Employee CSR engagement: what to do after awareness-raising?

Kick-off webinar, climate workshop, sustainability week: most companies now know how to raise awareness among their teams. The hard part starts the next day. Once the room is empty and the slides are archived, what actually changes in everyday work habits, commuting, purchasing and team routines?

For a CSR, QWL (quality of working life) or HR department, the question is no longer “how do we inform people?” but “how do we make engagement last?”. At EcoTizen we call this the problem of what comes after: information is not what is missing, the follow-through is.

This article offers a practical way of looking at it in three steps: understand why momentum fades, identify the levers that help sustain it, then choose a few indicators to steer it. The figures quoted come from public surveys, listed at the end of the article. When a passage reflects our practice or a hypothesis rather than data, we say so.

The Medef CSR barometer, carried out by the Verian institute in July 2025 among 1,800 private-sector employees, reports that one employee in two can identify at least one CSR action taken by their company, and that 67% can identify at least one environmental action. In other words, a significant share of teams cannot point to any concrete action.

The FACE-OpinionWay barometer (December 2024) shows the other side, trust: 54% of employees see their employer’s social and environmental commitment as mere communication rather than real change.

These surveys measure perception. They do not measure the effectiveness of awareness-raising actions and do not explain why momentum fades. Three explanations seem plausible to us. They are working hypotheses, unsourced, to be tested with your own teams:

- No gesture to repeat afterwards. The event informs, but offers nothing to do again the following Monday.

- No group. A lone, individual commitment fades faster when nobody around shares it.

- No visible feedback. Without feedback on what was done, the effort goes unseen and is quickly perceived as communication.

A short questionnaire a month after an awareness event is often enough to tell which explanation applies in your company: “Have you done anything differently since?”, “What stopped you?”, “Did you see a result?”.

The three levers below come from practice in collective engagement and from our working hypotheses. They are not drawn from a quantified study.

Lever 1: a short, repeatable, verifiable action. The more time, explanation or equipment an action requires, the more likely it is to be dropped. An action that takes a few minutes, can be repeated every week and can be shown to have been done (a photo, a ticked box) is more likely to become a habit than a general pledge such as “I’ll pay attention”.

Lever 2: work as a team. Team-based engagement changes the nature of the effort: people act for a group, see others act, and can nudge one another. It is also easier for a manager to run than an individual instruction. One caution: use teams that already exist (department, site, project) rather than artificial groups.

Lever 3: make the result visible, quickly and regularly. Every participant should be able to answer “what came of it?” without waiting for the annual report. On this point, the FACE-OpinionWay barometer indicates that, among employees who believe their company is committed to social or environmental causes, 74% say they are proud of it, 72% feel more motivated and 71% find meaning in it. These are self-reported answers: they show an association, not a demonstrated effect of engagement on motivation.

The three levers work together. A short action without a group fades, a group without a concrete action remains a discussion circle, and a result without an action is just a press release.

What is easy to count (webinar attendees, emails opened) measures exposure, not engagement. To steer what comes after, a few indicators are enough:

- Participation rate: what share of invited people actually act, not just sign up.

- Regularity: how many of them are still acting after four or six weeks, not only in the first week.

- Breakdown by team or site: where momentum takes hold, where it does not, and why.

- Actions completed: a volume of concrete actions, rather than a declared intention.

Our recommended method, drawn from practice rather than from a study: start with a pilot of a few weeks on a limited scope (one site, two or three teams), with a simple goal and a review shared with participants. This lets you adjust before scaling up, and gives management factual feedback rather than a promise.

This is exactly the setting EcoTizen was designed for: a mobile app of team challenges (points, rankings, photo proof) that gives employees something to do and a team to do it with, and a steering dashboard that lets CSR, QWL and HR teams track participation and export reports. If you would like to see how this fits with your own awareness-raising actions, book a meeting with the EcoTizen team to discuss it.

https://www.rse-magazine.com/lavis-des-salaries-francais-sur-la-rse-ce-que-revele-le-barometre-2025-du-medef/ (Medef CSR Barometer 2025, Verian, 1,800 employees, 23-30 July 2025) ;

https://www.medef.com/uploads/media/default/0020/07/16972-medef-baro-rse-et-egalite-2025-rapport-publie-oct25-vdef.pdf (source report of the 2025 Medef barometer) ;

https://www.carenews.com/face-la-fondation-pour-l-inclusion/news/barometre-face-opinionway-2e-edition-les-salaries-en (FACE-OpinionWay Barometer, 2nd edition, December 2024)