With the cancellation and postponement of most in-person employee engagement opportunities during the COVID-19 pandemic, CA Clean Air Day offers a unique opportunity to continue to engage your employees and colleagues around one of the most important issues to California communities: sustainability. 

By pledging as an organization, you can support and empower your team to take collective action to address one of the underlying issues that affect community health and in fact exacerbates the impact of the Corona virus (which is a respiratory virus). 

Study after study shows that engaging your employees on issues of social importance helps give them meaning in their job, and doing it as a group creates a sense of belonging — these two emotions lead to increased productivity, retention, and general happiness of your employees. And in times like these, that’s exactly what’s needed.

So, how do you do it; how can you use Clean Air Day to serve your employees? 

As with all employee engagement programs, forming a small committee of interested employees allows you to socialize the idea faster, remove the appearance that it’s a top-down mandate, and create the structure so that if the one champion you have leaves the organization, the effort doesn’t disappear. 

After that, have them set goals; how many people will you try to get to sign up? A percent number? A specific number over last year? Knowing what you’re working towards helps build momentum and encourages people to be a part of something. Also, make sure that the effort connects back to your business goals and values — this activity shouldn’t be an outlier in solution.

And remember, your organization’s leaders are the key to employee participation. Make sure that your top officers and leaders are not just encouraging participation but are demonstrating “walking the walk” of taking the pledge. Further, recognition of employees who are both planning and participating in the project from top leaders will build momentum and validate this project’s value to the entire team.

What makes Clean Air Day unique in this regard is the ability for you to track participation and understand what your people are finding important. 

Clean Air Day offers unique opportunities for engagement due to its tracking components. Since each employee participates by taking the individual pledge, organizations get a report (in real-time through a back-end login) to show who is participating, what they’re doing, etc. (for employees and customers who choose to share their info). This component allows the creation of friendly competition between divisions, departments, or even business locations, creating team connections and camaraderie that has been missing in the first half of 2020.

Using this data allows you to continue to support the priorities of your people. If 80% of your team say they plan to plant a home garden, you can support that effort by having an internal home garden competition with prizes.

And as a bonus, you can also have a custom link to use with your customers and clients to encourage their participation. You can use that to engage with those that sign up and use social media to get a wider recognition for your participation and employee commitments!

Clean Air Day is designed to be done in an accessible way to all Californians. Business leaders can take the opportunity to continue to engage their employees and address air pollution at a time when both issues are needed more than ever!

Feel free to reach out to us at  california@cleanairday.org if you have questions about how you can build an employee engagement project around CA Clean Air Day.