Money can't buy you love, anymore. Employees these days want more than cash for doing a job. They want the satisfaction that comes from doing something worthwhile in a productive environment.
It is now widely recognised that investing in improvements to the environmental performance of a workplace (for example, saving energy by replacing an air conditioning system with passive solar and natural ventilation mechanisms), not only saves money with regard to operational costs, but also makes money in terms of productivity gains. Such a workplace is a sustainment: an environment with the ability to sustain. In this case, a well designed workplace is not only sustaining the health of its employees, but also sustaining their commitment to their employers and thereby sustaining the whole business.
Even higher levels of loyalty and enthusiasm can be attained when sustainments are made the objective of the workplace. The motivating nature of the pursuit of sustainability is now well known: it can inspire sacrifice and creativity way in excess of the selfishness of profit or the vagueness of quality. Diverse people come together to work through seemingly intractable problems in novel ways when sustainability is their shared objective. If you want a dynamic, always learning, always innovating staff, then you need to structure your business around the development of sustainments: service-products facilitating more sustainable lifestyles and workpractices.
Sustainments sustain not only those for whom they are designed, but also, through the intellectual challenges involved in their realisation, those who design them.
