The greenest companies in Britain with the most environmentally aware staff will be unveiled in The Sunday Times Green List next week. Competition among the country’s businesses to be included in the inaugural list of the 50 Best Green Companies has been fierce. Standards are exceptionally high and the demands placed on companies sufficiently stringent to deter all bar those confident of their green credentials.

The criteria for the contest are unique. The Sunday Times Green List is not the only environmental contest open to organisations large and small, but it is the only one that includes a measure of workforce engagement with a business’s green initiatives. It is the only one that measures whether a company’s green sheen is more than skin deep.

No amount of glossy literature from corporate social responsibility departments, no snowstorm of recycling programmes, no “greenwashing” of a company’s environmental record can carry it to success in this contest. Here, the last say goes to the employees, whose views on the company’s environmental record played a significant part in determining the final rankings.

Companies had to score well in two separate surveys to make the top 50.

First, the employer survey covered environmental management policies, environmental training and internal consultation, energy consumption, waste production and recycling. This accounted for 70% of the final ranking.

Then the employee survey put 60 statements on the company’s green practices to staff which they rated from “strongly agree” to “strongly disagree”. The statements ranged from “my organisation always does what is best for the environment” and “my boss encourages me to think about energy saving” to “my organisation always goes for the cheapest, rather than the most environmentally friendly option” and “my workplace is too warm when the weather is cold”. Employee responses to these statements accounted for 30% of the final ranking.

The surveys were devised by The Sunday Times in collaboration with Bureau Veritas, the leading international firm of environmental consultants, and Munro Global, the respected data analysis company.

“The survey is radically different to anything else in the marketplace in the way it measures the engagement of employees with what the company is doing for the environment,” says Ken Smith, director of environmental management at Bureau Veritas. “No other survey does this.”

The survey will become a benchmark for environmental excellence against which companies will be able to measure their own performance year-on-year and that of other businesses operating in their commercial field or at a similar level of environmental impact.

“I hope the survey will be a catalyst for change,” says Smith. “The information gathered will be used by organisations to improve their communications and the engagement of the workforce as opposed to being something of interest just to those at the centre of an organisation.”

In all, 88 companies registered for the competition. Many more fell by the wayside, unable to embrace the level of scrutiny demanded, with the employee survey a hurdle felt by some to be too difficult to clear.

The final league table of the 50 Best Green Companies to be published on May 18 will be accompanied by five further league tables, one for each of the separate competitions that companies entered to ensure parity.

The five competitions were: Big and mid-sized companies (with 250 or more employees) with high environmental impact. Big and mid-sized companies with medium environmental impact. Big and mid-sized companies with low environmental impact. Small companies (with between 50 and 249 employees) with high and medium environmental impacts. Small companies with low environmental impact.

The competition attracted businesses large and small, ranging from an employer with 74,000 staff on the payroll – at HBOS, the banking giant – down to just 50 at Greencare H2O, a company specialising in providing workplace mains water-fed water coolers to replace environmentally unfriendly bottled water supplies delivered by van.

The final 50 Best Green Companies were surprisingly well balanced in terms of size, being made up of nine big companies (with 5,000 or more employees), 22 mid-sized firms (with 250 to 4,999 employees) and 19 small enterprises (with between 50 and 249 employees).

There is a similarly diverse range when it comes to effects on the environment, ranging from high impact businesses such as Total Exploration & Production, the fourth-largest oil and gas operator in the North Sea, to low-impact concerns such as Loughborough Students’ Union.

As with The Sunday Times’ sister survey, the 100 Best Companies to Work For, a number of key trends immediately become apparent when looking at the survey results.

For example, smaller companies generally score better in the employee survey than larger rivals. This is likely to be because it is much easier for management to convey their green message when the staff are numbered in dozens or hundreds, than it is when staff numbers run into thousands and tens of thousands.

The larger companies can be at a greater advantage when it comes to resourcing and devising green initiatives. The policies are often the result of a corporate social responsibility (CSR) department, a function that in a smaller company might be the responsibility of just one person splitting their time between green issues and other CSR-related concerns.

The different advantages enjoyed by companies of various sizes and environmental impacts balanced themselves out across the competition, making it possible to construct a single league table featuring all of the 50 Best Green Companies without having to weight the “green scores” according to a company’s size and environmental impact.

Just how consistent the survey has been across the different sectors and sizes is evident in the overall top 10 companies, which is made up of four big, one mid-sized and five small companies, of which two are operating in high, five in medium and three in low environmental impact areas.

“Companies big and small with high and low environmental impacts are all bound by common goals,” says Richard Caseby, managing editor of The Sunday Times.

“The 50 Best Green Companies demonstrate that you must have a link between the environmental aims and policies emanating from the boardroom and the people who will largely put them into practice on the shop floor,” says Caseby.

The result is not, however, a list of Britain’s greenest companies. If it were, renewable energy businesses and those operating in low impact areas would dominate it. Rather, it is list of green companies with committed senior management whose workforces are willing participants in the drive to be environmentally friendly.

The accent in the survey is on outright environmental performance measured by change. It is quite possible, for example, for a high net polluting petrochemical company to score better than a legal practice where paper and toner recycling is the limit of the green challenge.

Companies have been required to reveal their energy consumption, recycling measures and waste production figures for year-to-year comparison. Those achieving the most significant annual improvements gained the greatest rewards.

On the other hand, breaches of environmental legislation were also examined. The fact that these have occurred in some of our top 50 companies did not preclude them from making the list of the best, so long as their response to the breach removed the likelihood of it happening again and demonstrated a lesson learnt.

Every company making the final 50 was subjected to rigorous data verification to ensure they were achieving everything that was claimed. The Sunday Times Green List will become an industry benchmark by setting the highest possible standards in the judging.

Bureau Veritas verified a sample of data from each company. Evidence was required to support claims of companies’ environmental management systems, and where this failed to match the claims made in the employer survey marks were deducted. Also, more than 25% of the companies were subject to a site visit by Bureau Veritas’ environmental consultants.

The winners of the first Sunday Times Best Green Companies Awards will be presented with their trophies at a special ceremony on May 14, to be held on London’s South Bank.

All 50 companies that have made the first Sunday Times Green List will know their green policies are genuinely making a difference and are well understood by their workers.

The challenge for companies who will follow in their carbon footprints in 2009 is to ensure that while their green credentials remain impeccable, they do not score badly on employee engagement by failing to explain their green aims and policies.

For now, let’s prepare to celebrate the success of this year’s winners.

— Each of the Best Green Company Award trophies to be presented on May 14 is a unique work of art that echoes the Awards’ logo of a half globe and sprouting leaves. They have been handcrafted by sculptor Zoe Rubens, right, partly out of metal components from the printing presses at Wapping, east London, decommissioned this year after 22 years of printing The Sunday Times.

Rubens specialises in brazing and welding reclaimed objects in her studio in East Anglia, and exhibits at the New Academy Gallery in London. www.zoerubens.com