Five tips to engage your team in carbon reduction

The longer we wait to act on important worldly issues, the greater the consequences and damage to the world economy. One major issue that we tend to ignore is climate change. So out of what continues to be a challenging time for our economy, comes some sense of positivity and community, and one in which could fuel the next most important revolution of our generation, the Climate Revolution.

When establishing and rolling out your carbon reduction plans, an important factor to consider is how this is communicated and driven within your organisation to ensure everyone can play their part. By working closely with our customers, we wanted to support this initiative by providing the right tools to enable a change in employee behaviour, whilst also acknowledging and rewarding the progress of their team. For one of our customers, they took this approach to behavioural change and saved 10-15% on their carbon emissions!

Below are our top five tips to help engage your team in carbon reduction, carbon footprint and how to work towards these savings!

1)    Create information that is relevant to everyone

You want everyone within your organisation and even your external partners and customers to understand what you are doing in your fight towards reducing carbon footprint. To do so, this information needs to be presented in a way that can be understood by all different types of people as not everyone knows what a kWh is or how many tonnes that relates to in carbon. Your CFO may want information on cost whereas a retail shop owner may want the information communicated in a more relatable way.

This creates a need for a platform in energy that supports cost and carbon so it is universal in its appeal. Within our Energy.Hub, there are various tools that enable you to customise information to support this such as dashboards which you can personalise for all your different users.

2) Empower your teams across different levels

To implement real change in carbon reduction, everyone in the organisation needs to be involved and have it driven from the top-down. From senior stakeholders and executives enforcing the change and your site managers helping to effect the change. These key individuals can effect positive change, but may have different ways to engage it.

A senior stakeholder might have a plan focused on both carbon and cost. Where a site manager may work with people at a site and team level and effect change on a site by site basis. With unlimited user access within the Energy.Hub, you can communicate to your various teams in one central platform, provide relevant information and reports keeping everyone up-to-date on their progress.

3)  Reinforce the change

Change takes time and we have learnt that it is important to consistently keep your teams informed of their progress and recognise positive changes. This can be communicated through your customisable Energy.Hub dashboards, automated key reports and alerts, regular newsletters and meetings. We can also integrate with your internal tools and channels to automate the process further.

4)  Identify champions of change

Whilst it might be the responsibility of the Energy Manager or team lead to manage energy, now is the time to have a think about who might want to join the carbon revolution. Who is best placed to help manage the on-going changes and check that your teams are doing all they can do to help? This could be your site Green/centre manager or it could be a ‘Green Team’ which is a champion of change.

These Green Teams are vital when it comes to sharing best practices and discussing how a particular site may be performing. Identifying these Green Teams can also support an improved two-way communication between your teams, making it easier for people to report issues or potential solutions and share with the wider teams.

5)  Reward positive behaviour

Lastly, reward the positive behaviour changes from your team and promote them internally to encourage their continuous efforts in carbon reduction. The Energy.Hub allows customisable messages to be posted on dashboards that can be created for particular sites, users or the whole organisation. You can post positive messages aimed at the sites that are performing well and successfully reaching their targets.

Should you wish to learn more about how Utilidex can support your organisation's journey to carbon net zero, further information can be found in the YPO Utilities framework. Or, please get in touch with the team!