Building a companywide culture of sustainability - it’s not for the faint of heart.

That was pretty much the crux of Jeffrey Hollender‘s talk today on engaging your workforce to build a sustainable brand.

It’s much easier to create a great advertising campaign than to create a culture that is reflective of the values a company has, he said right off the bat. That, in my experience, is the most challenging aspect of building an enterprise.

No shortcuts here, but plenty to gain: Seven Generation grew its business 45% last year - and looks on track to up revenues 65% this year.

But let’s begin with the baby steps. It starts with how you answer the phone, how you treat the people who clean the office, the equity of your compensation packages. Seventh Generation employees are allowed to bring dogs to office, and they get a free massage a week. These are the easy things we can do, according to Hollender.

Not so easy, maybe, is the shift in mindset necessary for step two - valuing and actively encouraging your employees’ personal development. We’re not talking Tony Robbins here. Think monthly workshops on reaching individual goals, and creating an environment in which it’s ok (really) for employees to ask any question they want. (For the record, Hollender claims he’s never gotten a question he didn’t feel comfortable answering. Can your company say the same?) It’s almost a taboo subject in the business world, he acknowledged, but as Gandhi said, we must become the change we want to see in the world.

Incremental changes are not going to get us where we want to go. We need to radically change the way think about things.

~Jeffrey Hollender, CEO, Seventh Generation

Structure of company ownership is also critical. Seventh Generation each year redistributes 1%-2% of its equity to employees. You’ve got to get employees invested building the company’s value, Hollender explained.

And the hardest part of creating a culture that represents the brand? Being brutally honest about your company’s environmental and social impacts. Seventh Generation has even gone so far as to post information on its website detailing everything that’s wrong with its products. The goal, according to Hollender, is to create a business in which all our products are not just sustainable but restorative. Aim for good, not less bad. That’s the hardest thing to achieve.

Seventh Generation calls these long-range goals global imperatives, and they govern every aspect of its business operations, from materials sourcing to manufacturing to business development to marketing.

To illustrate, here are three things Seventh Generation is up to that you won’t hear about in ad campaigns:

1. A summer partnership with Greenpeace to train college kinds to become social and environmental activists
2. A program that enables low-income Hispanic women, primarily in the housecleaning trade, to create cooperatives so they can own their own businesses
3. A drive for donations of feminine care products to supply low-income women in local communities. (At its height, the program netted half a million donations a week, without no public promotion.)

No feel-good brand boost in sight. The real payoff, according to Hollender, is that building a strong internal culture of sustainability will inevitably create a more authentic brand. We live in a world that is so devoid of authenticity, he summed up. If you can create an internal corporate culture that is passionate and committed to strong values, your consumers will cheer and support you.

~Emily Rabin Cowan, SLM Managing Editor