Considerations for Sustainable Employee Engagement as Enablers for Communication About Sustainability

Strategic sustainability communication has the potential to acculturate internal and external organisational contexts. Strategic sustainability communication could broaden societal values and social learning while building collaborative networks toward societal, environmental, and economic well-being. Arguably, internal and organisational communication is the starting point to convey and achieve an organisation’s sustainability messages and goals. Thus, this chapter takes a two-pronged approach to strategic sustainability communication from an organisational perspective. Firstly, as we argue, a necessary precondition for communication for sustainability is several considerations for sustainable employee engagement. These considerations are grounded in an approach that allows for reflectivity and encourages radical leadership thinking towards a decentralised leadership approach. Such an approach may be facilitated by the strategic communication professional as the broker of collaboration. This, arguably, contributes to the establishment of an innovation culture for curiosity-driven knowledge within an organisation. Such a culture has the potential to build a transdisciplinary response to complex problems. Secondly, these considerations for sustainable employee engagement collectively serve as enablers for communication about sustainability, addressing the sustainability issues and goals of the organisation while encouraging a desire within employees to extend these sustainability practices outside the organisation.