
White Paper: How to recognise differences in workforce attitudes towards sustainability
Recognize differences in workforce attitudes towards sustainability and design an effective employee engagement with sustainability program.
With rising office energy costs impacting all types of business, attention is turning to the best way to achieve short term savings. Dovetailing energy consumption measurement with employee based action shows the way ahead.
Based on information from Catalyst Commercial, as at the end of September 2022 the current trend line for the wholesale gas price (450p per therm) is now over 9 times higher than the equivalent in October 2021 (50p per therm). While skyrocketing consumer energy bills have made headlines, the impact energy price rises are having on commercial users, landlords and occupiers of property is only just beginning to show up in higher running costs.
So what choice and options do employers and facilities management companies have when it comes to reducing costs?
Whilst many will quite rightly seize the opportunity to promote a Net Zero policy, it’s not the only choice available. Indeed, moving to renewable energy is perhaps too much of a long term aim to reduce bills immediately, whereas using less energy in the buildings that are in use today has much more scope for short term savings.
The team at SAV Systems show this succinctly as an inverted pyramid, where using less energy and using energy more efficiently hold the keys to success.
When it comes to short term savings, there are six simple ways to raise awareness on business office energy consumption – whether that is heat, light, cooling or water consumption:
A key tenet of being able to realise savings is to make employees more consciously aware of both energy consumption as well as energy waste. There is a lot more you can do beyond just communication posters in the office or information on the company intranet. It’s all about changing behaviours – one tiny change at a time.
Behavioural change apps like Ailuna raise to front of mind the simple steps that individuals can take – both in the office or at home. Whether it is switching the lights off, saving water or turning the heating down, these are all habits that are good for the individual (at home), good for the business (in the office) and ultimately good for the planet. It is when these habits become second nature – being consciously competent – that the greatest results can be achieved.
In order to realise the savings from reduced energy consumption and waste, it’s a key requirement to have an office building measurement system that is able to report and track usage, so that changes in occupant behaviour can be translated into direct savings. Products like EnergiRaven from SAV Systems provide the tools to be able to account for these changes.
Once you have line of sight on sustainable office energy reduction and the direct correlation to financial spend, then you have the insight that can be fed into the cultural awareness and education programmes that drive employee habit forming change. Put simply, you can’t do one without the other.
What Ailuna can do is create a series of challenges – called actions – that employees choose to take. They focus on a single action at a time, and do this same task repeatedly over a period of time (up to 30 days) until a new habit is formed. Along the way they get support from the community of colleagues who have either mastered the action – acting as mentors – or others who are currently taking the action where peer group support is provided.
The collective outcome across a cohort of employees is to make change stick. Tools like leader boards, badges for action completion and peer group recognition all reinforce the collective sense of achievement. And even better than this is that you can make it fun – by creating team and site based competitions – whether that is recognising the lowest square foot energy consumption by building, or by recognising the team who has achieved the great improvements month on month. Mix and match the games and tactics to keep everyone engaged.
What we know from other studies into human behaviour is the simple act of informing someone where they lie in a league table can act as a catalyst to take action. In the world of personal exercise and the desire to stay healthy, fitbit type gadgets use tracking and algorithms to monitor everything from the number of steps taken to how many calories are burned. By providing this data instantaneously, and allowing it to be shared, these tools do more than inform. They reinforce, motivate and reward by turning exercise into a game.
Recognize differences in workforce attitudes towards sustainability and design an effective employee engagement with sustainability program.
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