Nudge

The concept of Nudge has gained a lot of attention recently as it is seen as having potential to create behaviour change in both organisations and general society.  This is because it recognises that we aren’t all perfectly rational robots and we make decisions for a multitude of reasons, not all of them logical.  Nudge draws heavily on psychology and looks at how to become ‘Choice Architects’.

Experience & Tips

The talk will draw on Adam’s experience working with over 40 organisations from the largest corporations & public sector bodies to small charities & businesses.  He has also spent considerable time studying best practice in other organisations and countries and blogs regularly for GreenWise.

Adam’s presentation will highlight 10 tips for nudging and behavioural economics case studies, such as why Google Powermeter didn’t work and how to launch a great workplace recycling bin campaign.  He will also outline the limits to the nudge approach, interesting phenomenon such as the ‘Boomerang Effect’, the psychology of denial and the difference between behavioural and cultural change.

The Q&A is a fully interactive session which will enable you to engage your grey matter to think and talk green.  There will also be plenty of opportunity for you to indulge in ‘Great Green Banter’ and networking.

Adam is also co-organiser of Green Drinks Leeds.

Click here to book

EVENT DETAILS: Tues 28th Feb arrive & mingle from 6pm; speaker starts around 7.15; conversation flowing until around 10.  Feel free to pop in for a bit, or stay for the whole evening – it’s all free, you only pay for your drinks.

VENUE: Lounge Bar & Grill, St Johns House, Merrion Street, LS2 8JE.  We will be in Terrace section to the right of the venue

For further information on Green Drinks Leeds: www.greendrinks.org/Yorkshire/Leeds

You can also join us groups on LinkedIn and Facebook.

To subscribe to the Green Drinks Leeds mailing list,  please enter your details on the following site:  http://eepurl.com/OiMF

Carbon Reduction Commitment

An example of the potential power of reputation is the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC).  The effectiveness of it might have been reduced due to its conversion to a form of tax, yet it nonetheless offers the prospect of highlighting high performers, mid-table dawdlers and low-end laggards.

A company’s placing in the CRC League Table is already influencing the minds of boards that report into the CRC.  Coupled with the increasing price of energy, boards are beginning to realise that a poor placing in the table may hit their bottom line with both direct and considerable force.

Recognition & Loss Aversion

The other dawning realisation in boardrooms is the reputational aspect of the CRC.  The organisations that have succeeded in the first league table will be congratulating themselves and those at the bottom will be considering what went wrong.  Coming in the bottom quartile of a league table is often a more powerful driver for change than success.  This is a well known behavioural trait called loss aversion (ask a sacked football manager for his views on this).

The most powerful external recognition/loss aversion drivers are those against your direct competitors.  Considering how competitive certain industries are (food retailing for example), you would not want to be the energy manager of the organisation that came bottom of your section of the CRC League Table.  Serious questions would be asked by your boss, and perhaps even the board.  To detail the ranking of particular industries, the sustainability management software experts at Hubsphere have created a very useful break down of the league table.  You can access their information here.

Internal Status

The power of reputation and status also works internally.  Departments, sites and individuals are often put in league tables.  Even if they have no direct financial benefit attached to success, there is often fierce competition both to come first, and possibly even stronger, not to come last.  Furthermore, recognition via awards and other similar tools offer a great motivator for people.  These incentives make people feel good about their efforts, increase their own internal PR and also makes others perhaps even a little jealous and motivated to contribute.

There are some great of examples of making the power of internal reputation work in sustainability, including InterfaceFLOR.  For more detail, you can read the GreenWise blog I wrote about them here.

Leveraging Reputation

In summary, if you want to deliver sustainable change, regardless of your organisation, one of your most important tools is leveraging both internal and external reputation to create multiple benefits.

This article first appeared on the GreenWise Business Blog.

These are high tempo talks using PowerPoint, inspired by the concept ‘Pecha Kucha’.  At the event there are a wide variety of speakers, with only three rules:

• 20 slides
• 15 seconds each slide
• No pitches

Adam’s talk was titled ‘A Climate for Change?’ and focused on:

• Why he chose to set up PeopleProfitPlanet
• Some of the challenges of sustainability
• How to engage and empower people to take sustainable action

All of this in 5 minutes!

To see Adam’s talk click here.

The programme is designed to help you deliver behavioural & cultural change in your organisation, including a full day workshop and pre+post event guidance

For further information please click here

Over the last five years PeopleProfitPlanet have worked with many different sizes and types of organisation, from global corporations and large public sector bodies, to small businesses and charities.

The common factor across all the 40+ organisations we have worked with is that delivering sustainable change is challenging.  This is particularly so in the current economic climate, when you are being expected to deliver on your sustainability targets with little or no external support.

Many organisations are either in the early stages or are requiring help to take them to the next stage.  Wherever you are on your journey, this programme will give you the understanding and skills to take you to the next stage and plan for the future.

The understanding that we’ve learnt from our work, added to best practice in industry leaders such as M&S and InterfaceFLOR will be added to our deep understanding of organisational needs to provide you with a powerful and high impact programme of learning.

To download a pdf flyer of the training programme, please click here

Due to your position you are expected to manage a number of areas of your organisations environmental sustainability.  This can cover your technical building systems, waste & recycling contracts, standards such as ISO14001 or CDP and last but not least, how to engage your people and create sustainable behaviour change.

In the five years that I’ve been running PeopleProfitPlanet, it is always this final point, of engaging people, which comes out as the most challenging, and the area where people have the least experience.  The good news is there are organisations, both famous and not so famous, who have successfully engaged and changed their people.

Where to start?

The key is to take a step back and think about this as a normal change management situation.  Within your organisation you will have had new systems and process brought in (e.g. IT, HR, Finance), and if this has been done successfully, there will always be a plan behind this.

A famous example of this is Marks & Spencers ‘Plan A’. M&S head of Sustainability, Mike Barry, spoke at a PeopleProfitPlanet event recently. He said Plan A wasn’t seen as a ‘nice to do’ CSR project, but from the outset was presented as a long-term project, which needed both a business case building and senior buy-in.

What delivery tools do I go for?

OK so, you have a plan, senior leadership are bought in, but a plan is only as good as its delivery.  It is critical therefore that you choose delivery tools that are appropriate for your organisation and will engage and even excite people to take action.  Also make sure that you engage with fellow colleagues to check out what they know has worked or failed.

Just as in other change management fields, you will also need to approach this with both carrot and stick: reward high achievers, but also give targets so middle managers know when they are falling behind.

An example of a small company that delivered excellent results when it utilised simple and easy tools to engage and focus its staff and management is Keycare.  They reduced their paper usage by a whopping 64 per cent in the space of one quarter and car mileage by 37 per cent over a year.  Further detail of this case study can be found here.

Can I rest on my laurels?

You’ve now spent a year delivering the tools set out in your plan with considerable success.  Can you rest on your laurels?  Well you could, but if you do, you might find yourself back to square one after another year.  Sustainability isn’t something that comes naturally to most staff or organisations and so it is a case of ensuring you not only keep going, but also keep innovating and involving everybody from senior leaders to grass roots staff.

As Mike Barry says the journey up to now for him hasn’t been easy and he believes M&S is only 10 per cent of the way along their journey to true sustainability (but that’s for another blog!).

People Driven Sustainability

As HR is now a developed management discipline and many organisations are only just starting to understand sustainability, to be able to exploit People Driven Sustainability, it is absolutely key that an organisation involves the HR department.  Your first job will be to help your HR colleagues understand how sustainability can help them in their role of delivering a more effective workforce, and why sustainability is key at delivering broad organisational goals.

At PeopleProfitPlanet we have developed an approach to managing sustainability called the ‘E³Approach’, this stands for Establish+plan > Empower+deliver > Embed+own, and I will use this to outline some of the methods of engagement that HR can provide.

Establish+plan

HR professionals are very aware of the famous maxim ‘fail to plan, plan to fail’ and they can offer a key support in delivering a robust sustainability plan.  This will enable you to bring some rationality and rigour to choosing the empowerment and embedding tools.  For example it is critical to understand the attitudes of management and grass roots staff.  In many organisations, HR will already have created ways of doing this through surveys or focus groups. Utilise these to find the information.

Empower+deliver

There are many tools HR can help deliver to increase your sustainability.  A key part of HR’s role in managing an organisations employees are the appraisal mechanisms and targets/KPI’s which are utilised to create carrots and sticks.  Work with your HR department to create appropriate targets, for example in energy reduction or increasing webinar use.  This could be done on an individual or departmental level.

Embed+own

An excellent method of ensuring that you begin to create ownership of sustainability is by involving your people in the ongoing innovation of this field: leading to what we call ‘Sustainability 2.0’.  HR should be well versed in connecting with your staff and gaining ideas from them, so utilise this experience.

The ideas I’ve outlined above are just some of the ways that HR can help you with your sustainability journey, so the message is: don’t delay, set up a meeting with your colleagues in Human Resources!

This quote comes from the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development report ‘Motivated Staff Make Lighter Footprints’.  Training your management and staff in skills for sustainability is an excellent way of bringing your environmental policies to life. However the impact of an organisation’s employee engagement will only be as good as the commitment put into its green training.  To ensure a good return on investment, it is critical to ensure that there is sufficient time, money and thought put into a environmental training programme.

Over the last five years, PeopleProfitPlanet has delivered training for sustainability to thousands of staff in dozens of organisations, sometimes with over 100 people in the room or as little as four on webinar. What is apparent through all the work we’ve carried out is that the better planned the training the more success it has, both in the long and short term.

How do you get training participants engaged?

It is important when delivering green training that the direct engagement has a number of characteristics that ensure the participants gain the maximum value from their time spent in the training room or on the webinar.  First and foremost, it is crucial that participants recognise that the green course is something that will be good not just for the planet, but also their organisation.

It is also very important that the training – and trainer – should be engaging, interactive and professional. If some fun and humour can be injected into the session, even better.  An example of this is when we have delivered a three-hour training for ‘Green Champions’.  The session is split relatively equally between considering the commercial and environmental drivers behind taking action (where they play ‘Carbon Bingo’), thinking how the Champions can become ‘Great Green Influencers’ and finally what and how they are going implement when they get back to their office.

Should you take into account different needs?

When planning and designing the green training programme we need to start by recognising that different organisations and people have different triggers and needs.  This point was well made by, Ramon Aratia, Sustainability director at InterfaceFLOR at one of our recent events, when he observed that: “Every person has a different door” (see my previous GreenWise blog for further detail).  Therefore, ensure the training is familiar to the participants, and also help them achieve their objectives as easily as possible and in a way that fits with their core job role.

How do you stop green training being a ‘nice to do’ activity?

However good the actual training session is though, it will only deliver long lasting value to the organisation if it follows a good management planning and embedding process (e.g. PPP’s E³Approach).  This structure of preparation and follow up is very familiar to experienced managers and training professionals, but because some organisations still see sustainability as a “nice to do”, it is often ignored.  It is important that people are excited and engaged even before they get through the door, and there is impactful follow up (such as a webinar) after the event to help them retain their learning.

So, in summary, you need to remember that old maxim: failing to plan is planning to fail!

Any great sustainability story will appeal to appeal to the heart, head AND wallet. To translate these in terms which should resonate for a business story, I’d suggest these are represented by Ethics, Authenticity and Commerciality

Wallet/Commerciality
To many people and organisations environmental sustainability is a bonus; what they really care about is delivering a great service or product and staying profitable. If you can demonstrate that sustainability and profitability are intertwined, then that creates to an immediately powerful story.

Head/Authenticity
Your people, customers and suppliers will appreciate honesty and humility, and will see through any attempts at greenwash

Heart/Ethics
Focus on your ethics, e.g. why are we doing this? Whilst people need to see their company is being profitable the Harvard Business Review (http://bit.ly/nRmbAZ) recently observed that; “Everyone knows a business needs ethics, customers, and profits, but a lot of companies fail because they get the sequence wrong. The most common mistake is to put profits first. When you do, numbers become all-important, and you can justify almost any behaviour if it makes money.” Doing the right thing will help drive your profitability and loyalty of staff, suppliers and customers.

If you want more ideas on how to influence culture, the Harvard Business Review also has some more tips here: http://bit.ly/oattIB

CSR standards can take two main forms – comprehensive standards that include and guide all of a business’ operations, and standards to demonstrate socially responsible practice. In total there are over 100 CSR tools available for businesses to manage and improve their operations so it is important that a business knows what they want to achieve by implementing a standard. Typical benefits can include attracting the best staff and meeting the requirements set by large corporations for their supply chains. CSR standards also provide a great way of publicly promoting a company as a compassionate, ethical and transparent organisation.

There are three frameworks that set the international standard for CSR – GRI (Global Reporting Initiative), AA1000AS (Accountability 1000 Assurance Standard), ISO 26000 – (Social Responsibility Framework) and the UNGC (Global Compact) – the two later of these are frameworks which don’t require certification and are therefore often considered as a less stringent and diluted.

Besides these global standards it is possible to obtain standards demonstrating excellence and best practice across the whole of CSR, such as the new Responsible Business Standard.   There is also the Investors in Diversity standard which specifically focuses on social diversity and integration and is therefore an important and useful way of attracting the best talent, and achieving loyal staff.

If you want to know more about the different types of CSR standard that could benefit your organisation contact adamw@peopleprofitplanet.co.uk.