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Raising employee awareness

The Carbon Trust estimates that UK industry is haemorrhaging almost £7 million a day to poor energy efficiency.

Whilst there are steps companies themselves can take to save energy and costs, changing employee behaviour could have the most dramatic impact. Indeed, the Carbon Trust estimates changing employee behaviour could be key to saving companies £2.5 billion on energy bills and prevent the emission of 22 million tonnes of carbon emissions.

So one of the most effective things you can do is make your employees aware of the role they can play in being more energy efficiency.

Support and resources

To implement a long-term energy efficiency campaign it is important to have a commitment from the organisation’s senior management. If you can persuade a member of the management team to champion the campaign this will improve its chance of success.

As well as the support of senior management, vitally important is a team of resources to drive enthusiasm and spread the load of implementing the energy efficiency campaign. Creating an ‘Energy Team’, with members from varied parts of the organisation will help sustain motivation and encourage a greater chance of success.

It is important to have an idea of the other internal stakeholders you may need to make the campaign a success, for example: website content manager, graphic designer, intranet content manger and human resources.

In addition, think about how your organisation distributes information – can you use any of these to communicate your campaign, for example: intranet, internal email system, notice boards, team meetings.

Budget

It is important to take into consideration the cost attached to promoting an awareness campaign: production of posters, creating incentives and competition prizes.