People

We depend on pioneering and passionate employees to advance our mission. We work hard to attract, develop, and retain people who embrace our values and who are committed to shaping a sustainable society. To enhance employees’ job satisfaction and professional contributions, we deploy various strategies. These primarily include:

Development

We continuously expand our team’s skills and capabilities to help them grow. From employee-led “lunch and learns” to attending conferences, employees receive ongoing professional development. In 2017, our employees hosted workshops on the benefits of biking and foodservice industry trends and came together to watch Chasing Coral, a documentary about the impacts of coral bleaching. For 2018, we renewed our goal of doing three employee lunch and learns. To reinforce our commitment to good corporate citizenship, we ask employees to incorporate at least one sustainability goal in their development plans. This helps them be mindful of their own impacts and raise the bar on our performance. In 2017, 95% of our employees set a sustainability goal as part of their annual performance plan.

Inclusion

Eco-Products is located in a community that is not very ethnically diverse, so we participated in B Corp’s Inclusive Economy Challenge to learn more and challenge ourselves to make our company more inclusive. To expand the diversity of our pool of candidates for open positions, we publicize job openings with diverse industry associations. In 2018, we plan to institutionalize this process to ensure that we are increasing our network and encouraging diversity within our workforce.

We also began engaging people locally who live in underrepresented communities about Zero Waste practices. We coordinated and hosted a bilingual Zero Waste Fest on American Recycles Day to build awareness of the benefits of waste diversion in our neighbor community of Longmont. We felt that Longmont was a good candidate for this event because of its diverse population and the recent implementation of a residential curbside organics collection program.

We had eight organizations attend that focus on Zero Waste or food waste issues to share their great work with the community. This included local businesses, nonprofits, and city government departments. We plan to host our next event in a diverse and underserved neighborhood in the Denver metro area in 2018.

Outreach

We believe sustainable companies build sustainable communities, which is why we give our time and donate products to organizations working to address social and environmental issues. We donated products to more than 100 non-profits and civic institutions in 2017. We are proud to be able to support so many organizations that are setting the example for bettering their community. Additionally, we offer employees one day (eight hours) of paid time off to support a cause of their choice each year. To encourage employees to use this benefit, we set a goal to have 55% of our staff take a day off to volunteer in 2017 – which we exceeded! In fact, 60% of our employees used some of their paid volunteer time.