Culture Change—You Need It So How Do You Know If You’ve Got It?

Achieving aggressive sustainability goals—whether within corporate operations or as part of a community’s quest for zero carbon emissions—is an enormous task.

In the early phases of any entity’s sustainability efforts a committed green team can do a lot. A small group of people can identify and address opportunities. As a company (or community) become more efficient, though, the projects get more complicated. And the projects involve more stakeholders. One of the ironies of sustainability efforts is that the more you succeed the more challenging it is to expand that success.

Sooner or later—especially if you’ve got aggressive goals—success requires all hands on deck. A company can’t achieve zero landfill unless everybody does their part in the lunch room. Similarly, a dramatic reduction in fleet emissions is possible only if every driver does their part.

Achieving aggressive sustainability goals requires culture change.

At Cool Choices we talk a lot about the need for culture change. We share stories from partners who’ve got “an entire employee population moving in the same direction.” We love that moment when our partners get it–when they see culture change happening in their organization.

How do you know, though, if you are achieving culture change?

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Congratulations to the Wylie Independent School District for completing their second Cool Choices sustainability engagement program! Wylie ISD is a public school district northeast of Dallas that serves more than 15,800 students from Wylie, Texas and neighboring communities. Nearly 275 staff across 23 schools and administrative buildings participated in the month-long Cool Choices program in October. This program follows their first program last April.

Humans follow social cues all the time—which means sustainability professionals can accelerate change by making sustainable practices more visible.

Congratulations to the Wylie Independent School District for completing their first Cool Choices sustainability engagement program! Wylie ISD is a public school district northeast of Dallas that serves more than 15,800 students from Wylie, Texas and neighboring communities. Over 300 staff across 23 schools and administrative buildings participated in the month-long Cool Choices program in April.

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Wondering how you can influence behavior to reduce energy usage among businesses as well as residents?

Over the last decade, energy efficiency programs—faced with aggressive goals and fewer easy wins relative to technology—began seeking to change participant behaviors, especially at the household level. One strategy—home energy reports—dominated the program design. Home energy reports feature a model where participants receive feedback on how their energy usage compares to other homes—leveraging social norms. There is now plenty of research proving that households will reduce their energy usage if they learn that their consumption is higher than other peer households.

However, one of the challenges with the home energy report model, is that while we know that households reduce their usage, we don’t know how they reduced their usage, or for how long those reductions will persist.

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We are delighted to be launching a Cool Choices sustainability engagement program for the Wylie Independent School District in Wylie, Texas.

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Every organization benefits from engaging its stakeholders around sustainability. Our partners work with us to customize their Cool Choices sustainability programs in order to achieve diverse objectives.

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Whenever we talk about the results organizations receive from our sustainability engagement program – how a simple game-based format inspires adults to make real changes in their lives – sustainability advocates are intrigued, but they are also skeptical: “Sure, Cool Choices inspired measurable changes in that organization, but would it work in ours?”

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When someone thinks about Waukesha County, Wisconsin, they may not necessarily think about sustainability or environmental activism.  Cool Choices launched a county-wide program in Waukesha County in 2017, and proved that even one of the reddest counties in the country can benefit from increasing sustainability awareness and actions – and have a whole lot of fun doing it, too.

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Cool Choices is thrilled to announce our partnership with Gerding Edlen to field a tenant engagement program at six Gerding Edlen multi-family buildings in Boston and Chicago.

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