Adam Woodhall, Founder of PeopleProfitPlanet, comments:

“Over the last 6 years, the business has developed from focusing mainly on employee engagement, to helping change behaviours. Now, we’re looking broadly at how to create a sustainable and resource efficient culture. There is a great team at Carbon Credentials and I’m really pleased that PeopleProfitPlanet will have an even wider impact; and we’ve already started work with new clients, including a highly prestigious professional services company.”

Richard Green, Commercial Director of Carbon Credentials, remarks:

“Whilst behavioural change is desirable, only when it becomes second nature can we claim to have impacted ‘culture’. Not only does culture change lead to improved sustainability and profitability; doing nothing can be terminal!  Organisations that attempt to change their behaviour through sporadic initiatives only get sub-optimal results, or in some cases, fail completely.”

“We were attracted to PeopleProfitPlanet because of their reputation and experience in this field. We also share the same values of ‘client success’ and measurable results, central to our business culture. Their E³ Programme is perfectly aligned with our professional services portfolio and offers outstanding value to our clients. Our aim is to become the leading provider of sustainability and energy services in the UK, and delivering culture change is a vital part of that.”

Adam, who is now Carbon Credentials’ Culture Change Director, continues:

As a Harvard Business Review study has demonstrated, 70% of all change initiatives fail. This typically happens because organisations haven’t understood their long-term needs and thus fail to develop an appropriate plan to ensure that change behaviours are embedded. We have developed the E³ Programme to help clients make those difficult, yet very achievable, steps toward being sustainable and profitable.”

Ramon will deliver a talk how they embedded this culture, starting at 8am for 8.30am prompt start until 10.30am at InterfaceFLOR’s central London showroom on 9 May 2012.

Part of the Carbon Credentials breakfast series, attendees have the opportunity to share best practices and collective experiences. The invited guests are all senior management including senior sustainability practitioners and provide an excellent opportunity for networking.

Sign up for your complimentary attendance here.

The breakfasts seek to get under the skin of current best practice by sharing collective experiences. The invited guests are all senior management including senior sustainability practitioners and importantly, the seminars also provide an opportunity for attendee networking over breakfast.

Comments from recent events include:

• “Useful, short, sharp, convenient!”
• “Incredibly inspirational and motivational”
• “Very informative, inspirational speaker. High level and impressive attendees”
• “Output orientated”
• “A good opportunity to network with colleagues”
• “Provides time out to think”
• “Good small group for interaction, network and idea sharing”

Click here to book your place at this free event.

Influencing colleagues and management to take sustainable action is difficult, but we’re here to help.

We’re offering a great value training workshop will give you leading tools & an action plan to increase employee engagement and embed behaviour change into your culture.

For full information on the programme please click here.

The next workshop is on May 24, from 9am – 5pm in Central London. To book your place click here.

On July 17 there will also be a full-day event happening in Leeds. Click here for further info.

Put the event in your diary!

How does a business overcome ‘process paralysis’?

Common process barriers have the potential to paralyse your sustainable change progress, so being aware of them is critical. Embedded systems and methodologies – fossils of previous processes – may no longer suit your sustainability model.

Implementing a sustainable change management programme requires integrating, monitoring, managing and reporting of energy and sustainability information at the department and location level.

Brilliant environmental efforts might be being made at one of your smaller offices, but if your head office follows an entirely separate set of processes, these opportunities won’t be capitalised upon.

Standardising your processes from the start offers your organisation the opportunity to build significant, widespread sustainability efforts and prevents process paralysis.

Communicating Change: what’s the answer?

Sustainable change is about more than just addressing design and processes – it has to be made human. Staff buy-in will be critical to bring about change and achieving this will require creative communication.

Whether or not sustainability efforts ‘fly or fail’ often boils down to how the work you’ve achieved is communicated.

Widely recognised as one of the most comprehensive sustainable change programmes in the UK, M&S’ ‘Plan A’ didn’t succeed overnight, nor were staff enthused from the start.

More than just communicating a sweeping corporate vision, M&S’ sustainability programme was successful because it created a positive feedback loop. As sustainable changes across the organisation were achieved, they were promoted. Where pitfalls occurred, they were not condemned, but used as a motivation to achieve. Through these feedback loops, staff was more likely to come on board with the sustainability programme, feel a sense of ownership and be proud of their efforts in the long-term.

By addressing the three sets of barriers discussed over the last two blogs; design, process and communication, you’re well on your way to achieving a meaningful programme of long-term sustainable change.

This post first appeared on the GreenWise Business blog. 

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

This two-part blog series will focus on three broad obstacles to sustainable change. This blog investigates the initial design barriers, with the second delving into embedded process and communications barriers, on the journey towards sustainability.

Design as the Differentiator

Borrowing a quote from Steve Jobs, “In most people’s vocabularies, design means veneer. It’s interior decorating… but to me, nothing could be further from the meaning of design. Design is the fundamental soul of a man-made creation that ends up expressing itself in successive outer layers of the product or service.”

Design is what separates successful sustainable change programmes from surface-level efforts. The success of M&S’s Plan A, or of  leading carpet sustainable manufacturer’s InterfaceFLOR commitment to become carbon neutral by 2020, or Puma’s environmental profit and loss account, are all directly linked by a comprehensive design strategy. These three companies didn’t consider sustainability an ‘additionality’. Instead, these organisations each evaluated their core corporate mission and developed a method of integrating sustainability into each part of the business – from the ground-up.

Tackling Design Obstacles

To deliver sustainable success, the first step involves evaluating your business model and processes for not only obstacles, but also opportunities.

An intimidating task for one individual, this is where you begin to source ideas from your surroundings: speak with your engineers, supply chain managers, other trusted colleagues and external consultants.  Provide an open forum for exchange and encourage innovation. Perhaps even take another lesson from Mr. Jobs and hold small-scale ad hoc meetings for employees keen to present “the coolest new thing ever” (Mr. Jobs’ words) to their colleagues.

Adaptable Design and Long-Term Sustainability

Where design acts as the seed of sustainable change, adaptability will be required to grow sustainable wealth in your organisation.

The challenges of designing an effective programme to deliver sustainable change are broad and varied. There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution and an adaptable attitude is essential to creating an appropriate design. Ideas must continue to flow and sustainability programmes ought to be created with the flexibility to accommodate and capitalise on these new ideas.

For the second post in this series about Process and Communications, click here.

This post first appeared on the GreenWise Business Blog.

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.