Ep. 24: How HP engages employees on sustainability

In this episode of The Sustainability Communicator, Mike sits down with Alexandra Talleur, an internal communications lead at HP who specializes in sustainability engagement. While companies often focus on external sustainability communication, internal communication frequently receives less attention. Yet effective employee engagement is crucial for implementing sustainability strategies and maintaining talent. Alexandra shares insights on creating meaningful internal sustainability communications, connecting sustainability to employees' roles, and navigating challenges like the "green gap" between stated values and actions.

You can also listen to this episode on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and YouTube.

TRANSCRIPT

Mike: We spend a lot of time thinking about engaging external stakeholders on sustainability communication, but what about internal? Your employees are your best messengers and making sure that they're on board will help you go far.

While many companies spend significant time and resources communicating sustainability externally, more often than not, internal communication gets a lot less love. Yet, as many more companies are turning to green hushing in hopes of avoiding external backlash, this is compelling them to turn inward to reassure employees that they remain committed to sustainability progress.

A successful sustainability strategy also requires the participation of employees across the company. It can't just be the sustainability leads. Sustainability potentially helps recruit and retain the best talent.

To better understand the inner workings of internal sustainability communication, today we're checking in with Alexandra Toor, an internal communications lead at HP who helps evangelize the company's sustainability impact to employees.

Mike: How would you define internal sustainability communication from a high level? What does it aim to do and how does it differ from external comms?

Alexandra: Put very simply, it's really about communicating with your internal audiences about the sustainability work you do, and importantly also how your workforce can take part. Typically there are two aims. One would be making employees aware of what your company is doing out in the world on sustainability issues. And then number two, it's also about what employees can do within their own roles and within their communities.

Mike: Sustainability comms has changed a lot in the last couple years. And I'm assuming internal comms has changed as well. We've been seeing lots of calls for disclosing more information to your employees and engaging employees. How do you think that internal sustainability communications has changed the most maybe in the last five years?

Alexandra: I think you hit one on the head, which is that employees, I think across the board are getting more and more interested in what their employer is doing from a sustainability standpoint and from a social impact standpoint as well. I think that's definitely a trend that we've seen externally that we're seeing internally.

Also, I think some of the similarities between internal and external comms is for both, it can be so hard to break through in a very crowded, noisy environment. Consumers and employees are being hit by a lot of news every day. So hooking your audience and breaking through is definitely one commonality.

But I do think internal comms has some unique challenges as well.

Mike: What are some of those unique internal comms challenges?

Alexandra: One unique challenge for internal comms is helping employees see themselves as part of the work or see the work as relevant to their role at the company. For a handful of employees or teams within a large organization, they may be in a dedicated sustainability role where they're really owning and driving the strategy.

But for the vast majority of employees, they have their day job. They are maybe working in IT or they're working in legal. For those employees it can be hard to understand why they should care, why they should pay attention. Obviously some employees just have a natural interest or passion in sustainability, and those are the ones that we would call the hyper-engaged employees that are a little bit easier to hook and pull in with internal comms.

But for the broader employee base, I think helping them see why it's relevant to their work, what role they can play and why they should feel proud of the work that your company is doing is a big part of it.

Mike: I've recently come to question if we have proof that sustainability helps attract and retain the best talent. Do we actually have any data to back this up? You mentioned the term "green gap" earlier — can you talk a little more about that? Are you seeing this in your internal comms perspective?

Alexandra: It's such an interesting question. The green gap refers to how consumers say they would pay more for a more sustainable product, but that doesn't always translate to what they're actually doing at the register.

I've wondered in the employee space if there's maybe a similar thing happening with attraction, particularly hiring. Retention I think is a little bit different. I think the common factor is likely around economics. So my theory is that in a perfect world when employees have a lot of choice, a lot of people, even those who don't consider themselves hardcore sustainability advocates, would ultimately prefer to work for an employer that aligns with their values. But when pressed and when people are looking for jobs, it may not be something that obviously leads them to turn down a role.

The common factor there could be around economics. In a good economy, people can maybe make different decisions at the cash register, just like they could when they're looking at companies to work for.

The retention piece though, I do think it's clear that having a greater sense of purpose or fulfillment at work likely leads to greater longevity and loyalty between employees and their employers. So whether that points directly to a company's sustainability strategy or just a general sense that your employer has everyone's best interest in mind, I do think that likely has a good role to play in retention.

Mike: Why does HP have your role, which is a very rare one?

Alexandra: When I was initially hired, HP had already had strong internal resources around communicating externally about their sustainability work. But they were gearing up to announce their public goals for 2025 and 2030 and their broader sustainable impact agenda, which touches on climate action, human rights, and digital equity. They were looking to bring somebody in who would be able to reflect that back to employees.

So initially the impetus was really around making employees aware of what HP is doing out in the world around sustainability and social impact. Then over time, that's morphed more into action. Instead of just making employees aware of what HP is doing, actually finding ways for employees to take part in that strategy and in their community.

Mike: What advice would you give to companies that aren't as far along on their journey? Maybe they're not even doing a good job communicating externally. Maybe they just have a communications manager who's also responsible for internal comms — what advice would you give them on even an entry-level version of sustainability internal comms?

Alexandra: First of all, companies definitely have to be doing the work. They have to have a sustainability strategy and be making efforts in that space so that they have something to communicate about. Which sounds obvious, but sometimes the desire to communicate comes before the action has really happened.

For companies that do have a sustainability strategy in place and are now looking to communicate about that more internally and externally, one way to get started is if they have a team that's communicating about this externally, finding ways to reflect that back internally, whether it's in all-employee emails, on your intranet, or all-hands meetings. Just finding natural ways to weave in that content can be done regardless of whether they have a dedicated employee communications role for sustainability.

I also think that for companies with robust sustainability teams, developing relationships with those teams directly and really seeing them as a source for stories can pay dividends over time.

This sounds a bit cheesy, but we talk about HP's sustainability work, but it's actually the work of 60,000 employees. Sustainability isn't this other entity — it's work that's being driven by the people who actually work for HP. A lot of them have amazing stories to tell. That's part of what we're trying to do, and which I think a lot of companies can do regardless of whether they have a full-time person dedicated to that.

Mike: Everyone has said sustainability is everybody's job, and eventually we should work ourselves out of a sustainability title. But a common challenge I've seen is that sustainability leads trying to get programs implemented are reliant on people in the company that don't have sustainability in their title. Their approach has been the Fight Club approach to sustainability — don't talk about sustainability, don't lead with it. Really speak the language of the stakeholder you're trying to reach.

I think learning to accept that not everyone's going to care about sustainability is something that sustainability professionals have a hard time swallowing. Not everyone's going to be like, "Yay, we're here to save the world." And that's completely okay. I think once you achieve that level of self-awareness, it's more about "What do they care about?" rather than "How do I get them to care about sustainability?"

Alexandra: I completely agree that a big part of the growing up process for any sustainability professional is accepting what's pragmatic and what works above what the ideal may be. I'm a big fan of approaches that are creative and pragmatic, and are working with the reality within a particular company.

Mike: Can you talk about any specific campaigns that HP has had recently to engage employees or internal stakeholders on sustainability?

Alexandra: In June, HP released its annual sustainable impact report, which is a really important asset for investors and regulators. But for the average employee, probably not as important. I think HP's report this year was 208 pages — robust from a reporting perspective, but obviously the average employee isn't going to wade through 208 pages, nor should they from a productivity standpoint.

What we did this year is condense the key statistics and takeaways from the report into an infographic that we released to employees. In past years, we've leveraged the full report as well as the executive summary, but this year we decided to crystallize it down to the 12 most important stats in the report that we wanted to drive home with employees. We produced it in a more engaging visual way with less text, with opportunities to click through into the report and read more if they wanted to.

The key learning is to be realistic about what employees are going to engage with when this isn't their full-time role. It's probably not going to be a 200-plus page report, but it might be 12 stats that they see in an infographic on the intranet one day. Finding that balance between educating employees and putting the information out there without expecting them to do something that probably you and I wouldn't even do is a good rule of thumb.

Mike: Any other campaigns you might be able to talk about? How do you get your employees excited about initiatives, and how do you know if they care? Have you done any internal surveys to see what employee sentiment is on sustainability?

Alexandra: For Earth Day, instead of talking about work that HP was doing and using Earth Day as a moment to celebrate that, we really wanted to celebrate employees that are doing the work. We did a video-based campaign where we selected 10 employees from across the company and across the globe who had, in our words, "gone beyond for the planet."

We ended up uncovering some amazing stories of employees who had taken the initiative outside of their core role at HP to make an impact. Some were in dedicated sustainability or social impact roles, featuring a particularly successful initiative. Others worked in various different roles but were personally passionate about sustainability and had spearheaded an initiative. One employee based in our Barcelona office created a robust bike-to-work program. The examples ranged from employees having an impact at their site or in their community to employees actually making a product more sustainable.

We found that recognition was really successful, which isn't surprising. Everyone likes to be seen and celebrated for their work, and employees are no different. Also, people love to see their colleagues celebrated. So it had this nice ripple effect where it was great for the 10 employees featured, but then great for their teams and departments as well. We've also been experimenting with video format, which can be a lot more engaging.

For measuring success, HP's intranet platform is fairly traditional, which is a euphemism for saying it's a little bit outdated. So we can be limited in the metrics we can gather. We do always look at things like page visits and unique visitors, but we also go anecdotally. We have a lot of people who are invested in sustainability at HP, so talking to them and understanding what resonated is definitely one way we try to gauge if it got on their radar and how it felt.

Mike: What happens when you have employees that don't like sustainability? There's lots of misinformation around ESG and an anti-ESG backlash. I'm assuming at a tech company there's less of this happening, but I've worked with companies that have offices in parts of the country where the politics are different. Sometimes there is pushback like "Why are we doing this woke stuff?" because there's a misunderstanding around what sustainability is. How would you approach that?

Alexandra: I've never personally received any pushback on sustainability communications or campaigns we've done. If anything, it's gone the other way where employees say we're not doing enough or something doesn't align with our sustainability strategy.

In cases of potential pushback, I'd go back to the value proposition concept — finding a way to speak their language where maybe you don't lead with sustainability. At HP, because we're a hardware company and manufacturer, sustainability really is about innovation. Ultimately, we're trying to solve environmental issues created by products by reducing the footprint of our products. That becomes a design challenge, which I think a lot of people can get behind, whether or not they personally feel invested in the health of our planet.

So that can be a way in for HP in particular, and maybe for other companies as well, where they're not leading with sustainability, but with an interesting business challenge that everybody needs to work together to solve.

Mike: I love that answer. It's interesting because I think sustainability is never the right word. Whether it's ESG, social impact — we're grasping at ways to describe what's really just better business and a long-term view of business. I think it gets misconstrued as being this very complicated, politicized thing. But if you're a human living on Earth, you have something to gain from sustainability.

Finding ways to frame the messaging through the worldview of the people you're trying to reach is very important. You honestly don't have to even mention sustainability ever. It's something I've been working on even as I've been trying to explain what I do to family and friends. I think they don't really understand how I pay my bills because they think it's not actually a job. It's really just a way of taking a long-term view of business.

Alexandra: A question we often get is not necessarily "Why are we working on sustainability?" but "Why are we working on this over that or this instead of that?" So companies will need to clearly articulate to their workforce why their strategy is what it is.

A common theme at HP is employees who want to see impact at a very local level. So we've had to figure out how to articulate the sustainability strategy and how it connects directly to our business impacts, and then still leave room for employees to get involved at a very local level — something like a beach cleanup that employees feel has a tangible impact in their backyard. I think that's what resonates most for people — the problems you see in your community and how you feel you should go about solving them.

So I think putting a stake in the ground around "Our sustainability strategy focuses on X, Y, and Z because that's where we can have the biggest impact" is important to stay strong on, but leave room for employees to take part in ways that feel meaningful to them.

Mike: How did you get into this field? What made you want to focus on internal sustainability comms, and what advice would you give somebody trying to follow in your footsteps?

Alexandra: I started in the nonprofit industry a little over 10 years ago, working for a girls' empowerment organization and then an environmental conservation organization. So very early on, I had a personal interest in sustainability and loved using communication skills. For anyone early in their career, I would say think about your strengths that you want to use day to day. For me that was communications, writing, editing.

I transitioned into communications agencies and worked for Ogilvy and Edelman on their dedicated sustainability teams, which gave me fantastic exposure to different industries, clients, and challenges. For somebody interested in communications who wants to get a lot of experience quickly, communications agencies are a great way to do that because you're exposed to so much in such a short period of time. It's a bit of a bootcamp.

Then I got to a point where I really wanted to go deep with one company. I had loved how dynamic it was to work with different clients, but I wanted to sink into something and establish mastery over one subject area. Going in-house felt like the right move, and focusing on employee communications felt like an interesting challenge. I had done some employee comms at Edelman, but really turned my focus to that once I got hired at HP and have found it rewarding to work with an employee audience. I'm an employee too, so I feel like I have a vested interest in how I'm communicated to or what my employer is doing. That helped me feel more connected to my audience than I had felt when working in media relations and external comms.

Mike: Your advice is spot on — a communicator needs to wear many hats and there's never a clear path. Agencies are definitely a great way to go through that bootcamp and get the skills you need. I do foresee more internal comms roles like yours in the future. Your general internal comms people don't necessarily understand sustainability as well, so they might not always be translating it as effectively as someone who speaks both languages. More companies are going to realize they need specialists who actually get this stuff. This isn't just about Earth Day activations — this is core to business. I definitely see that being a growth area for people interested in getting into this work from a communication perspective.

Alexandra: For folks interested in this space, I know not too many companies have full-time roles dedicated to internal comms for sustainability, but quite a few are starting to have more hybrid roles where maybe you're in an employee comms role and part of your remit is around communicating about sustainability and social impact. When you're surfing LinkedIn and looking at job descriptions, definitely keep an eye out for that.

Don't be afraid to try and create a role for yourself. I have friends and old colleagues who have had that interest area and who have been able to pitch themselves with "Hey, I have this expertise," and they've been able to build that into their role — either when they're getting hired or once they've been with a company for a few years and can say, "Hey, I'd love this to be part of my job." Never be afraid to try.

Mike: Thanks so much, Alexandra, for your time. Everybody, that's Alexandra Toor from HP. You should follow her, connect with her on LinkedIn. If you ever have questions about internal comms focused on sustainability, she's probably one of the leading experts I know on this right now.

And that brings us to the end of today's episode of The Sustainability Communicator. I really appreciate you spending this time with me today, diving into these crucial conversations about sustainability storytelling. If you'd like to stay connected, you can find me, Mike Hauer, on LinkedIn, or subscribe to my monthly Engaged newsletter, where I share deeper insights about sustainability communications and what's moving the needle in our field. All the links are right there in the show notes.

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And as always, wherever you are in your sustainability journey, good luck and keep at it. We need you out there.