Originally published March 2021. Updated August 2026. 

Employee engagement remains one of the biggest challenges facing organizations. According to Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026, only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025, down from 23% at the recent peak. Gallup estimates that low engagement costs the global economy more than $10 trillion in lost productivity.

The challenge is not simply about making employees happier. Engagement is about whether people feel connected to their work, their colleagues, and the organization they work for. Factors such as recognition, leadership, development opportunities, a sense of belonging, and whether employees feel their work has meaning influence it.

Sustainability can play a role here, particularly when employees are invited to participate rather than simply being told what their company is doing. Tree planting is one way companies can turn sustainability from an abstract corporate commitment into something employees can see, explore, and be part of.

From sustainability statement to personal experience

Many companies now have environmental targets, sustainability reports, and climate or nature commitments. Employees may know those initiatives exist, but that does not necessarily mean they feel connected to them. The experience changes when employees receive something tangible and personal.

Imagine welcoming a new employee with a real tree planted in their name. Instead of simply being told that the company supports reforestation, the employee can virtually visit the tree, see where it is growing, learn about the species and the person caring for it, and explore the wider company forest. The company’s sustainability program becomes something the employee can experience.

That distinction matters.

Deloitte’s research into younger generations in the workplace continues to highlight the importance of meaningful work, well-being, development, and sustainable working conditions. Employees increasingly look beyond compensation alone when considering what they value in an employer.

A tree will not by itself create an engaged workforce. But when used thoughtfully as part of a broader employee strategy, tree planting can help companies create meaningful moments, recognize people, build shared experiences, and connect employees with measurable environmental action.

Seven ways companies can use tree planting for employee engagement

1. Welcome new employees. A tree can become part of the onboarding experience. Instead of another branded item, a new employee receives a tree planted on their behalf together with information about its location, species, and local planting organization. The message is simple: as you grow with the company, something else is growing too.
2. Recognize achievements. Recognition is an important part of employee engagement. Trees can be used to celebrate project completions, exceptional contributions, promotions, sales achievements, innovation awards, or other milestones. Because the gift has a lasting environmental dimension, it can carry more meaning than a conventional reward.
3. Celebrate anniversaries and milestones. Companies can plant trees for work anniversaries, birthdays, company milestones, or other meaningful moments. Over time, those individual trees can become part of a larger company forest, creating a visible record of shared achievements.
4. Create a shared company forest. A company forest can connect individual contributions into one collective story. With EcoMatcher’s ForestTracker, employees can virtually explore the forest and see individual trees within it. A company forest can represent a team, office, sustainability program, anniversary, or global workforce. New Forest Community Messaging features can make that digital forest a shared space where participants leave messages and connect around the impact they are creating together.
5. Support employee sustainability campaigns. Tree planting can be incorporated into internal campaigns and challenges. For example, companies might plant trees when employees complete a sustainability challenge, participate in volunteering activities, reduce business travel, complete environmental training, take part in a wellness initiative, or submit ideas for making the company more sustainable. The objective should not be to turn every employee action into a transaction. Instead, trees can provide visible recognition of collective progress.
6. Make virtual and global teams feel connected. Employee engagement becomes more complex when teams are distributed across offices, countries, and time zones. A digital forest gives everyone access to the same experience regardless of location. Employees can visit their trees online, explore the wider forest, learn about the planting project, and understand how their individual tree connects to a larger initiative. For organizations using Microsoft Teams, digital tree experiences can also become part of the workplace tools employees already use.
7. Turn sustainability into an ongoing story. One of the limitations of many employee campaigns is that they are short-lived. A tree is different. It grows. That creates opportunities to revisit a forest over time, share updates, celebrate milestones, communicate progress, and continue the conversation around the organization’s sustainability efforts. Where available, EcoMatcher’s Drone Integration can add aerial before-and-after perspectives of forests, helping organizations show how landscapes develop over time.

Why transparency matters

Tree planting only creates meaningful engagement when employees trust what they are being shown. A generic statement such as “we planted 10,000 trees” tells employees very little about what happened on the ground. Where were the trees planted? What species were planted? Who planted them? Can employees actually see them?

EcoMatcher approaches this differently by combining tree planting with technology. Individual trees are recorded with information such as GPS location, species, planting date, photographs, and information about the person caring for the tree. Employees can then explore their trees digitally through TreeTracker 3D and see how they form part of the company’s wider forest. Transparency turns a sustainability claim into something employees can explore for themselves.

Making tree engagement more personal

Technology also creates new ways for people to connect with nature. EcoMatcher’s Tree Personas provide trees with distinct digital personalities while keeping the underlying tree and environmental information authentic. Employees can virtually visit their tree and interact with it through TreeChat+ in their own language, asking questions about the tree, its environment, and its impact.

The purpose is not to turn a tree into a gimmick. It is to make environmental information more approachable and encourage curiosity about trees, forests, biodiversity, and the people involved in planting them.

Different employees will engage in different ways. Some may be interested in environmental data. Others may enjoy exploring a forest in 3D, following project updates, or simply knowing that a real tree exists somewhere because of a milestone they reached. Providing different ways to experience the same environmental action can make an employee program more inclusive and engaging.

Making employee tree programs scalable

For larger organizations, employee engagement programs also need to be practical. Trees can be gifted individually or in bulk through EcoMatcher’s TreeManager. Companies can integrate tree gifting into existing processes through EcoMatcher’s API or Zapier, connecting tree planting with platforms such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify, and thousands of other applications.

This makes it possible to link trees automatically to events such as employee onboarding, anniversaries, rewards, achievements, or other predefined milestones. The technology should remain in the background. For the employee, the experience should remain simple: something meaningful happened, a real tree was planted or allocated, and they can see and explore its impact.

Designing an effective employee tree program

Companies considering tree planting for employee engagement should start with the employee experience rather than the number of trees.

Ask five simple questions:

1. What moment are we trying to make more meaningful? Onboarding, recognition, anniversaries, sustainability campaigns, or another occasion?
2. Why are we planting trees? Employees should understand the purpose of the initiative and how it connects with the company’s broader environmental strategy.
3. Can employees see what happened? Transparency and traceability make environmental action more credible.
4. Can employees participate? The strongest programs allow people to explore, learn, share, communicate, or contribute rather than simply receiving an announcement.
5. Will the story continue? A forest can grow over years. Consider how the initiative can evolve rather than treating it as a one-off campaign.

A growing connection

Employee engagement cannot be solved with one initiative. It is built through many interactions that help people feel recognized, connected, and part of something worthwhile. Tree planting can contribute to that experience when it is transparent, personal, and genuinely connected to an organization’s sustainability strategy.

A tree planted for an employee may begin as a simple gesture. Over time, thousands of those individual gestures can become a company forest and a shared environmental story that employees can continue to follow as it grows. That is where tree planting moves beyond being another sustainability activity. It becomes something people can be part of.

Start building a company forest with EcoMatcher and give employees a transparent, personal way to connect with your sustainability story, one tree at a time.