A few days ago I read Belz & Peattie’s Sustainability Marketing blog post about the importance of the commitment of employees in building a strong sustainability brands. Having just taught the team lecture with my group about sustainability marketing transformations, I also feel that empowered employees is one of the more important “essentials” for transformations discussed in Chapter 11 of our textbook, because employees represent the company and they are usually who the consumers interact with regularly. Their actions and thoughts must be consistent with the sustainability objectives of the business and they must have the brains and the passion to make the changes towards sutsainability, such as by implementing organizational process or information systems.
Belz & Peattie described a typology of 4 types of employees: 
Weak links, Bystanders, Loose Cannons, and Champions.
Taken from: http://www.sustainability-marketing.com/2010/09/employees-as-sustainability-brand.html
It seems that the weak links may be problematic for a company, since they don’t understand the meaning of the sustainability brand and they just don’t care. But although bystanders have the a deeper understanding, they aren’t committed to sustainability and they may actually undermine the brand. So how can a company transform and inspire these people?
As Melissa indicated in her blog post about BC’s green economy, the green job market is growing rapidly in BC. I see this as an opportunity but perhaps also a risk. It is an opportunity for companies to renew their employee base because they can recruit those who are seeking sustainability-related careers, often fresh grads who may be the Champions that they are looking for. This group of employees can then inspire and educate the existing employees on a peer-to-peer basis, making the whole organizational culture more ingrained with sustainability. However, a lot of job seekers may also engage in “window-dressing”; that is, they may just be exaggerating or feigning their commitment to sustainability for the sake of impressing employers. Perhaps they are just Bystanders who know about sustainability but don’t genuinely care… so green-focused companies must attract and recruit employees with caution.
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