The role of coworkers in the implementation of sustainability goals: The importance of building bridges between visions and realities

Within companies and organizations, sustainability work entails major and new demands on internal communication, leaders and coworkers. A challenge, however, is that people often deal with complex situations by simplifying and going back to established ways of working, tested tools and old plans that worked before.

Successful sustainability work in companies and organizations requires that both managers and coworkers are committed, but the coworker perspective on sustainability issues has so far been largely overlooked in research. In order to better understand how organizations use communication to achieve sustainability goals, research is needed on the actors who realize organizations' strategies, where coworkers key actors.

Sweco, has set clear sustainability goals, including becoming climate positive by 2030, but the company faces challenges when it comes to implementing sustainable methods in customer projects. On an overall level, it is relatively easy to formulate ambitious goals, but it is significantly more difficult to create commitment to them in a large organization, and to get managers and coworkers to realize them in their everyday work.

The project therefore aims to create new knowledge about the coworkers' important role in managing society's sustainability challenges, and their work in realizing Sweco's goals and strategies. Success factors as well as obstacles and challenges will be mapped.

The study will also explore coworkers' communication about sustainability issues with customers and other stakeholders. By examining these areas, the understanding of specific difficulties and opportunities that organizations face when working with sustainability and the coworker's role in this work will increase. The project puts the employees' attitudes and perceptions of sustainability and their understanding of the company's sustainability goals in relation to the daily work in focus. The project also identifies and analyzes obstacles to the use of sustainable practices and proposes methods to overcome these obstacles. The study will help Sweco improve the efficiency of its sustainability work and has the ambition to increase employees' commitment to sustainability initiatives and goals. Furthermore, the proposed project contributes to identifying priorities for Sweco linked to sustainability work so that initiatives and efforts can be focused on the most urgent issues.