Involving Staff
It is important that appropriate human resources are available in your business to implement sustainability actions and to investigate new opportunities as they arise.
One successful method of implementing change is to establish a small 'action team'. If your organisation is large, separate teams may be needed to address different locations or departments (e.g. catering).
The brief for these teams should include:
- Identifying priority issues for action
- Developing systematic action plans
- Setting targets
- Reviewing proposed actions for improvement
- Monitoring progress and providing feedback to managers and staff.
Encouraging Leadership
Corporate environmental programs are often launched because of one committed and enthusiastic staff member who 'champions' the cause. Is there someone in your business who could be the potential environmental ‘champion’ ?
Training & Educating Staff
Training staff in environmental best practice may be as simple as educating them about the actions they should take to save water and energy, such as turning off lights and taps when not in use.
The key to successful training is to ensure that training on environmental issues is integrated into standard training programs. Staff may take the program more seriously if it is presented under a different name (eg. Improving Resource Efficiency) or given a different emphasis, such as saving costs.
As well as describing the practical actions that staff should take, information should be provided about the sustainability objectives of the business as a whole, including any targets that have been set. Ideally, this information should be incorporated into induction training for new staff, as well as ongoing training for existing staff.
Monitoring your progress
Continually reviewing progress is one of the keys to improving the environmental performance and staying at the forefront of best practice.
You can achieve this by conducting periodic reviews of energy, water and materials use. You may find it helpful to graph monthly or quarterly consumption of resources to visualise the trends.
Benchmarking
Establishing benchmarks and setting up processes to collect the relevant information between reviews will also help you to establish what progress has been made. Reporting on progress towards selected targets will keep your environmental program focused and performance oriented.
Benchmarks are best established in relation to a relevant performance index for your business, such as per ‘occupied bed night’. Appropriate performance indicators include
- Electricity consumption
- Gas consumption
- Water consumption
- Volume of waste to landfill
- Recycling volume
- Office paper consumption
- Fuel consumption