Better Business: How to go greener with staff to improve performance

Why get staff involved?

"There's only so much you can do with hardware and bits and pieces. If you don't reach the people behind it, you're just wasting your time."
(Coca Cola Enterprises)

We found strong evidence that meaningful staff engagement is vital to reducing workplace emissions. And this engagement benefits staff and organisations in lots of other ways too. These are some of the motivations for involving staff that employers told us about:

Maximising emission reductions

Staff behaviours can account for a significant chunk of an organisation's carbon footprint, so engaging staff in designing and participating in low carbon activities is essential to maximising the potential savings from technical or environmental efficiency improvements.

Increasing morale and loyalty

Employers with strong environmental policies and values to match often have lower staff turnover, and find it easier to recruit high quality staff.

Enabling innovation

Where staff are centrally involved in leading and driving low carbon activities forward, there is greater potential for new ideas and ways of working to be implemented.

Reinforcing the benefits of work activities

Staff across the organisations we spoke to really valued the fact that they could apply new skills and ideas from cutting carbon at work to their lives at home. The idea that the benefits of carbon cutting are not just for the organisation, or only for staff when they're at work, but for all areas of life is a powerful one.