The sustainable workplace sounds a fine idea, but actually trying to enforce it or living in the midst of the changes required can be another matter. Elisabeth Jeffries reports.
It is all too good to be true. Employees cycle to work.
Rubbish is neatly separated into different bins. LED lighting is fitted. These are all good practices designed to encourage an environmentally friendly, happy workplace, and in theory people enjoy a feel-good factor from helping protect the world around them.
In practice, the reverse is sometimes the case. The bins may be poorly located or labelled, so staff leave litter lying about. A bicycle shed is purchased, but there are no showers to wash on arrival or car parking is restricted except for the few lucky special cases. LED lighting linked to a building management system is difficult to control at one’s own desk. So employees rebel and feel that management is control-freaky, and sustainability a chore.
Some of these experiences are reflected in a survey conducted by Johnson Controls Workplace Innovation, a research and development section in the facilities management branch of the buildings products company. Workplace Innovation carried out the survey in conjunction with the Royal College of Art’s Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design.
The study, entitled Sustainability@Work — Creating Greener Workplaces, found a surprisingly high number of employees were put off by sustainability measures.
It demonstrated that employees believe they are all responsible for sustainability and want to work in an organisation that enables them to behave sustainably. But they do not want to be burdened with it, and don’t want it to affect existing working patterns.
Of the 4,000 people surveyed in 2013 in six countries (the US, Germany, UK, China, India, Australia), only 28 per cent disagreed that sustainability initiatives should not affect the way people work. A further 30 per cent were undecided. Meanwhile, 38 per cent agreed that “employees should not be burdened with implementing sustainable practices on top of their existing workloads”, while 33 per cent disagreed and 29 per cent were undecided.
Penny-pinching
Sustainability can be a nuisance. Many sustainability measures, unless carefully and sensitively put in place, will get in the way of a busy employee, be considered trivial or penny-pinching and perhaps even cause more stress.
“If you take the stairs rather than use the lift, if you are rewarded if you cycle to work, if the building saves energy at certain times, these can all be an inconvenience,” points out Dr Marie Puybaraud, one of the study authors.
Taking the stairs will be difficult for those wearing high heels. Cycling may not be practical for employees taking their children to school. Energy-saving measures may mean some people have to work alone with the lights turned off if they do overtime. All these will be especially unpopular with many employees if they are imposed from above. They can cause conflict.
Yet according to Dr Puybaraud and her team, a more thoughtful approach will work more effectively. This entails segmenting employees into different sustainability cultures or character types.
These they have divided into campaigners (34 per cent), housekeepers (27 per cent), libertarians (21 per cent) and pragmatists (18 per cent).
The researchers believe that these four types are to be found across most of the world.
If these four different types of employees and managers drive change through, they are likely to adopt a particular approach to sustainability.
Libertarian or housekeeper?
Libertarians, for example, believe sustainable measures are important, but should not affect the employees’ way of working. They would expect matched efforts from company and employees. Housekeepers focus on changing behaviours and finding ways to save or make do. They would encourage employees to have a car pool and centralise waste and recycling bins.
Pragmatists believe that employees should not bear costs that become gains to the company. A pragmatist culture might have desk-sharing and homeworking. Campaigners expect matched efforts from company and employees. A campaigner culture might have free public transport and no parking.
“Most organisations did not know what they had in front of them. Everyone has a different attitude to sustainability. You may not become a pragmatist in the office if you are a pragmatist at home. You have to get to know the different people you have in front of you and communicate differently with different people,” says Dr Puybaraud. That said, in practice most companies have a tendency towards one of the cultures.
FMs were a section of the staff population with strong, distinctive and often quite environmentally friendly views.
The authors write: “The building and services/FM industries consistently stood out as sectors which demonstrated more advanced sustainable behaviours and attitudes.”
For example, they disagreed the most that sustainability should not impact on a company’s ability to compete. Among industry sectors, they scored most highly in the belief that sustainability needs to be driven by everyone at all levels and needs to be embedded in how the organisation does business.
They also did not agree that employees should not be burdened with implementing sustainable practices on top of their existing workload, nor that sustainability initiatives should not affect the way that employees work. Finally, they agreed that sustainability should not just focus on short-term cost savings, but needs to be about long-term investment. Of the different sectors interviewed, they were the most in favour of homeworking.
The failure to communicate appropriately to the right people and implement the right measures may mean the sustainability project collapses.
“When my former employer, a public sector organisation, removed the car park, there was uproar,” remembers Jane Abraham, a consultant specialising in workplace environments. Hot-desking, she points out, is also often a mistake.
“Employees, on the whole, hate it. It doesn’t feel like it’s yours and you can pick up all sorts of germs. People like the comfort of knowing their environment and being able to control it.”
That hot-desking is often introduced for financial reasons may also grate with the libertarian and pragmatist types identified by Workplace Innovation. “The only reason, ever, for hot-desking and lean working is to reduce employer rental costs,” says Abraham.
To manage change more successfully, Workplace Innovation makes a number of suggestions. These are contained in the company’s engagement toolkit. The cultures conceptualised by the company may provide insight that can then be used to help managers develop an appropriate internal communications strategy for an effective environmental sustainability programme. It may be worth the effort, given the company’s findings that most employees aspire to be green.
Steps in the toolkit include evaluating employee attitudes and expectations and assessing the company’s current approach to understand which culture it tends to adhere to. Then it recommends creating a road map by identifying priorities and long-term goals, and identifying opportunities for communication about these with staff.
The next step is the creation of a communications strategy uniting all the initiatives under one brand. This helps management to understand what rewards and benefits to use to tailor initiatives to the different cultures in the organisation. A roll-out process is explained, along with the most likely effective communication channels. Workplace Innovation also recommends that the organisation should continually re-evaluate its strategy and give feedback on its goals to ensure continuous progress.
But views of the culture-based approach differ among sustainability and workplace professionals. Abraham also takes the view that managers need to distinguish between different types of employees.
“If you have a company-wide programme it might not match the needs of all the employees. In terms of travel, you need flexibility for those that do need cars, for example. You need to be realistic,” she says.
Holistic nature
However, other considerations need to be taken into account, especially if several programmes are running. She indicates that they need to complement each other. “You need to integrate competing bigger programmes around behaviour change so as not to be burdensome. If you can make it easy to empower people to engage, you are less likely to disincentivise them,” she adds.
Health and wellbeing programmes are an example.
“Health and wellbeing programmes need to be integrated with CSR. You are asking people to change their behaviour and their lifestyle.” She suggests staff need to be made aware of the links between a healthy lifestyle and sustainability, such as diet. One reason is to avoid complexity. Another is to ensure that people understand the broader, holistic nature of sustainability as a policy.
Bridget Jackson, sustainability manager at consultancy Price Waterhouse Coopers, agrees that conflicts may arise between sustainability and wellbeing. The company has experimented with different communication strategies. In one case, staff were asked to cut down on business travel, but did not respond positively to this. Managers noticed some resistance and apathy. “If it’s about green first and foremost, it only appeals to a few people. For others, it doesn’t work,” says Jackson. However, the sustainability managers in this case did not turn to segmentation to sensitise their approach.
Instead, they turned to more commercial and personal values.
“We flipped our message to: sustainability drives good work performance. We launched a campaign to encourage employees to use alternatives like video conferencing. We did this by saying: if you don’t travel you are at odds with giving the highest service to the client,” she explains.
Quick and easy availability to clients was the point. By avoiding unnecessary travel, they were encouraging clients and consultants to be in touch in a variety of different ways. The tone of the campaign, she says, was “funny, witty, upbeat and not doom and gloom.”
Improving wellbeing by cutting down on travel was also part of the message.
According to Jackson, the use of alternative technologies for client contact tripled in three years as a result. But she indicates that segmented communications, as suggested by Workplace Innovation, may not always be the appropriate way forward. The consultancy also tried segmentation and found five different employee types.
“But we found we get much more impact by aligning the programme with the business message than pegging it to segments and values,” she says. – See more at:http://www.fm-world.co.uk/features/feature-articles/bearing-sustainability/#sthash.P2Q0pvcL.dpuf
