Making Change Happen

Recognition is Very Cool – and Inspires Us to be Cooler!
By Kathy Kuntz, Executive Director

We’ve had a lot to celebrate lately!

In early October Menasha Corporation won an Innovation Award from the Campbell Institute and the Stewardship Action Council for their employee engagement efforts with Cool Choices and then, a few weeks later, In Business Magazine honored Cool Choices as its Eco Service of the Year!

Recognition is an interesting thing. It feels great to get that pat on the back for your past efforts but recognition is not just about the past. Recognition also prompts us to try harder going forward – to prove that the recognition was deserved and to gain more recognition.

The power of recognition to inspire additional positive efforts is one of the principles we use at Cool Choices. We partner with companies and public entities to engage employees around sustainability – to make sustainable practices the norm in workplace communities. And in our work we show companies how recognizing and celebrating the good stuff – even when it’s small – can inspire employees to do more.

As sustainability professionals we spend a great deal of time thinking about what’s not working – the number of employees who forgot to turn off their computers, the still-imperfect ratios of waste to recycling, those single-sided copies… Cool Choices’ programs demonstrate the power of positive reinforcement – when you celebrate what some employees are doing right it can motivate others to change their practices so that they get kudos too.

Yes, the recognition is much appreciated. We also appreciate that it will inspire us to continue to rock the expectations of our partners going forward.

How much do people save just by changing their behavior? Do savings persist after the game?

Whenever we talk about our employee engagement efforts people ask about outcomes. That’s great! Cool Choices believes changing practices helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions – so we have a responsibility to prove it.

The Energy Center of Wisconsin recently evaluated Cool Choices’ work at Miron Construction showing our approach is effective. In the study Center staff analyzed player utility bills before, during and after the Miron game. Then Center staff compared actual changes in usage to actions players reported in the game. Finally, the Center conducted interviews with a sample of players to understand differences between actual savings and reported savings. In those interviews, conducted more than a year after the end of the game, the Center also explored whether participants continued sustainable practices adopted during the game.

What were the results?

The Energy Center of Wisconsin:

• Verified that Cool Choices players reduced their electric usage in the game (the median reduction for participants was 6% of household electricity – which is substantial).

• Documented that former Cool Choices players continued sustainable practices. Some one-time practices like programming thermostats to save energy remained a year later in 100% of households interviewed – and repeated practices like turning off game consoles was relatively high with respondents reporting that they maintained the Cool Choices’ sustainable practices 60-79% of the time.

Really great results – but we’re getting even better!

The Energy Center of Wisconsin’s analysis also helped Cool Choices by increasing the accuracy of our savings estimates and clarifying players’ sustainable practices (e.g. we learned that some of the refrigerators players unplugged in the game were not full-size). We have adjusted our estimates to allow for a refrigerator mix including smaller units, and are incorporating other recommended improvements to make things even better.

To learn more about the Center’s findings click for the full report (pdf).

“I convinced my family to carpool.”

“I got my dad to start recycling.”

Cool Choices is in the midst of an amazing partnership with some marvelous teachers at Waunakee High School. The teachers—along with students on their green team—are leading an effort to change commuting habits at the high school. And, along the way, they are also changing practices in households throughout the community.

The effort began last year when two WHS teachers applied for a small grant Cool Choices offered through the Wisconsin K-12 Energy Education Program (KEEP). The teachers used the grant to implement a multi-year effort to analyze and affect commuting habits at their school. When classes started in September they launched a competition where students and staff get points for reporting how they got to school each day, with extra points for the greener options. Organized into teams based on school clubs, students can win prizes throughout the 9-week competition.

Students and staff can also get ‘extra credit’ points for other environmentally sustainable actions like using re-usable lunch containers, doing a sustainable project in the community or by convincing their family members to be more sustainable.

We’re finding the student efforts at home to be quite inspiring. Almost 300 students and staff are participating in the competition (in a school population of 1,200) and thus far about 1 in 5 players have reported at least one effort to increase their family’s sustainable practices. Required to share details about their efforts, participants tell us …

• “I got all of my sisters to bring reusable containers for their lunches today instead of paper bags!”
• “I convinced my family to turn off lights before they leave rooms.”
• “Instead of using the plastic bags at the grocery store, I convinced my mom to buy 5 of the reusable cloth bags.”
• “I convinced my family to turn down the heat, because I mean COME ON people, it’s still technically summer, and why would we buy warm clothes if we weren’t going to wear them?”
• “Instead of buying all these plastic water bottles, I got them to change to using cups or re-usable water bottles, which also saves money!”
• “We switched to more energy efficient light bulbs!”
• “I had my mom take a re-usable bag for lunch today and we’re eating more vegetables and fruit at dinner.”
• “We take shorter showers”
• “I convinced my parents to carpool to work.”
• “My brother took a re-usable water bottle to football practice.”
• “I asked my parents to turn down the water heater!”
• “I was waiting in the car while my dad went into Sam’s Club and instead of keeping the car on and listening to the radio, I suggested that I turn it off and listen to my iPod.”

These stories demonstrate that students are really engaged and that they are doing a good job engaging their parents and siblings. This shared engagement is critical; it is easier for us to maintain habits when those habits are shared. More, just talking about one opportunity can lead to other opportunities.

The Waunakee project demonstrates the power of young people as the spokespeople for sustainability. A fun competition is inspiring teenagers to advocate for shorter showers, to convince their parents and siblings to adopt greener practices.

We are excited to watch these young people emerge as sustainability advocates in their homes and in their community. From our vantage point, the future looks just a little bit brighter when we look toward Waunakee these days.

A mantra here at Cool Choices is that change works best when it is fun, social and easy and we work hard to make sure our initiatives meet all three criteria.

Lately there have been a number of stories about efforts to encourage biking that reinforce the importance of ‘easy’.

Change is easy when there are not big barriers looming in the distance. When it comes to biking, folks have traditionally identified multiple barriers:

• Nowhere to store my bike at work
• No showers at work, which means if I get to work sweaty I will stay that way
• Biking looks dangerous—have you seen those guys in traffic?
• My commute is too long to consider biking

Over the last few years there have been tremendous effort to address these barriers.

Communities are tackling the last issue, for example, by accommodating bikes on public transit systems—so that people can overcome longer distances with a combination of biking and transit.  By 2008, 71% of public transit buses in the US had bike racks.

And thanks, perhaps, to the emphasis on transportation in the LEED^® rating system. Because of LEED, more and more buildings feature showers and bike parking. After all, employers see multiple advantages to encouraging employees to bike to work since biking reduces both pressure on automobile parking lots and the company’s overall carbon footprint while contributing favorably to employee wellness.

Increasingly, then, the barriers to biking come down to the issue of biker safety. In some areas—both urban and rural—biking feels pretty dangerous, especially to the inexperienced biker. Many of us cannot imagine zipping in and out of traffic the way bike messengers do in the movies. Which is why we were so excited to see a number of cities implement measures that make biking safer for the rest of us. 

Chicago, Washington, D.C., Memphis, Austin, San Francisco and Portland, Oregon, have implemented a Green Lane Project that creates special bicycle lanes—separated from automobile traffic by physical barriers. Observers say the programs are working. The lanes are drawing a diverse set of bikers, many of whom might have been previously nervous about biking these urban streets. Similar efforts in London have led to a 70% increase in bike traffic.

Many cities are finding that more bikers also means fewer bike-related accidents. Experts explain that when automobile drivers expect to share the road with bikers their car driving habits change and there are fewer car-bike accidents. So biking doesn’t just feel safer, it really is safer.

Change happens most readily when it is fun, social and easy. And relative to biking, the changes are getting easier all the time.

There has been some hand wringing in recent days regarding findings from the National Geographic’s annual Greendex survey. Commentators read the survey and bemoan that Americans are not only more wasteful than their peers around the world, but we also don’t feel guilty about that waste.

Reading the survey results I see a slightly different explanation.

Greendex is a measure of consumer attitudes and opinions, as well as practices. Across four categories of consumer behavior (housing, transportation, food and consumption of goods), Americans ranked dead last, meaning our behaviors have greater environmental impacts than the parallel behaviors of our peers in any of the other 17 countries surveyed.

That ranking is no surprise. Our suburban, car-oriented culture is resource intensive and the US has ranked last each year since the survey began in 2008.

What seems discouraging is that just 21% of US respondents feel guilty about their environmental footprint, compared to higher percentages in other countries like India and China where people have lower footprints. The spin has been that we’re wasteful and that we don’t care.

Looking at some of the other findings here—consistent with other recent surveys—I think there is another story.  In the Greendex survey 52% of Americans described themselves as green. So more than half of us think we are doing our part. At the same time these same US respondents said only 35% of all Americans are green.

That means that if there’s a problem in the US, it’s not me it’s you.

This is consistent with the recent AP-NORC survey on energy use and attitudes where only 9% of respondents thought their usage was higher than others in their community—9%. The rest split pretty evenly between reporting they were average or that their usage was below average.

The problem is that we are confident that we are not the problem.

Cool Choices sees this phenomenon in our work inside corporate communities. When we do baseline surveys the majority of employees report that they are doing their part to be sustainable.  When asked what portion of their coworkers share this commitment the numbers drop. Indeed, the Greendex numbers look pretty consistent with what we have seen.

And this is a problem. Actually it is multiple problems.

• First, the perception that I’m the only one trying gives me license to try less hard going forward.  This is the ‘I’ve already done my part’ phenomena that George Marshall and others cite.
• More importantly, though, the sense that I’m in the minority has huge implications for social norms. If I think most of my colleagues do not care about sustainability then I’m less likely to speak up when I see opportunities.
• And, of course, I will feel less guilty about my overall impact—because it is not as big as the impacts of others around me.

Making sustainability efforts more visible—giving people proof that those around them are also trying to do the right thing—achieves multiple objectives.  It busts open the myth that I’m the only one who cares and it puts my current efforts (which might not be as green as I want to think) in context with the actions of my peers, ideally spurring me to do more.

Cool Choices achieves visibility through game systems that are transparent—so that players can see what actions other players have claimed. How can you enhance the visibility of sustainable actions in your work?

The new Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll on energy issues, funded by the Joyce Foundation, indicates Americans are skeptical about the impacts of small actions (like turning off lights) and, at the same time, the majority of respondents say it is too difficult to make the changes that they identify as more meaningful, like adding insulation or carpooling.

As the church lady would have said decades ago, “How convenient!”

Essentially, the US public is perfecting a rationale for doing nothing. The excuses remind me of an out-of-shape friend who believes using the stairs over the elevator this one time will not make that much difference while, at the same time, arguing that giving up his daily doughnut habit is too difficult to consider.

And the analogy does not end there. The AP-NORC survey also found that, of the 90% of Americans who believe the government needs to do more to address energy issues, 58% think the focus should be on providing better energy-saving options versus 38% who think the focus needs to be on getting people to make better choices.

My friend is also waiting for a magic pill that will make him healthy and fit without any effort on his part.

The likelihood that he can get fit without effort is about the same as the likelihood that US can eliminate wasted energy without engaging people and their behaviors.

The bottom line is that energy use is not just about technology; it is about the people using the technology. Refrigerators are a good example; the electric usage of a refrigerator today is less than half that of a comparable model in 1978. Unfortunately, a growing number of households have two or more refrigerators and the size of the typical refrigerator sold continues to grow.

Reducing energy usage is about people and the choices they make. People like you and me.

Cool Choices knows that, in reality, little actions matter and they add up, especially across communities. A single action like turning off game consoles when not in use can save $100/year with some models—which adds up to billions across the millions of households with these devices.  We have seen instances where hundreds of households can save more than $100,000 annually via small actions.  And we know that lots of people find other benefits in these small steps toward environmental sustainability—a saner commute to work, more time with family members, etc.

Still we do not expect to persuade people with fact sheets and fancy charts showing how the savings add up. Cool Choices implements behavior change programs that use gamification techniques to leverage social norms because we know that while humans like to use rational arguments to explain their actions, much of what humans do is influenced by their social setting—often to a greater extent than any of us realize. (Translation: In general, peer pressure is as real at 45 as it was at 15 except we are better at rationalizing our behaviors at 45.)

Social norms matter. When your friends start doing more to save energy then it becomes uncomfortable to be the one who is still wasting energy. You’ll want to keep-up. When people you like and respect rave about how fun and easy it was to change their habits, you think about your own habits. And when Cool Choices throws game mechanics into the mix—giving you kudos for the good stuff you do and creating a way for you to benchmark your achievements against your peers—well, then you might reconsider things you once thought were too hard to do.

It is the concept behind numerous fitness initiatives and it is the premise of our employee engagement game: creating a fun, social, and easy way to measure and celebrate progress makes difficult tasks less difficult and creates community around what was once solitary activities. We believe it will move people beyond the excuses to action and that, cumulatively, those actions will matter.

Since Cool Choices gives corporate employees opportunities to win by being more sustainable, we are always interested in other workplace gamification efforts. A recent piece about games as part of wellness programs caught our attention. The article showcased several models and talked about how organizers used prizes to generate interest and participation.

In the end, though, it wasn’t the money that drew the workers in. It was the online camaraderie, and the challenge. “People wanted to be on the winning team,” says Julie McGovern, Chilton’s vice president of administration and HR.

That is worth repeating: participation wasn’t about cash prizes. People wanted a challenge and the camaraderie of facing that challenge together. Likely some of them wanted the pleasure of prevailing over their peers while others may have simply enjoyed being part of a team. The lure of prizes may have drawn a few people into the program initially but, once in, folks are motivated by the game, not the prizes.

We see this in our interactions with employees. People are excited to be part of a bigger effort to do the right thing and they appreciate the ways a game can facilitate recognition of their individual efforts. Simple tools like leaderboards and player highlights are very motivating.

This is important news for the leaders who worry that games will require big-ticket prizes. It turns out that playing the game—getting credit for one’s own accomplishments and having an opportunity to cheer on others—is a reward in itself.

And it is not the only reward. In wellness games, employees get healthier and in sustainability games like ours people report both positive lifestyle changes as well as dollar savings. And in all of these games, there is an increase in levels of team work, which provides a whole other realm of corporate benefits.

Indeed, when you pause to do the math you realize that the corporate and individual benefits of employee engagement games add up almost as quickly as the environmental benefits.

Cool Choices was privileged to help facilitate a session demonstrating the efficacy of game mechanics at this year’s Behavior, Energy and Climate Change (BECC) Conference. That meant we organized a fun and silly session of charades and got to talk a bit about the power of games.

For me, though, the most powerful thing was watching others play charades. Earlier in the evening, I had serious doubts about our plan. I walked into the hotel conference room, scanned the crowd of professionals networking in small groups and thought, “uh, oh, this is never going to work.”

Our plan, you see, was to put the group into teams and then get them to act out charades for each other. The charade topics would get increasingly silly (shifting from standard charade topics like “Fiddler on the Roof” to more animated topics like “sumo wrestlers”) to illustrate the way that games engage and pull you along.

As I looked around the room though, I had doubts. Could we really get these professionals to pretend to be members of a rock band or a cheerleading squad? Would they be willing to play if play compromised their dignity? The point of the event was to illustrate the power of games but, really, could games be this powerful?

Happily, I did not have a lot of time to express these doubts or to change our plan. As I stood in the back of the room fretting that our plan would not work, others put the plan into motion.

As I stood on stage watching the previously dignified group disappear, people’s playful sides emerged. I was soon watching groups of conference attendees flap their arms like chickens, march in an imaginary parade and, yes, wrestle sumo-style. Some teams argued with referees over point values, instant alliances were born on other teams and laughter—laughter pervaded the room.

In the end my hardest task was to get the groups to stop playing. Their response was a powerful reminder of the potential of games.

Author and journalist Chris Benjamin shared some thoughts about the power of community in a recent blog that bear repeating here:

Almost nobody wants to be The Guy who hurts the community – the One Person who won’t sort the recycling or take out the compost, or show up when the church has a broken banister.  Once sustainable behavior becomes normalized people don’t want to be left out.

In just two sentences Chris creates a powerful vision of exactly the changes we’re aiming to create, here, at Cool Choices. Like Chris, we know that normalizing sustainability makes it compelling. Our aim in our corporate partnerships is to make environmental sustainability so fun, so visible, and so easy that it becomes the norm, the way everyone does things and—as a result —the path that the community identifies as business as usual.

Chris goes on to talk about what it means to promote sustainability at the community level, noting:

Marshaling communities, even semi-communities, to commit to positive environmental change helps the world in two ways: 1) It makes the small positive change and, 2) (more importantly) it builds better, more unified communities who have stepped onto the sustainability continuum together.

As we enter the last month of our pilot at Miron, I see evidence of both kinds of change. Individual participants are seeing financial and non-financial savings in their own lives that translate to a growing portfolio of aggregated environmental benefits. More, as people reflect on what they have done and talk about what else they might do (even after the game ends), we are seeing a collaborative vibe around sustainability that seems broader and deeper than before the pilot. We’ll know more, of course, after the post-pilot evaluations are complete but at this point I’m feeling pretty bullish about the power of workplace communities to normalize sustainability and then rally around that achievement.