the two pieces don't fit. They don't match. And until we have a very solid way of matching those two pieces, I think that's the thing that keeps me up at night.

Because we're just going to keep going down a path that's just kind of nonstop. And again, it's not out of fear. Like, I do think there's some people Gen Z  that says like, look, if humanity erases itself out of the planet, like, will the planet be better off? And I've had a lot of philosophical debates about this and that we're not going to get into that at all. But for the sake of humanity — and especially the most vulnerable populations on this planet — I think being able to reconcile that is really important. And there's ways of doing it. We're not there yet. But for me, that's what keeps me most well, keeps me up at night and I'm most worried about. 

I am optimistic about a lot of things. There's so much new energy in the sustainability field. I don't know how it was like 30 years ago. But I do know that in the last 10 years, climate change was kind of on people's radar 10 years ago, sometimes, but now it's really on people's radar. You have it in the media. Yeah. Like just The New York times, I opened it up a couple of days ago and I think, and I circled like there was like 15 articles, let's say on the front page. And I think 10 of them were either ESG or a climate change or flooding or something related to environment, which is completely new compared to 10 years ago. And I do these climate chats every week where I talk to individuals and professionals trying to transition into climate. And that's given me so much hope.

Because you have the marketers, you have the lawyers, you have the environmentalists, you have the PhD students who did neuroscience but now want to do like climate related things. Everyone is really thinking about this and trying to figure out how they piece climate change into their own lives. And that gives me a lot of hope because it means  that if we have ten of us, we can create some change. If we have ten million, there's so much more that we can do. and I'm also an optimistic person by nature, I think, so I think that helps too.

Mike: I agree with that.  I started my career during the great recession. And I remember, even then climate change — I think this is probably like 2009 — climate change wasn't as politicized on one side, which was a good thing. But I think people forget that actually Republicans had a whole climate platform back then.

Daniel: There is a Republican Climate Caucus in Congress that no one knows about.

Mike: I did not even know that. 

Daniel: Yeah, the issues are a little bit different, but like it's there. And anyways.

Mike: Anyway.  But I still remember when I was still trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. It was back when I went down to Colombia and I was traveling all over and I talk a lot about how I visited the San Blas archipelago, which is right off the coast of Panama. And there's an indigenous peoples called the Gunas that live there that, I got to visit one of their villages and they were basically saying like, “yeah, we're going to have to evacuate because we're at sea level” and that was a kind of my wake up call back then of like, “Oh my God, this is happening right now. This isn't something that's happening in a hundred years to my grandchildren.” 

And actually  I just found out that it's happening now and now over a decade later. They're actually being evacuated back to the mainland, which is really terrible. But, yeah, that has changed, I think, as the impacts of climate change have become pretty much impossible for us in the Global North to ignore.

Now more and more people want to help, which to me, I think, yeah, that gives me hope too, that people want to find a way to make it work. They don't all need to be corporate sustainability directors. I always tell people  there's ways to do this without having to change your job title.

Best thing you could do is vote. And this upcoming election, I think, is going to be very pivotal. We're going to have to keep going no matter what happens, but we're not going to dive into a political chat right now. 

Daniel: Oh man, I had so many thoughts. I can, I'll name one. I'll name one because I did international affairs in undergrad. I talk politics a lot. So I'm not afraid of jumping into some of this conversation. I mean, I'm also from Colombia, so, like, I can't even vote in the U. S. election, so, this is all

Mike: Okay. This actually was one of my questions. I was talking about from a non-U.S. perspective. So I'd love to, love to hear.

Dan: Yeah. so, I just think, um, look, the polarization is so real, and social media exacerbates it, and, having talked to, you know, a lot of Republicans, just in some of the work that I've done, and some of the places I've traveled to, I'm always on the side of like trying to find connection and, bridging gaps not everyone has to come into the world this way.

I know that's maybe one of my strengths in the way I want to be in the world. And in doing so you realize that we're not always as far apart as we think we are or our social media leads us to believe, obviously there's differences in what we want out of the world and, and in the U.S. yes, like Joe Biden has done more, I think, for climate change than any other president, with the IRA and all of that stuff. But there are now a lot of Gen Z Republicans who are thinking about climate change and aren't saying that climate change is fake. They're just figuring out different mechanisms to solve climate change, which sometimes are non government based, which is, I think, something we really need alongside government policy in action, we also need these business solutions. And, one example of this, and then we can steer clear of this conversation to move on is in the Republican debate a couple of, I mean, maybe that was a year ago now — one of the questions that came in that they had was a young person. I think they were in college, literally asking all the potential candidates or Republican candidates: What will you do about climate change? And this is in a Republican debate. And for some reason, I think everyone thinks now that Republicans have zero knowledge of climate change, or just want to deny it completely, and that's not, not the case.

There's compromises to be made, there's big issues at stake,  but  we're not as far apart, is the main message I'm trying to get to here. But, this is all, again, from the Colombian standpoint, you know, I can't vote, so it's all on the U.S. citizens of the world to choose.

Mike: That's a good segue into actually my last question, which is, a lot of, at least in the mainstream corporate sustainability issue world. We tend to think of things through a North American European lens.   There is a little discussion of  development in the Global South and all that, but how is corporate sustainability looking in, at least in South America where you're from? How does it differ from how we address it in the US and Europe? Are people even using that terminology? I'm curious from your perspective, if you want to talk a little about that. 

Daniel: I do think the political discourses are a bit different too. And so ESG is a term that is known. But it's not, I mean, even “the Global North and the Global South” is Global North language, right? Um, it's like most Colombians when you talk to them, they're not like, “Oh, we're part of the Global South.” That's not a concept that they think of. They don't self describe that way. It's only because of some terminology developed in the Global North, but all of that. The spaces I'm most interested in for the Global South are energy, for sure. Because we need more access to electricity, but also because we have a chance to leapfrog.

I mean, this is well documented and known, that we don't need to base all of our electricity grid on, one, transmission lines, but also two, on coal and fossil fuel, and so we have a chance there to develop solar and wind in a way, and geothermal and hydrogen in a way that, I guess 200 years ago wasn't thought possible, or did not happen, rather.

So that's one part. The second part is these carbon credits and carbon markets. Now, that does not necessarily mean that I agree with the idea of carbon credits. If there's one debate we have at Yale School of the Environment, I'm in. In the business side, it's this, like, are they a good thing?

Are they bad? Are they additional? Are they valuable? Are they all these, all these things, but finding ways of restoring, protecting nature in a way that generates income for a country, especially in Colombia, because Colombia and Brazil have the highest levels of biodiversity in the world that will give it a definite edge, a competitive edge, and an ability to develop, if we can find ways of financing that. And then the third thing, I mentioned this in a couple of conversations I've had before, but oil exports in Colombia are really high and figuring out a way to support, you know, health and science and everything else that, uh, the money from the tax money from these oil exports, the money I bring that comes in finding some sort of way of kind of diminishing those oil exports and changing them for literally, I don't know what it could be.

It could be green technologies. It could be some of these carbon credit things. I don't know, but that money's important to Colombia because it sustains a way of life and what we currently and how we currently are. And so, yeah, I don't have an answer to that. I think that might be an additional seven hours of podcasts.

Mike: I think that's actually interesting and I think it's true. Even when you go to global climate conferences, it's still being driven by people from the United States and Europe. And, you know, they're  the ones that cause most of these problems and we're trying to dictate the solutions to countries that had the least to do with it.

This whole idea of a just transition — that could be a whole other topic of an episode. But I think it's very important to know, even from a stable communication standpoint, that we're communicating globally, which makes it a very big challenge because how you're going to communicate this in Colombia is very different from how you're going to communicate this in California or somewhere else.

Great. Well, that's all the time we have today, Daniel. Thank you so much for coming on the pod. To everybody, Daniel is on LinkedIn. I'm going to have  his information in the show notes. He puts out some really good content. He's currently on a mission to becoming a chief sustainability officer.

So follow him on LinkedIn as he goes along that journey. Thanks again, Daniel, for coming on today and have a good day.

Daniel: Yeah, thank you so much, I enjoyed chatting with you and hopefully we'll, you know, solve this climate crisis.

Mike: We'll do it!