How to… Engage Employees with Green Initiatives

There's a classic team-building exercise that employees undertake when sent out on those infamous company retreats. One person falls back and their colleague catches them before they fall. I always found this a bit of an extreme, and pointless, practice - of course your colleague isn't going to let you end up in A&E with a concussion, but does that reveal anything about how you engage together at work?
When it comes to green initiatives engaging employees and getting them on board with new practices and processes are critical to success. But thankfully there are steps businesses can take to increase the chances of successful employee engagement and thankfully there's nary the threat of a head wound:

Make it fun. It might seem a bit cheesy but employees do engage best with a green initiative when they work together in small manageable groups and use fun, creative and encouraging ways to promote green best practices.

Generate competition between departments. For example, when encouraging people to turn things off run league tables of which departments or floors of an office are best at turning things off. Prizes can be awarded, but generally the pride of coming top (or shame of coming bottom) is a good spur, and it works better than naming and shaming individuals. You can also reward the most improved team. And an added bonus - managers do not want to manage the worst team, so they can get really involved!

Create displays of how much energy or waste is being used by employees. For example, one company Global Action Plan worked with built a tower of printer paper boxes in their atrium to show everyone just how much paper was being used in that building in one week. Combined with briefings on how to change their printer settings to default double sided print such displays are a recipe for change.

Police green progress. One good tip is to get someone from within the company's green team (we like to refer to them as environmental champions) to perform monitor checks in the evenings to see who has left their monitors on after hours. Some firms have rewarded those who have turned their monitors and computers off, with a croissant, or smiley face sticker. While those who left their equipment switched on come in to find a sad face sticker or a balloon tied to their monitor representing the CO2 they wasted. It might sound cheesy, but again it has been proved to work.

Get managers to walk the talk. Could the MD be picked up by other workers for a week to launch car sharing? Similarly it may be a not be to every businesses' tastes but one potentially effective idea is for a "shop the manager" programme, where a manager's team could pick them up if they do something that is environmentally damaging without a good reason. Obviously managers would need to be brought in to doing this, but such a scheme has the dual benefit of highlighting that "everybody isn't perfect" as well as showing that if "even the managers" can clean up their act then everybody else can be encouraged to follow suit.

Measure your environmental impact and communicate it to employees effectively. Whether it is how many trees worth of paper they use in a year, how many pieces of paper per day, how many thousands of plastic cups they use in a year, or their current recycling rate against what percentage of waste could actually be recycled. These figures are a powerful, scaled-down message that communicates environmental impacts to individuals far better than difficult to comprehend Mega watt hours or tonnes of carbon.

In short, when communicating green policies and initiative to employees try and do something that is memorable and is still talked about a year after the stunt or activity was run. Successful engagement has a fabulous ripple effect.

Amy Sims is communications manager at Global Action Plan.