Engaging employees in the environment is good for business and the environment. BrownFlynn collaborated with TD Bank and the Environmental Defense Fund to create an Environmental Employee Engagement (EEE) Roadmap, enabling others to benefit from the development and implementation of TD Bank’s successful EEE program. Read the whitepaper here!
By Todd Reubold, Director and Founding Editor, Ensia
The connection between banking and the environment may not seem obvious at first, but it runs deep. To learn more, Ensia recently spoke with Diana Glassman, head of Environmental Affairs for TD Bank, a retail bank with approximately 1,300 branches in the eastern United States. Over the course of our conversation we discussed TD Bank’s environmental initiatives, criticism of the banking sector for financing fossil fuels, the intersection of energy and water, and more.
Todd Reubold: Part of your role at TD Bank involves identifying opportunities to expand the company’s environmental commitment. Can you tell me more?
Diana Glassman: TD Bank seeks to be an environmental leader. This is a belief held at the top. It’s the right thing to do, and it also has business benefits. There are revenue benefits, there are brand benefits, there are employee benefits, there are reputation benefits, all of which are important to a growing business.
TR: Can you give me a few examples of TD Bank’s environmental initiatives?
This interview originally appeared in Ensia magazine; read the full interview here.
“Want people to support your organization’s green initiatives? Make them part of business as usual.”
Net Impact and The GreenBiz Group recently released “TD Bank: Where Green is Going Viral,” a case study about TD Bank’s successful environmental employee engagement program. TD Bank, the U.S. subsidiary of the Toronto-based TD Bank Group and a Top 10 retail bank in the United States, has ambitious targets for 2015 to reduce paper consumption by 20% and actual carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions per employee by at least 25%. In 2012, TD Bank launched an environmental employee engagement plan to capitalize on its employee workforce of 27,000 in order to achieve its 2015 targets. The goal of the plan is to make “green” resonate with employees throughout all business processes and the workplace culture. The case study outlines five lessons for organizations and individuals to integrate sustainability into their workplace culture. Read the full case study here.
BrownFlynn commends TD Bank for sharing its thoughtful insights about environmental employee engagement. Organizations from across the board, whether corporate, nonprofit or governmental, can benefit from reviewing the case study’s five lessons to improve environmental engagement.
As Diana Glassman, Head of TD Environment, said, “Don’t underestimate the power that is unleashed when people get engaged. If a lot of people begin focusing on the water, energy and food they consume, they will have an impact.”
By Brittany VanderBeek, Analyst
A team at BrownFlynn sat down with the head of environment for leading US retail bank TD Bank to find out how the organization measures employee engagement on sustainability.
How do you accurately measure effective employee engagement in environmental initiatives? It is a tough nut to crack for most companies, but TD Bank has found a way that works for them.
We interviewed Diana Glassman, Head of TD Environment for TD Bank about the Environmental Employee Engagement (EEE) Program, who hopes it can help others scale up their own successful programs. TD Bank is a top-10 retail bank by deposits in the United States with more than 26,000 employees and 1,300 stores throughout the East Coast. TD Bank is a subsidiary of the Toronto-Dominion Bank Group.
What is the EEE Program, its intended accomplishments and its critical success factors to date?
TD Bank set specific environmental business goals as we strive to be as green as our logo. The EEE Program is a holistic approach to capture the minds and hearts of our employees, and to enable them to be Environmental Leaders while building the better bank.
We wanted to establish a program that aligned with our corporate goals of reducing carbon/employee by 25% and paper by 20% by 2015, and fit our corporate culture. We also wanted to create a comprehensive program that quantified results and reached all our stores, many of which have only a handful of employees. Before establishing this program, we did extensive research and found that a program like this did not really exist in the market, so we had to create it ourselves.
One critical success factor is the framework we developed called the 4H’s of Environmental Leadership at TD Bank®: Head, Heart, Hands and Horn. This framework has helped us structure and organize our program to ensure we are moving employees through the cycle and using our resources efficiently. Importantly, we identified quantitative metrics that matter to the business for each stage of the cycle – and can track our performance over time.
Another critical success factor is an identification of audiences within the bank, and recognizing that we need to take each audience through the 4Hs with different tactics that are suited to them. We have 1,300 retail stores from Maine to Florida and 26,000 employees. That is a lot of employees with diverse interests and needs to motivate and mobilize!
A final critical success factor is that we needed to integrate the EEE program into the core of the business; we needed to make it relevant to all employees from part-time tellers to senior executives otherwise it would never have a chance of surviving and thriving. Our EEE program is linked to our university talent acquisition efforts, orientation, training, rewards and recognition, and leadership development pipeline in our largest business – and financial metrics that matter to senior executives.
To read the full blog post please visit the 2 degrees website!
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