Bosses who practise what they preach are leading the greenest companies in the UK. The Best Green Companies staff survey highlights a direct correlation between businesses that have a workforce engaged with green issues and those whose bosses are leading by example to improve the firm’s environmental performance.

“You can have all sorts of formal management processes in place but often it is an inspirational boss or leader who makes all the difference in terms of engaging staff and taking them along with him or her,” says Sarah Davidson, technical director at environmental consultancy Bureau Veritas, our partner in producing the Green List.

This seems to be the case with the companies that achieve the highest rankings on the 13 survey statements related to bosses and leadership — they are all in the top quarter of firms for overall employee scores. The six firms ranked highest by their staff overall also achieve the best six My Boss green scores.

“It’s been a good year for bosses. The scores overall have gone up,” says Will Ullstein, director of innovation at market research company Munro Global, another partner in producing this supplement. “Do they lead by example? Overall they do, if you look at the top companies.”

The average mean score across the survey is up 3.6% this year to 73.4%, and the My Boss index of the 13 statements follows this trend, with a 4.6% increase to 74%, suggesting that the engagement of employees by management around green issues is improving.

Is the increase in the My Boss index mirroring or driving the rise in the overall green score? “I think it’s part of the jigsaw,” says Ullstein.

“My boss is open to suggestions for environmental improvements” remains the best performing My Boss statement, scoring 82.5% this year, compared with 80.6% in 2008. Leaders are still committed to the environment (78.7% this year, up from 76.3% in 2008), a statement that is nudged into third place this year by “I receive regular communication on environmental issues from my employer”. This achieves a 78.8% green score compared with last year’s 72.6%.

Toby Robins, operations and environment director at office equipment company Wiles Greenworld, which is ranked sixth overall for My Boss results, is confident that communication is key. “Everyone who understands the issues will be green. It’s a matter of education,” he says.

Since last year, bosses have shown the most marked improvements in encouraging staff to use public transport or share their car to get to work, providing adequate green training (both up 6.9 percentage points) and ensuring they are aware of the international standard for environmental management ISO 14001 (up 6.6 percentage points). However, they still need to promote the use of public transport and car-sharing further, and to improve training. While scores across all areas of the survey are climbing, these are two of the five statements that don’t achieve the average survey green score of 73.4%.

Auditing departments for environmental performance, encouraging staff to get involved with community programmes and bosses leading by example are other areas for attention. These are the same five statements that didn’t meet last year’s 69.8% green score. Most worrying of these underperforming areas is perhaps bosses leading by example. Although open to ideas and happy to implement them, many leaders aren’t seeing these through in their own behaviour.

“I think it is imperative,” says Zoe Robinson, sustainable development manager at Warren Evans, the London-based bed and furniture manufacturer that beats every other company on the Green List when it comes to bosses leading the way, with its 82 employees returning a 96% score. “It is difficult to motivate anyone to do anything that you’re not willing to do yourself,” Robinson says. “We have an individual green policy for each area of the business, from delivery to the showroom. We’re keen to provide guidance for jobs, and we give managers in-depth training.”

Of the 10 top performing businesses on the My Boss index, nine are small (with between 50 and 249 employees) and one is medium-sized (employing between 250 and 4,999 staff). There aren’t any firms with 5,000 staff or more.

“It’s much easier for management to spread the green message in small companies. In big companies, you need every single manager within the business to be on board,” says Ullstein.

The highest-ranking large organisation in the My Boss index is our winner of the best big company for employee engagement award, the Environment Agency. Its 79.2% My Boss green score ranks it 17th on this measure.

Simon Dawes, manager of the agency’s internal environmental management team, says every single employee needs to know how they can make a difference. “The trick for us is to have really defined targets, down to regional and team level,” he says. “It’s a very tangible thing. Each person knows what they can do.”

With only two years of surveys to draw on, it is too early to identify any definite trends. However, managers at the low-impact firms that congregate toward the foot of the My Boss index are perhaps not leading by example as much as their counterparts in medium- and high-impact organisations because their day-to-day job doesn’t have such a direct effect on the planet as someone who works for a large construction company, for example.

Robins thinks it boils down to having green principles at the heart of how the firm operates, from post room to boardroom. “The question I try to ask is, ‘What’s the right thing to do and can we afford to do it?’ ” he says. “If there isn’t integrity — if you’re expecting people to do things you wouldn’t do — it’s just a marketing gimmick.”