Sociabble Trees: Reward the Commitment of Your Employees by Planting Actual Trees

Sociabble and its partners gather to celebrate the launch of Sociabble Trees, an initiative that’s good for employee engagement and the environment.

Plant a tree. Grow together.

Only 13% of employees are engaged in their work, according to the Gallup report. But what if we changed our perspective, rather than just asking people to get involved? What if employees actually need meaning and concrete ideas to mobilize? What if we offered them this fresh perspective, and motivated them by giving value to their efforts? This is where we started five years ago when we launched Sociabble, first from the point of view of employee advocacy, then from internal communication, and today, more generally, as a tool of collaborative employee engagement. We introduced gamification into the platform from the beginning, and we measured the positive effects. Banking, Finance, IT, Automotive, Retail—whatever the sector, employees like to play. Points, rankings, badges: we have offered companies the opportunity to gamify engagement, so that the company can reward employee engagement directly, or so that employees can reward each other. Although this was an important step, we understood that we still had to give meaning to these points, these rankings, these badges. Rewarding employees with Amazon or other gift vouchers is an option, but it encourages the emergence of “bounty hunters.”

So we looked for ways to realign employee engagement, reward, and “meaning.” This is how the Sociabble Trees initiative was born.

With Sociabble Trees, employees are rewarded with actual trees for their engagement, and they can track the progress of their individual forest as well as its environmental impact.

The principle? Reward employee engagement by planting trees. By giving companies the opportunity to select reforestation projects around the world. By rewarding micro-commitments (participation in training, signing a contract, content created for internal communication, etc.) with tangible, quantifiable micro-rewards: trees. By making these trees even more concrete by giving each employee a website where they can visualize their forest, the plant species, and the reduction in their carbon footprint. And for the company, to offer the possibility to access the website aggregating the individual employee forests and to measure the collective reduction of its carbon footprint as well. Thus, with Sociabble Trees, it becomes possible to align an initiative of social and environmental responsibility with a concrete business objective: to engage employees for better performance. According to Gallup, the companies whose employees are the most engaged are 21% more profitable, and 17% more productive than companies with less engaged employees. Already, pioneering companies like L’Occitane, Aviva, and Carrefour have joined the Sociabble Trees program. So why not reward the commitment of your employees with trees as well?