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Need another reason to be sustainable? Really? Helping the environment, reducing energy consumption, improving your bottom line and pleasing customers isn’t enough? OK, I’ve got another for you: It makes for happier employees.

Apparently, many employers aren't yet aware of this. Why else would yet another study show that a huge percentage of employees find their companies’ sustainability practices lacking? This time, it was a tally of more than 1,000 responses to an online survey for the Brighter Planet blog.

Of course, it’s an employers’ market and you could argue that most employees would cling to their jobs even if they discovered their boss planned to build a moat of toxic sludge around the building. However, companies still want to keep those trapped employees happy and attract good new employees—to enhance productivity if for no other reason.

Here are some of the findings from recent surveys showing how companies can keep their staffs happy by implementing changes that really help save money or boost profits while reaching all those other sustainability goals:

• Sustainability is a great way to utilize employees’ ideas and create a morale-boosting team atmosphere. Fewer than 15% of employees in the Brighter Planet study said their employer had an employee sustainability engagement policy. Only 35% of respondents said they can even easily share sustainability ideas with coworkers. This is nothing to sneeze at. If a company doesn’t have a way to share sustainability ideas, it may not have ways to share other information. The Economist blames some of Toyota’s current woes on a corporate culture that discourages passing information and ideas up the chain of command.
• Greenwashing doesn’t cut it. A 2008 Cisco “Sustainable Business Practice” study in the United Kingdom found that 78% of workers know whether their company has a sustainable business-practice policy. They also know a policy is more than a couple of recycling bins. Only 45% of those surveyed in the UK say their company has such a plan.
• The Cisco survey also found that 13% of UK workers say they would not work for an employer without sustainable business practice guidelines. These numbers trend higher among younger workers, according to an Australian survey. If you want the cream of the Millennial crop, you’d better get onboard with a meaningful sustainability protocol.
• “Up in the Air” may be wrong. In the Cisco survey, 48% of employees are interested in using Web and video conferencing in place of business travel. The other 52% probably mistakenly think they are going to meet George Clooney if they hang out in airport and hotel bars.
• There is a chance the competition is already ahead of you. A majority of employers that publicly share sustainability efforts said they did so as part of a sales and marketing effort, and 46% said they did so to recruit and retain good employees.
• A sustainability officer may not be as valuable as adding sustainability to the other execs’ job descriptions. Brighter Planet found that programs led by a sustainability director are one third as effective as programs for which management or the board are the main advocates.

Companies that want to hire and retain good employees need to boost sustainability. Certainly, it can’t hurt. I‘ve never heard of anyone quitting a job because the company offered recycling.