Tag: Sustainable Savings

The following was originally posted on Toronto Sustainability Speaker Series.

At Cool Choices we take games very seriously. We’ve seen how games can make sustainability fun, popular and easy.

In May, Cool Choices launched a real-world game for employees at a Wisconsin-based commercial construction firm, Miron Construction. Of Miron’s 330 staff, 240 signed up to play and more than 70% of those employees are still playing three months later. In the game employees earn points when they do specific sustainable actions associated with household energy and water usage, transportation, indoor environmental quality, waste management and food. Employees compete individually and on teams for prizes and status.

So what kinds of things are they doing? As part of the game participants …

• Monitor their electric usage, taking steps to reduce phantom loads and eliminate inefficient appliances
• Slow down on the highway and practice eco-driving trips every time they get behind the wheel
• Pursue opportunities to carpool
• Turn off their televisions and game consoles to spend more time reading, interacting with other family members and playing outside
• Install rain barrels and develop innovative ways to re-use water
• Engage their families in discussions about how their household might be more environmentally sustainable

More, these same participants are sharing stories and photos with us about their efforts. They brag about the energy hogs they’ve found and unplugged and they show us how they’re using the game cards as prompts at home and in their cars. They say they are curious to find out what opportunities they can tackle next.  And they share how the game is changing their lives. Yes, there’s lots of talk about dollar savings but some employees are also telling us that their quality of life is improving—they find eco-driving to be less stressful than their old driving habits, they spend more time with their family now that they’ve turned off the television, and the game itself is an opportunity for the family to bond.

While we’re still in a pilot stage, we are already accumulating lessons learned:

• Points resonate. Our game refers to “points”, not kWh or BTUs or pounds of carbon, in part because everybody understands points. We share cumulative savings results with players periodically (in terms of dollars and environmental benefits) but we find that point values motivate action better than incremental savings information. Earning 25 points is more compelling than saving $2/month.
• Games engage. Games are, by nature, social. Playing generates conversation at work and beyond work. Players tell us that the game cards facilitate family involvement. Our cards are colorful and lean on text; participants report that their kids “own” the cards and help decide which cards the family will play next.
• Competition is compelling. A commercial construction firm, Miron thrives on competition. Our weekly leaderboards and team standings give players opportunities to trash talk with other teams, to nudge team members who are lagging behind and to show off their own successes.  For a company like Miron that’s committed to a triple bottom line, it’s terrific to have employees razzing each other about sustainable practices at the water cooler. 
• Having fun trumps reams of data. The game format helps control our (well-intentioned) urge to provide too much information. While we have on-line opportunities for participants to learn more about the actions they are taking, players are not required to study up on a topic in order to earn points.  If you want to know exactly how much electricity that old refrigerator is using our tools will help you calculate the usage; if you simply want to unplug it and collect your points, well that is fine too. Our aim is to make everyone feel good about the changes they are making so that they keep playing, not to create hundreds of subject-matter experts.

Gamification provides a fun framework for facilitating vitally important environmental actions. The game gives us a way to celebrate each individual accomplishment and to create a nudge for additional actions.

Games can make the world a better place. That’s why we take making sustainability fun very seriously.

As a veteran of almost two decades of energy efficiency efforts, I’ve had hundreds of people start conversations with me by saying “You know, I tried [insert efficiency product or practice here] and…”

Over time I learned to brace myself, to force a fixed smile as I listened—because as often as not, what followed the “and” was negative.

“And I didn’t see any savings.”

“And my wife hated the way the light looked.”

“And it didn’t work as well as our old model.”

“And the contractor left a huge mess.”

Now I’m watching Cool Choices’ first corporate partnership unfold and once again I’m listening to stories. Participants in the pilot are encouraged to share stories, photos or videos about what they are doing and how it’s going.

Some participants tell us that because they are watching less TV, they are spending more time outside, spending more time interacting with other family members, going for walks, and reading more.

Others tell us that avoiding jackrabbit starts and stops while driving was a challenge at first but now they find driving more relaxing. They arrive at their destination on time and feeling better about the other people on the road.

Multiple participants tell us about how they’ve involved their children, saying that Cool Choices has prompted broader and deeper conversations about sustainability.

The stories make clear that lots of participants are very proud (and justifiably so) about how they are taking control of their energy usage.

Up front we talked to these people about the financial benefits they could see via the game but now it’s clear that they are seeing benefits beyond the financial. Participants are experiencing:

• Mental health benefits associated with more social interactions, less road rage and feelings of greater control of their own lives.
• Physical health benefits associated with more opportunities for exercise, more time outside and less stress This is, I think, the magic pixie dust that’s needed to make change happen.

When people feel (yes, feel—in their guts) that being more sustainable actually improves the quality of their life, then we’re on the right track. Suddenly the benefits outweigh the hassles and sustainability isn’t about doing less—it’s about living more.

I can’t wait to read next week’s stories.

Jayme Heimbuch at Treehugger.com published a piece a few weeks ago about the failure of energy conservation to engage people via social networking, suggesting that perhaps people were the problem (because we seem to care more about celebrities than kilowatt hours).

Three weeks into a pilot where people are sending us photos, bragging to us and their colleagues about the electric savings they’ve uncovered, I’ve a different take on all of this.

Most existing energy conservation efforts haven’t engaged people in social media around their sites because the efforts are not any fun. Most of the tools function more like a test than a game, requiring you to gather and interpret all kinds of data before you can do anything the least bit fun. It would be akin to Trivial Pursuit requiring players to complete a comprehensive assessment to optimize team assignments. Imagine how much fun that would be.

Actually it would be about as much fun as filling out screen after screen of questions about your electric usage and insulation levels—stuff regular people don’t think about.

Disclosure: I’m an absolute energy geek. At my house the utility bill is something we open and discuss, as soon as it arrives. And then we input the data into customized spreadsheets, marvel at the graphs and talk about it some more.

But most people are not like me. Whereas I enjoy filling out carbon calculators and comparing the results from one tool to another, most regular people (our target market) find this a burden. And most people have enough burdens already.

Game developers have taught me that if you want to engage people you need to provide opportunities for early successes, to let players feel good about their efforts. It has to be fun.

Asking people questions they can’t answer about their appliances or energy usage makes them feel bad, incompetent even. It is not fun. While a few might dig in to learn more, most will drop out, opting to spend their time on something more pleasant. And we wonder why these folks aren’t posting their results on Facebook? What should they post?

Just learned I don’t know how to read my utility bill – even though I’ve been paying it for years.  It’s probably also time to admit that I can’t reset the clock on the microwave.

Our initiative, by contrast, empowers people. Participants can take easy actions, without having to learn how kWh converts to tons of CO2.  We give participants clear signals—points—to value their actions. In our experience people immediately grasp this approach, seeking out high point-value actions that fit into their lives.

We’re finding that a few people want to get into the details. We support and celebrate those efforts but that’s not the main event. The main event is regular people taking action and bragging to their colleagues about the points they’ve accumulated.

By making this fun and easy we have engaged participants who intend to continue taking actions that, in aggregate, will generate meaningful savings and reduce greenhouse gas emissions over the long run.

And isn’t that the real objective?

I’ve been involved—as an observer, a participant or a catalyst—in a variety of community-based energy efficiency programs over the last two decades. All of those efforts aimed to leverage a geographic or political community identity (neighborhoods, towns, etc.) to encourage individuals to implement energy efficient products or conservation practices in their own homes. Utilities and local governments target geo-political communities because it’s operationally handy—the communities align with utility territories or local government jurisdictions. So it’s easy to know who’s in and who’s out.

Community efforts, though, are most effective in a community with:

• a lot of informal interaction (so successes with one member can influence other members);
• strong established communication networks that reach all community members; and
• clear and compelling leadership to champion the effort.

Given those criteria, I’d argue that the ideal communities are corporate, not geo-political.

Think about your town or neighborhood vs. your workplace community.

• Whereas I wave at a neighbor while pulling into my garage, I chat daily with my co-workers and know more about their lives.
• While my city council person tries to reach me via snail mail and community forums that I rarely attend, everyone in my company has my email address and can interact with me at regularly scheduled meetings that I’m paid to attend.
• And while I might disagree with both at times, my CEO’s commitment to an issue is usually more straightforward than my mayor’s, often because the hierarchy is clearer.

Hence Cool Choices’ current focus on corporate communities. Our approach is to partner with companies that are already leaders in corporate sustainability efforts. We work with these companies to facilitate a cultural transformation where employees embrace sustainability in their personal lives, just as their employer has embraced it on the business side. We believe workplace efforts that promote personal sustainability are a big win for both the corporation and the employees.

For example, these efforts:

• Broaden and deepen employee engagement in corporate sustainability efforts, reinvigorating corporate efforts;
• Provide employees with the tools and opportunities to save money in their personal lives;
• Make sustainability a fun community effort; and
• Enable corporations to differentiate themselves in terms of candidate recruitment, community relations and other arenas.

Ultimately I think these efforts will affect neighborhoods and whole towns. But that might well happen via one employer at a time.