Encouraging sustainable behaviors, including creative ways of incentivizing sustainability among workers, is being weighed all throughout the EU. A German soccer team recently included the option for a sustainability bonus in their contracts, which considers the impact of certain behaviors and rewards employees who make sustainable choices.
“The soccer team incentivized what employees actually eat,” said Alexander Schlicht, vice president of legal at Osborne Clarke in New York City. “This is highly controversial.”
These clauses are not yet widespread, and the logistics and feasibility of them are still in question. With a sustainability clause, companies set up a metric system that measures certain employee behaviors—even travel.
“Broadly speaking, it’s incentivizing everything [that] is sustainable,” Schlicht said. “In this case the employer introduced a point system to determine the bonus calculations; depending on how many points the employees actually earned the bonus is paid out.”
Companies can work to provide more sustainable options that employees can take advantage of, like offering electric bicycles for commuting to work, as a prerequisite to make sustainability bonuses feasible. It’s also a feature that employees can opt into or opt out of.
"In European countries, there are good employment protections,” Schlicht said. “When you say you don’t want to have such a clause included in your contract, you don’t have to expect...
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