Employee-driven sustainability performance assessment in public organisations

Organisations are increasingly adopting sustainability performance assessment tools. However, these formal organisational sustainability assessments are typically managed and prepared by technical staff. There is a lack of research on approaches that enable a stakeholder-driven performance assessment. This paper develops a framework of informal/complementary stakeholder-driven sustainability performance assessment, from the perspective of employee voluntary collaboration. The framework composes a checklist of questions covering the main sustainability domains: perceptions, individual practices, and voluntary monitoring indicators. In an exploratory case study in a public organisation, the checklist was evaluated by employees in a participatory workshop. The evaluation criteria of understanding and usefulness were rated more positively than reliability. This paper shows a novel way of integrating employee inputs for informal sustainability assessment and supports the importance of empowering public organisations, thereby increasing their understanding of sustainability management frameworks.