At least two recent surveys have looked at sustainability in the workplace, one from the employee side, the other from the employer side—both want more sustainability in the work place, but the path to getting there is as murky as a brown cloud.

Last week WattzOn, which offers a free online energy management platform, introduced a survey that looked at employee perception of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and the environment. The WattzOn survey found that 76 percent of US employees want their employer to take actions that can help protect the environment. In fact, more than a fifth (20.8 percent) said they’d be willing to accept a pay cut to work for a company that takes strong action to protect the environment. WattzOn surveyed 500 geographically representative employees across the spectrum of employment including finance, healthcare, IT, management, legal, retail, real estate and others.

It appears executives are also increasingly concerned about sustainability as well. An Ernst & Young Report “2013 six growing trends in corporate sustainability”, which was released in May 2013, found that more than half the companies it surveyed were aligned on both mandated and voluntary sustainability disclosures. It also found that companies doing the best have also aligned their sustainability efforts with their financial goals—and their boards and CEOs are involved in sustainability. However, only 36 percent of the respondents said that both the CEO and board were fully engaged in sustainability efforts (some such companies are B Corporations). The survey included responses from 282 companies with revenue greater than $1 billion annually.

“Across corporate America, executives are increasingly focusing more attention on the risks and opportunities around sustainability” said Steve Starbuck, americas leader, Climate Change and Sustainability Services, with Ernst & Young. “However, most companies still are not actively engaging in scenario planning, which means company awareness has not translated into the necessary preparedness that would minimize risk and maximize opportunities for their organization.”

The WattzOn study found that employers want their employers to do more. In fact, just over a quarter (27 percent) of US workers were very satisfied with their employer’s efforts to help the environment.

“Employees are demanding more effort from their employers in developing programs to help protect the environment at the office and at home,” said Steven Ashby, co-founder and chief product officer of WattzOn. “More can be done to protect the environment through energy efficiency and savings on water and gasoline use. US employees are looking for the tools to help them make environmentally-beneficial changes to their behavior and would like to receive these tools through their employer’s benefits and corporate social responsibility (CSR) programs.”
 
If employees evaluated their bosses’ sustainability efforts it’s quite likely they’d fail. The WattzOn survey showed that 47.8 percent of employees don’t think saving energy is a priority for their employer, fewer still—11.8 percent work for employers that prioritize greenhouse gas reduction.

It appears that sustainability is on the minds of executives. The Ernst & Young report found that 51 percent of companies anticipate that their core business objectives will be affected by natural resource shortages in the next 3 to 5 years. In fact, 76 percent of respondents anticipated water shortages. Other shortage anticipations surrounded energy, forest products and rare earth minerals and metals.

Still the disconnect continues. For instance, 79 percent of companies said they incorporated sustainability risks but only three in 10 companies did further investigations with scenario analyses, Ernst & Young said. That’s despite 43 percent of companies saying such integration would be helpful. The results show a considerable amount of confusion in the corporate world as to how to become more sustainable.