Solutions Salon Breakout Session
QUESTIONS:
How do you find enough staff resources to implement energy efficiency strategies?
What’s the best way of aligning energy efficiency incentives across departments?
What’s needed to form effective cross-cutting energy efficiency teams?
How can you best engage employees on energy efficiency efforts?

What people want out of the session:

How do people within organizations create cultural change?

Best ways to integrate the energy audit, engineering, and technology across the larger organization and really get employees involved?

Best ways to encouraging multiple organizations in a particular region (Boston) to implement programs for energy efficiency?

News Corp by Rupert Murdoch – and son James – provides a good case study for taking energy efficiency across an organization’s culture. Their challenge is to use their communications platform for environmental messaging – example – at the end of the season for a popular TV show, 24, the lead actor made a global warming PSA, and News Corp got hit with a lot of negative viewer responses.

NOTES:

It’s important to start by materiality analysis and finding out what matters most in terms of your businesses impact and opportunities for energy efficiency.

Case 1: large bio-tech firm
Engagement and awareness – green building program is a big success. Employees feel a connection to the green buildings, elevated awareness, lots of PR. Operational challenges have come up, but it has been an early success.
Internal communication and coordination has been the biggest challenge. Getting the right information to the right people, in the right media (internet, presentations, portal, etc) is tough. Getting people interested, marketing and communication challenge is tough. Very matrixed organization. CEO endorsement was very important, but that didn’t clear the floodgates. Not a silver bullet, they really should have put a lot more energy into also getting buy-in at the mid-level management on environmental targets. High level goals need to cascade to performance goals of individual sites/managers.

Case 2: large services firm
“Ambassadors program” , on Earth Day, solicited folks in the business to help roll out initiatives. Language barriers, communications technology barriers, really tried to get people face to face. Working on recycling, etc. 3800 employees, 600 in the pilot. Also did green building, but the company thought it was all they needed to do, all PR. Employees raised the issue of broader changes and were able to create a partnership with a regional NGO. Being witness to the old culture - print everything - and the operations practices - recycling bin being thrown in the trash at night - created the impetus for voluntary dedication to additional sustainability responsibilities. CFO is the corporate sponsor, meets quarterly with sustainability working group – would be challenging if that person left or changed.

Posting copy paper and printer toner use figures based on available data (printer reports). People see their individual impact as a greater organizational impact. Just the information/awareness has had a quick and large reduction impact. Have started to add cost figures to the absolute numbers of pages, cartridges, etc. Have posted messaging signs in copy areas - “Did you really need to print this?” - and then a funny picture of manager.

“Polite culture” is challenging, because there is a sense that certain things shouldn’t be said around certain people in order to avoid conflict and build consensus. Need for inclusion in strategic planning.

Case 3: large services firm
Ad-hoc, energy efficiency group. No full time energy manager. Green team, but also part of people’s responsibilities. Challenge without full time resources. Leased space, so the financial benefits of efficiency improvements are passed on to the owners. Upstreaming is the strategy now, working with owners. Ideally would like to get employees out of the equation. People are very busy, wants them to be focused on business – previous work on employee education worked – 10% reduction – but once programs stop, things go right back up.

Awareness programs such as participation in Earth Hour are helpful – “Every little bit helps”. “Green champions” program – not green cops, more light hearted and funny.

One successful program was turn off work stations at night and then boot up in the morning. IT worked with companies to reduce boot-up time. Decreases in sent paper (customer bills, etc) but drives up data center energy use.

Retrofitting buildings. Supply chain management – buying energy efficient computers for example. Top-down approach.

Comment: Boot up takes too long for high tech data-driven companies. They searched out what programs or data had not been accessed in the last X time and turned them off, so they have to be rebooted when needed. There are ways to mine this data.

“The folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B” good article

Case 4: residential, commercial real estate
“Green leases” to encourage landlords and tenants to engage in energy savings.

IDEAS:

People like breaks – so you could capitalize on that need for example by giving people responsibility as energy or recycling monitors who walk around a few times a day and “take a break for the environment” “take a carbon break”. Walk up the stairs instead of the escalator.

Green teams – volunteers that care. People who are already interested in these issues are more likely to take risks on behalf of the environment – in terms of trying something new, a new way to do something or a new technology.

Finding people in positions of decision making power is important. People can organize within organizations, acting independently or on the advice of other like minded colleagues to make incremental improvements.

Employee energy-savings sharing agreement. Meet a certain target and a portion of the savings go towards a group reward. What happens when the incentive goes away? Which practices become habits and what drives people to go back to business as usual?

Design Session
Brainstorm:

How do we create a roadmap of concrete change, beyond behavior change, onto capital improvements?
We have a senior executive’s approval, but we haven’t challenged them to expand the scope of the program beyond simple behavior change.

-Define it…
Has to be based on the drivers (customer? cost savings? interests of a specific officer? etc). Materiality analysis.

-Sell it…
How do we engage upper management? Then, how do we bridge the connection between upper and mid-level management?

View 1 (consultant): Gauge very early on in the conversation, the level of commitment from leaders – if I get the “deer in the headlights look” then the conversation ends. Prioritize with the senior manager, offering options of what matters to them.

View 2 (insider): Put together an ROI, do some sort of audit, to give them a sense of what is possible. Find out what is important to them and find a way to speak their language. Relationships are very important, use what you know about the person to make the best case. Try telling them about competitors, peers, and what they are doing better. Then encourage them to set benchmarks.

Assess upfront where you can get the company to achieve results, and what the risks are. If you can line up with a senior manager and make them personally successful, that goes a long way. Figure out how they are being rated on performance and how they think of their own performance.

Case study: Nike – designers were the rock stars. Senior managers listened to designers. New sustainability manager met with the top 50 designers. She would quickly within 15 minutes gauge their interest, pass on the uninterested and add the interested to a list. Ended up working with 15 or so designers and moving sustainability through them. Lesson: find out where the power lays, analyze the culture and leverage it.

-Do it…
Free energy audit, utility will come in and do it. Hopefully it will provide impetus for an energy efficient lighting project. ROI will be calculated and verified by the utility auditor – no/low risk. With big energy efficiency financial incentives available from utilities for demand reduction, it is a no-brainer.

Do a free personal home energy audit for difficult people, to help them get through the idea that what’s possible on a small scale is possible on a larger scale.

Final Poster

Problem: “How to get senior management buy-in”

Solution steps:
1) Determine CEO’s motivation/needs

reward structure
risks threshold

2) Identify influencers

internal : mid-level managers, senior managers, janitors
external: clients, competitors, peers

3) Tailor presentation to CEO/company needs

Have a lower-risk backup solution
Detailed workplan and timeframe
Processes for monitoring and feedback