Sustainability professionals can leverage technological advances to achieve significant energy efficiency objectives, to be sure. Ignoring the human side of the equation is a mistake, though. Encouraging employees to adopt environmentally sustainable behaviors provides the opportunity to shape corporate culture around sustainability, ultimately facilitating deeper reductions in greenhouse gas emissions across all aspects of organizational operations.
Why Behavior Still Matters to Achieve Energy Efficiency Results
We recently interacted with “Tom,” an energy efficiency professional who has spent decades working to make buildings more energy efficient. “It’s great,” Tom said, “the next generation of building automation systems will be so smart that it won’t matter what people do in the building—we can ensure reduced energy intensity, no matter what the occupants do.”
This is one vision of resource efficiency—leveraging technology so that waste is impossible and human behavior irrelevant. Certainly technological innovations are a cornerstone of our efforts to be more environmentally sustainable. Increasing the output of renewable energy systems, designing buildings that require less energy for lighting, heating, and cooling, and then ensuring that building systems are appropriately sized and efficient—all of that is incredibly important. Ultimately, though, the point of buildings is to shelter people—to give humans a place to work and live. Rather than eliminating humans from the effort, sustainability leaders need to be thinking about how to engage people, and how to influence their behaviors so that they are also contributors to the solution.
Even in high performance buildings—or rather, especially in high performance buildings—humans matter. Indeed, as buildings get more efficient, the electric usage at workstations: computer monitors, personal printers, coffee makers, etc., becomes a bigger slice of the remaining load. In fact, some studies estimate that 55% of the energy use in high performance buildings is plug load. So even as lighting and HVAC controls become more sophisticated, people still matter.
Advancing Sustainable Behavior Change is Good for Corporate Culture
There’s also another important reason to engage people around their behaviors. In every organization, people and their practices that make up corporate culture. Management guru Peter Drucker famously noted, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” His observation is a warning to pay attention to culture when implementing change strategies.
Everyone has seen Drucker’s observation in action. For example: XYZ Engineering is a high-profile firm, accustomed to doing everything in a big way. They hire an amazing person to lead their sustainability efforts and set ambitious goals. However, two years later, XYZ staff are still traveling large, leaving office lights on 24/7, and using twice as much paper as other firms their size. Without visible signals that people are committed to achieving the organization’s sustainability goals, the existing waste-oriented culture remains intact.
Behaviors are a manifestation of culture. If your organization is committed to reducing its GHG emissions then it should be committed to helping stakeholders—employees as well as customers—do more with less. You should make it easy for people to recycle, provide well-timed nudges that encourage resource conservation, and you should celebrate people being part of the sustainability effort. Ultimately, you want to create a culture where sustainable practices are the norm, not the exception. And to do that, you’ve got to pay attention to behaviors, as well as the values behind those behaviors.
To learn more about how you can integrate behavior change into your sustainability efforts, check out our webinar on this topic, or contact us to chat about your specific situation. Or view a case study from our client Inpro – who participated in four Cool Choices programs!
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