Transforming Inspiration for Environmental Sustainability into Self-Organized Action at Lam Research

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This case study focuses on the way in which Lam Research recognized employee passion for environmental sustainability through the development of the Lam Employee Sustainability Community (LESC). As an employee-led initiative, LESC has nurtured an inclusive and diverse community of Lam employees furthering environmental sustainability by leveraging education, employee-led projects, and community volunteerism. The top-level corporate strategy at Lam supports the work of LESC, and LESC itself operates at two reinforcing levels of activity. At the
first level are projects focused on corporate campus and community. Here, LESC facilitates the self-organization of teams to tackle environmental sustainability issues in the workplace or close to where employees live, the results of which are shared widely and made very visible in the organization. These actions also help to set a culture that drives initiatives at the second level: the pursuit of sustainable product and process innovations that are evaluated for implementation across product lines. These two levels of action support each other, and the case further illustrates a top-down and bottom-up approach to transform sustainability-inspired initiatives into action.

Key takeaways:

The case study generates four key take-aways for corporate leaders who want to engage employees with self-organized sustainability efforts aligned with a corporate sustainability strategy:

1. Give employees autonomy and voice for gaining ownership in sustainability initiatives.
2. Empower employees to move from passive participation to active engagement.
3. Leverage corporate campus and community efforts to help reinforce broader product and process innovations.
4. Connect top-down support with bottom-up community.