Environmental Behaviour Change Guide 101

• Report rights infringement
• published: 14 Feb 2012
• views: 1608

A video guide to successful staff engagement for energy, sustainability and environmental managers who want to engage their workforce during Climate Week. Video Transcript Hi there. Welcome to Envido's environmental Staff Behaviour Change 101. We're here today to give you a few hints and tips on how best to run a staff engagement programme to enable your organisation to meet its environmental objectives such as saving energy, reducing carbon emissions or cutting down on waste and increase employee awareness. If you've got any questions or would like any advice, then please don't hesitate to contact us. Now you're probably already aware of the benefits of a staff engagement programme, from reduced energy costs to increased reputation, both externally to your clients and your customers, but also internally amongst employees who are keen to work for an environmentally friendly organisation. The main problem that people find with their staff engagement programme is that they forget to set objectives at the beginning, and this means at the end of the programme, they can't evaluate how successful they've been. So we would always conduct KAP analysis, which is a study of knowledge, attitudes, and practices, as it allows a baseline of staff understanding, perceptions and readiness for change to be established before any sort of engagement programme is implemented. This allows you to measure and monitor the impact you are having. It could be something as simple as doing an energy assessment walk around a building, floor or department to see how many people are leaving their computer monitors, or conducting waste audits and seeing what people are recycling and what they're not. But basically these simple actions establish a baseline level so you can see monitor the progress you are making or and the overall changes that your programme has had and how successful it has been. So once you've established your objectives, it's important to analyse your audience and to assess what motivates them to change their behaviour. So I'm sure you can think of a number of people within your organisation who don't care about the environment and are just interested in saving money. That's fine. But there are also the other people that are interested in the environment, and so it's important to make sure that the messages that you send out are capturing both of these groups of people and that you can then ensure that you're engaging with everyone within the organisation and capturing as many people as possible. Once you've established what these messages should be, it's important to continually reiterate these messages to people because you can tell people something once and they won't do it. You need to keep telling them and telling them until it becomes ingrained in their behaviour. So we would suggest running a themed approach, like we did with Santander's employee environmental Go green campaign, where we focused on energy, waste, and travel, and this helps to break down the huge part of the environment into smaller, bite-sized chunks that people can understand and can get their head around a lot easier. We also suggest using a number of different channels so that you reach the maximum number of employees. Some employees won't read their emails, but are really interested in environmental e-learning or training, or we can do something as simple as putting posters on the back of toilet doors because you've got a captive audience there and people will tend to read these messages. So there are a number of ways of engaging with staff both online and offline, or it could be something as simple as setting up a Facebook page to encourage staff to send in their ideas about how they can reduce their energy use or their environmental impacts, and you can respond to that. So it's encouraging that two-way interaction. It's also important to consider timing when you're sending out your communications. So you don't want to launch a campaign when there is a bigger organisational change happening, or you also don't want to send out a message about keeping warm during the summer because people are going to be too hot. So it's important to make sure that your messaging is relevant and that the timing is appropriate for the communications that you're sending out. Finally, again think about the trigger for people. Think about what motivates people to change their behaviour or act the way they are, and show them the benefits of changing their behaviour and making it relevant to them. Finally, don't forget to evaluate the efforts that you've done and show the success that you've achieved through your engagement programme. This will help you to state your business case for future work and hopefully engage with your staff more. Again, if you've got any questions or would like to get in touch, please feel free to do so.