Why employee communication is the highest impact sustainability communications investment right now – and how to make it work

A definition for clarity

Internal sustainability communication is the practice of engaging employees on the organisation’s sustainability strategy –building understanding, commitment, and the everyday behaviours that translate ambition Jason Frank to business outcomes.

In an environment where external sustainability communications carry increasing regulatory and reputational risk, there’s been a marked shift from telling a good story to prioritising compliance and integration.

With many organisations retreating, some of the smarter ones are turning sustainability communications inside out –harnessing the power of internal communications to mitigate risk, drive engagement, and enhance performance.

As highlighted recently by the World Economic Forum (WEF), employee behaviour links directly to measurable ESG outcomes, from emissions to social impact, compliance, risk and culture.

But there’s even more at stake here than ESG targets, it’s about wider sales targets and overall commercial performance too. Many organisations face an urgent need to accelerate education and upskilling of employees, enabling them to have different conversations with customers who have new questions and needs.

Here we explore best practice on maximising internal sustainability communication impact.

Why it matters –amplifying impact across three dimensions

1. Employee engagement and culture

There’s always been a strong argument for greater investment in engaging employees in sustainability. Feeling that you’re part of a responsible and sustainable organisation is proven to enhance engagement. According to the 2026 Trust Barometer: “Employees across political lines –left, centre and right –are more likely to say they’d want to work for a company that demonstrates commitment to issues like healthcare access, gender equality and climate action. Internal sustainability communications matter.”

2. Sustainability performance

From a pure sustainability standpoint organisations that prioritise employee-led change will be better positioned to maintain progress and performance. It’s employees who determine whether sustainability strategies translate into operational reality: playing their part in reducing a company’s direct emissions; creating more diverse workforces through their hiring choices; and adhering to company policies and standards. With the spotlight on what organisations actually do –rather than what they aspire to do – more proactive efforts to shift employee behaviour make more sense than ever.

3. Wider commercial performance

There’s a widespread commercial imperative to invest more to help employees, especially those on the frontline with existing and potential customers, to understand and communicate your sustainability strategy and evolving product and service portfolio. Many organisations need to accelerate education and upskilling of employees to enable the urgent transition to new sustainable products and services for customers with rapidly changing needs, expectations and competitive options. This is about business life or death, ensuring you’re not left behind as more dynamic, innovative competitors change the conversation around you at a very different looking frontline.

Seven success criteria for making a bigger impact with your internal sustainability communications

1. Start with the foundations

Employees can’t deliver your sustainability strategy unless they get it, believe it, and emotionally connect to it. Take the current opportunity to educate and engage your people around the strategic fundamentals of sustainability in your business –purpose, vision, strategy. Explain why your sustainability strategy matters so much to your collective success and future, as clearly, simply and authentically as possible.

2. Show there’s still commitment –from the top

It’s important to ensure that employees don’t think you’ve stopped caring because you have dialled down external sustainability communications. Sustained internal sustainability communications will demonstrate continued momentum and commitment. It’s particularly important that leaders are visibly active advocates for sustainability, demonstrating their own continued personal commitment. There’s a real danger that leaders lose credibility and trust in the current environment. According to Edelman’s Trust Barometer, 75% of respondents said that CEOs are obligated to help bridge trust divides - but just 44% do it well. That 29-point gap is notable because it’s a leadership credibility problem playing out inside the workplace.

3. Combat cynicism and embrace the imperfect

Acknowledge uncertainty, explain transition plans, be clear about operational trade-offs and constraints, emphasise progress over perfection, and feel comfortable to admit gaps and 'what we can and can’t do yet'. We’ve seen a new trend in companies being transparent around the challenges involved in their goals, including Heineken, which cut a third of its sustainability targets alongside an open acknowledgement that 'progress is never linear'. In general, make your communications as honest, authentic and credible as possible to combat cynicism. Your people will respect and trust you more. And it’s also good practice for getting your external sustainability communications right in the current environment.

4. Follow the science

When communicating with employees, we’re ultimately trying to create specific changes in daily behaviour. In this context it’s imperative that we use proven models, insights and interventions from the world of behavioural science. The stakes are simply too high here for instinct and guesswork.

One common challenge highlighted by behavioural science is employees feeling like sustainability commitments, programmes and policies are mandates, removing employees’ all important sense of autonomy and self efficacy. As WEF put it recently: "Traditional ESG strategies often take a top-down approach, where leadership sets goals, disseminates policies and expects results. However, this model frequently falls short. Employees may perceive ESG efforts as mandates imposed from above rather than shared goals, leading to disengagement. Without a connection to their daily roles or a clear understanding of why these initiatives matter, employees are less likely to contribute meaningfully."

Behavioural science gives us a much greater probability of identifying what really motivates or blocks action in this complex and nuanced field, making it easier for us to develop the right messaging and interventions. Recent examples of applying behavioural insights successfully include applying ‘Social Identity’ theory*, harnessing the power of peers and ‘significant others’, and looking at engagement challenges through the lens of ‘social norms’ –all of which have enabled us to amplify impact.

5. Set different goals

As communications leaders we need to shift mindset and goals, moving from building internal awareness to meaningful capability- building and behaviour change that we can measure. Communications and sustainability teams need to double down on collaboration with HR, operations, compliance and other functions to think about how sustainability can be embedded more meaningfully and sustainably into the employee experience and journey, ensuring that it becomes more of a powerful and present social norm –part of onboarding, performance management and other processes.

6. Enable advocacy

A compelling reason to communicate more actively with employees is that they are a highly credible and powerful means of communicating externally. Whilst research shows that many people can tend to disbelieve corporate voices, it also shows that they are more likely to believe what an employee says. By providing employees with interesting, credible, social-friendly content –and encouraging or even incentivising them to share the content through their social networks we can fill some of the void left by reduced external communications activity.

7. And let’s get the tactical details right, too

To earn scarce employee attention, we need to be constantly raising our communications game, deploying data and behavioural science insights at a tactical level to ensure that we create communications and engagement programmes that combine the right interventions at the right moments. We need to create cleverly timed ‘nudges’, attuned to employees’ daily lives, targeting specific moments and behaviours. We need to create more inherently valuable content and experiences, more genuinely credible and eye-opening insights, more emotional storytelling, more participative experiences, and even sophisticated gamification.

And finally, on an executional level there is a bigger need than ever to communicate data to evidence our claims, achievements and progress –so we need to up our game on data visualisation. In the right hands simple data can deliver a powerful punch. Let’s be braver in applying creativity and technology to make our data more live, rich and interactive. One of our clients recently based an entire employee engagement programme focused on sustainability around tech-powered data visualisation, bringing critical ESG stats to life in a way that really got people talking.

Conclusion

In a constrained external environment, internal sustainability communications is no longer a ‘nice to have’ -it’s a strategic driver of performance. The organisations that recognise this will accelerate ahead. The ones that don’t will struggle to turn ambition into impact.

* Social Identity theory, developed by Henri Tajfel and John Turner in the 1970s, posits that a person’s sense of self is derived from the groups they see themselves belonging to. Individuals adopt the identity of the group they feel they belong to and act according to group norms, which means that these social identities have a powerful effect on their behaviour.

To find out more about how we can help you to enhance your internal sustainability communications and engagement email [email protected]\