How Green Are The Grassroots?

Whenever I hear about proposals and policies which would cut energy use in organisations, I always think: what about the staff?

We’ve all seen recycling bins which are either empty or else full of non-recyclable rubbish. We’ve known companies which have theoretical polices on travel which get ignored. An awful lot of the first generation of energy-savings and efficiency measures came in a greenwash wave, driven top-down by corporate social responsibility (CSR) people, or others in  high-level management.

Green polices, all too often, run aground when they hit resistance at the desks and in the company cars of the world.

Can you get staff behind green issues?

It’s a little like security policies. The word comes down  from on high that everyone shall have complex passwords, and change them regularly – and people see it as a barrier to doing their jobs. They find ways to get round it – like writing their passwords down or choosing ones they can easily guess.

Similarly, if you are a sales person, and a directive says you shall use public transport, it could hurt you. You may find it means you can make fewer sales calls, do less business, and lose out on your bonus.

So you will find a way to forget about it, and your head of department  – with one eye on the bottom line – will nod it through.

Look at things that way, and it seems like all is lost, but there are optimists around, who believe things can be changed.

Suppose you could calculate the net benefit to the company – and the effect on its carbon footprint – from any individual’s work decision? And suppose that information could be displayed directly to the individuals who make those decisions?

Furthermore, why not make the results of those decisions visible to all, turn it into a collective shared experience, almost a competition?

Turning sustainability into a game

That’s the idea behind Sustainability Momentum, or Sumo, a widget from CloudApps, a company that has warned before about the need to get employees involved in carbon savings.

I’ve looked at Sumo – it has a set of buttons that help employees rate different decisions, and gives them an overall score for how low their personal contribution to the company’s carbon footprint is. It isn’t the first green desktop widget (there have been ones from Ecosoft and HP) but this one links into back end systems, and goes much further.

The idea is that departments will treat it as a contest, individuals will set goals, and run comparisons, and they might even get a real incentive.

It might even become a key performance indicator (KPI) for staff, alongside their normal sales targets.

I have to say, I am sceptical about this sort of organised public demonstration, which smacks a little of the Two Minute Hate in George Orwell’s 1984. But then, I’m not a sales person, and am more internally motivated than competitive.

The new CEO at CloudApps, Peter Grant, is very much a salesman in background. He was at Salesforce.com, and has been promoting the idea of doing apps in the cloud for a long while. And he thinks this sort of thing will get people engaged.

“Employee engagement is the new hot topic when it comes to sustainability,” he said when I met him for lunch just before Easter. He was proud of having come in to Soho by public transport, and explained that the sustainability targets and indices for different employees are calibrated according to what kind of job they do.

Grant’s job involves lots of travelling, and the odd lunch out, but other employees spend more time at a desk in an office and take public transport as a matter of course (as do I), so they get targets set against a different base line.

Waste company Veolia is reported to be considering adopting Sumo for its work force, and mobile phone operators are also looking at it.

Whipping the peons into line

I’d have to reserve judgement till I have seen it in action. After all, even though it makes things visible at the employee level, it’s really a top-down policy, but with better reporting and graphics.

Unless the particular company using it presents it very well, and gets users to really buy into it, then it could be perceived as a ball-and-chain on users’ feet. Much like the customer relationship management (CRM) products, of which Grant’s former company Salesforce.com is an example.

I’ve met people who swear by Salesforce, and I’ve met others who swear at it, endlessly irked by the requirement to feed the software details of what they are doing.

I’m more sympathetic to Sumo, because its aims are more-or-less worthwhile and its results could be beneficial. But I fear it could be just one more attempt to whip the peons into line.