How TD Bank Measures Employee Engagement in 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.

Continue reading about the TD Bank interview on 2degrees >>

Written by Marissa Beechuk and Margie Flynn, BrownFlynn.

BrownFlynn is a leading, award-winning corporate social responsibility and sustainability consulting firm. All of BrownFlynn’s business is derived from sustainability consulting, communications and training services. The Firm advises Fortune 500 and privately held companies on how to integrate responsible practices into their business strategies, and how to communicate these practices internally and externally for bottom-line impact.