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Activating Green Behavior: Creating a Culture of Sustainability - Beverly, Ephi, and Allison - Room
SESSION NOTES
Big Picture Themes
- Business case and metrics matter for creating a culture of sustainability - how does it affect the bottom line?
- Appeal to personal values of employees
- Empower employees and Decentralize it - just let employees do it - ask for forgiveness later, worry how to measure it later. Let them create their "green company." It makes it hard to measure, but gives much more momentum and individual connection.
- Need top level buy in!
What Works Now or What Companies are Doing for Creating a Culture of Sustainability?
- Surveys of transportation behavior - employees reduce mileage and have been able to decrease costs of personal auto insurance
- Use incentives if employees bike, walk, etc. monetize these efforts towards employee's choice of charity. Divert savings from projects to fund employee incentives/recognition.
- Appeal to employees to understand what their impact is on a personal level
- Kids are the best teachers and promoters of "green". Keeping parents in-check. eBay plastic water bottle elimination campaign replacing with sigg reusable bottles for all employees. Educational meeting regarding life cycle of water bottle, contest getting children of employees to illustrate (art project) what water means to them.
- Drive behaviors by changing infrastructures. Example: trash bins smaller, recycle bins bigger in offices (Palm)
- Big shuttle programs - eBay helps you meet more people in the company
- Carpool matching databases available via 511.org
- Educational sessions (metrics, why did we make this change) - benefit of these changes-- communicate!
- Get Executives to walk the talk. Top level support and enforcement - CEO at Autodesk calls people out who are using plastic water bottles. Another example - Disney-Pixar Executive support helped get the ball rolling to make the changes.
- Show monetary savings, ROI
- Consolidating printers
- Green program excellent recruitment tool, recent survey shows that students may take a 10% cut in salary if they know that the company is socially responsible. Also a retention tool.
- Empowering teammates -- telling people to just go for it. Not needing to go through levels of bureaucracy.
- Find your evangelist within the organization. Empower executive admins --get them to help motivate and gain momentum.
- Align Incentives -- include it in job description (example - City of Santa Monica) -- recognition --> Many companies have not done this a lot. Include this in employee objectives. -- key to sustain behavioral change -- helps if you have an emissions reduction goal to point to this.
- Other benchmark companies such as Mark and Spencer who have company wide targeted goals.
Challenging Questions
- How do you balance being a champion vs. being a green police?
- How do you handle tradeoffs? One company gave people reusable silverware and got rid of disposables. Facilities saw a significant increase in water usage because everyone started washing them.
- How do you measure behavior change?
- Can look at energy and water bills
- It's one of the hardest things to measure - intangible
- Studies that green business lead to higher retention - attendance --> how many people come to brown bag lunches, etc.
- 511.org helps businesses (for free) to implement improved transportation for employees (carpools, shuttle buses, bikes, etc.) - has link to commute tracker.
- Annual conference - Behavior change for companies
- Global Footprints
- Sustainable Silicon Valley - runs mini-workshops on topics like - how to start a green team
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