Over the last couple of years, environmental issues and sustainability became one of the hottest and most important topics in the business landscape. All these things are perfectly understandable since the shift toward more humane, rational, and environmentally friendly is not only altruistic but also has very positive financial implications.Keeping all these things in mind, going green and adopting eco-friendly practices no longer seems like an option but rather a business requirement and your employees should start adopting this new sustainable mentality.The only problem here is that a new mentality can't be mandated but rather needs to be grown into. Let's take a look then at how you can use team-building events that have a very strong track record in promoting new attitudes to help your workers lean more heavily in the green direction.Set clear goals and success indicatorsEssentially, if you want to make some point, you need to be aware of what that point is Developing a greater level of environmental consciousness among your staff is great but these goals are too broad to be truly actionable. Instead, choose a bit more specific message to send and then start thinking about the team-building activities you can use to convey them more easily. Also, while you are doing that, make sure the message is actually received. Set some simple success indicators you will use to measure employees' engagement levels and how well they understand the goal of the event.Spread the message across all levelsIf you trying to change something as complex as an entire company culture, you need to make sure that the message is sent across all company leaves. Excluding any facet of your organization will create discrepancies and compromise your overall results. Make sure then that your team-building events include workers from all levels of your organization. Developing and maintaining company culture with remote workers won’t come without certain challenges but making them a part of such forays and offering perks like flexible work hours will bind them closer to your green corporate goals.Take your team-building events out into natureOne of the simplest ways to make sure your team members have understood the importance of green topics is to demonstrate the importance of preserving nature first-hand. The simplest way to do that is to take your next event out into nature and allow your employees to do something that will make an active contribution to nature preservation. As long as you are equipped with only the basic camping gear, quality folding pocket knives, and a couple of other survival kit essentials you can do anything from planting trees to removing waste from camping sites. The message will come through.Add a level of gamificationIf you want your team-building event to make a true impact you need to make sure the participants are engaged and properly motivated. The simplest way to do that, of course, is to lend the whole affair a certain degree of competitive challenges. Avoid going to extremes, though, since a head-to-head fight for valuable prizes can undermine the overall message of the event. Instead, try going with something in the vein of achievement-based prizes where all teams will be able to get rewards if they reach set milestones. This system has a much more positive effect on building team cohesion.Use team-building games to build awareness

Woman holding plant; image by Mike Greer, via Pexels.com.

In other words, your team-building activities should have some educational component. And while planting trees is, in itself, a very noble and self-explanatory activity, layering these efforts with some facts about the current state of the natural environment and how even the smallest changes can produce tangible long-term effects will have a much greater impact on your team members. Asking the help from local environmentally engaged organizations and activists will make this job much easier and probably even give you access to data, content, and personal stories that are not as widely publicized.Come up with a follow-upLast but not least, we would like to point out that, no matter how well-intentioned and effective your team-building events might be, they will produce only a short-term effect if you don't give your employees something to go home with. That can be something as simple as access to educational resources, an invitation to eco-friendly social media groups, or tips for making their workplaces more eco-friendly. You can even end on a cliffhanger and get your staff geared for future events. The only thing you can't do is let them go home without any idea what steps they need to take next.So, these were the top six ways to use your next team-building event to promote the culture of sustainability and get your workers more interested in environmental topics. As time goes by, the green agenda will start taking an increasingly important place in our society. This new sustainable environment will offer countless benefits but also require a great level of awareness and a very responsible everyday attitude. Team building events do sound like a good way to nudge your staff in this direction.