Earth Day and Mall Madness

 

     Yesterday’s blog challenge was to visit a mall.  Huh?  Well I hate shopping so I took a couple of hours out of the Smithsonian to visit Earth Day on the National Mall instead.  I still didn’t get any good ideas for a blog post though, so I’m going to cheat and refer to Peter Ubel’s reflections on mall-life, described in his book, ‘Free Market Madness’:

“Is there any place where freedom is more apparent than a super market?  Walking the aisles of your local grocery store, you can freely choose from among dozens of shampoos, scores of cereals, and hundreds and frozen delicacies.

But are you as free as you think?  In some supermarkets today, an anthropologist is wandering the aisles watching how you shop, observing whether your eyes roam the shelves from bottom to top, and measuring how long you linger in front of display cases if you have toddlers in row.  Meanwhile, over at the kitchen store, the proprietors have just placed an expensive new cooker onto the shelves, a deluxe model with a control panel that would put a 1990s VCR to shame.  At nearly double the price of their next-best model, almost no consumers are willing to buy this new product.  But that doesn’t matter to the kitchen store, because the next-best model (which used to be its high-end, slow-selling brand) now races off the shelf, appearing to be a veritable bargain in comparison with this new product.”

 

Ubel goes on to draw from behavioural economics to show that people's’ search for ‘utility’ (basically, the ) is driven largely by illogical decision making.  His main example is the  number of people who eat too much and eat the wrong food, reducing the length and quality of their lives, even though they believe they are making a rational choice each time they reach for their next burger.

But (not) protecting our planet is a very good example of failed utility too.  Returning to the earth-day theme, each one of us needs to consider our decision making and how these decisions add to, or subtract from, a broader view of utility, which includes preservation of our world.  This applies to HR too - see my post on Green HR.

 

Technorati Tags: Earth Day,Peter Ubel,Free Market Madness

 

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CSR & Social Justice / HR Carnival #38

Continuing the green theme, check out Natalie Cooper (Changeboard)'s latest HR Carnival - a special devoted to CSR.

Well done for putting so many great contributions together Natalie.

 

Technorati Tags: CSR,Green HR,Social Justice

The Search for Greening

In my last post (The Search for Meaning), I wrote about the first approach to developing mojo: the development of a compelling strategy based upon a key purpose that is internally rather than externally generated.

I think the second approach is to develop a complementary theme to the main focus - one that is not directly related to achieving the organisation's mission (like leadership, innovation etc), but can act alongside this to provide meaning and focus.

An obvious opportunity is to develop a focus on CSR and in particular on green business / HR.  But for this to serve as mojo, this complementary focus needs to be really high profile and to perculate through everything that the organisation does.

The term, green HR, is often used to simply to make existing HR services and approaches sound more strategic or innovative, or to very small changes in policy. But I think it can be a lot more too.

The issue is that for a lot of organisations, their main environmental footprint is caused by the action of their employees, rather than in manufacturing, transportation or other activities with a more recognised environmental impact.  And even in manufacturing and other industries, employee behaviours will still have a significant impact.

So the fact that many employees who have high green standards for themselves at home don't apply the same requirements to themselves at work (only 40% of employees think that it's our responsibility to protect the environment during office hours) is a problem.

Green HR to me is about how employees can be encouraged to change their behaviour, supporting and potentially leading the wider environmental management changes within organisational.

I attended a Deloitte dbrief webinar,  'Going Green', recently.  This identified a dual role for HR in promoting sustainability.

First, there is the role HR plays in driving results through its own activities:

• "How do we compete for talent?
• Gen Y? OMG!?!
• What do employees care about?
• How can green engage employees?
• Is green helping deliver on my employer brand promise to employees?"

I think this role relates to often fairly simple changes in policy, most often associated with recruitment and reward, and also often geared to taking advantage of national / European or other legislation.  An example would be B&Q stores offers discounted rates for home energy monitors (as an employee benefit).

And second, HR also supports green business by acting as a strategic partner to the business in this area:

• "What does sustainability mean to the business?
• Are people aware of our sustainability vision / results?
• Are our sustainability efforts enhancing our reputation?
• How do we reward people who 'go green'?"

I think this relates to organisations engaging their people to support broader changes to have less impact on the environment across the business (eg reducing waste, energy etc through manufacturing).  An example would be Ford's energy awareness campaign for employees ‘Energy is everyone’s job!’

This is a useful distinction, but I think there's a third role as well, which is about HR leading the business to develop a focus on green behaviour as something that will help the company's sustainable competitive position by engaging employees, and by acting as a source of meaning and motivation, ie as organisational mojo.

Employees are increasingly searching for meaning, and also increasingly require that this basis for meaning comes from the operations of the organisation rather than its competitive / financial success.  A focus on green issues is one possible way of providing this meaning.  HR can take a lead by raising this opportunity and aligning management and HR processes around these green issues.

My favourite example of this is BSkyB which I posted on last year.  Green-ness has become a core part of what BSkyB is about (rather than just delivering broadcasting), and HR has played a fundamental role in making this happen: raising the issues, supporting employee behaviour change and adding a green tint to all HR processes.

Now that really is green HR.

 

(I'll also be talking about these issues at Personalvetardagarna in Malmo, Sweden on 15th October.  Let me know if you'd like to meet me there, want a copy of my presentation etc...)

 

Technorati Tags: Green HR,Meaning,Organisation capability,Personalvetardagarna

Blog Action Day: the Environment

Today is blog action day. Bloggers around the web are uniting to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind - the environment. Every blogger will post about the environment in their own way and relating to their own topic. The organiser's aim is to get everyone talking towards a better future.

The environment has been selected as the 2007 theme - both for the clarity of its importance and the undeniable urgency that issues like global warming and pollution have. It is an issue that can relate to virtually any subject, any blog and anybody.

I only came across this initiative at the end of last week and had a quick think over the weekend about what I might write, but I have posted on HR's role in supporting green issues fairly recently, and more generally have commented on environmentally friendly initiatives at the Work Clinic. And I'm out of new stuff.

So this evening, I've had a quick look at a very few of the 15,861 blogs which are joining in. A common theme seems to be that, yes, this day is a good idea to increase communications about the environment, but that communications is clearly not enough.

I've already made a commitment to save energy but I know there is a lot more I can do. There is a lot more we can all do, and have to do (I tend to go with Al Gore rather than Stewart Dimmock on this).

My dad's perspective is that the biggest challenge in dealing with environmental risk is that whatever clever technology we invent, and however much we all take personal responsibility for reducing our environmental footprint, we are still very unlikely to be able to have an impact which will be as great as is required. The reason for this is that improving the environment is going to require slowing down our rate of growth - and no political party is ever going to be brave enough to admit this fact (perhaps unless Gore does stand for President in the US?).

So the conclusion of my post is that politicians should look at the number of people who have participated in this communication, and take a risk to tell people what they really believe about the environment and what we will need to do to stabilise it. Current actions (or inactions) are not going to be enough. We need to be much more radical and if necessary, slaughter a few sacred cows.

And I commit that, whichever party does do this (when Gordon Brown finally gets round to calling an election in the UK) will get my vote (even if it is the Lib Dems).

Green HR

I attended a very interesting session on green HR yesterday, organised by Buck. As they explain, “Green issues are moving up on everyone’s agenda and it’s clear that these issues need to be addressed to sustain the environment. Businesses can do their part by establishing green policies which in turn have positive effects on the perceptions of the people who matter – consumers, press and employees.”

Green HR refers to the contribution of people management policies and activities towards this broader agenda.

It’s an important issue for HR because it is clearly an important issue for all employees, as well as customers and other stakeholders. It’s also one in which HR can have a big impact without causing much expenditure – good environmental management can improve sales and reduce costs, providing funding for green benefits to keep staff engaged. Examples of these include IKEA giving all their employees a bike at Christmas (also these are apparently easily available on ebay) and Anglian Water offering employees £1/day if they agree to walk to work.

But the most powerful example of green HR came in a presentation of ‘The Bigger Picture’ given by Dev Raval, Group Head of Reward and Strategy at B Sky B.

'The Bigger Picture' refers to Sky's objective to engage its customers in practical and inspiring ways to use energy efficiently. They aim to raise people's awareness of the impact that we as as individuals have just from living our lives. And they do this through tools such as their carbon calculator pictured here.

To engage customers, the company needs to help Sky people inspire others by becoming more progressive and efficient in their energy use. Sky's key principles governing the employee aspects of its 'The Bigger Picture' programme include:

Resonance

• Making environmental management an integral part of their way of doing business
• Providing a mix of high and low impact changes
• Providing a constant calendar of activities
• Not an initiative or programme in isolation.

Inviting

• Incentivising and encouraging - no compulsion
• Practical and inspiring
• Easy to adopt
• Diverse solutions.

Specific actions within the programme have included offering staff incentives for buying a hybrid car, savings on carbon offsetting, on public transport and bikes. Sky have also made additions to their holiday discount scheme to feature holiday companies operating in an environmentally friendly way, and to their volunteering programme, for example to volunteering in schools, to help pupils undertake environmental projects. Some of the company's actions have been really simple, but still very effective (at least for raising awareness), for example allowing employees to buy a coffee mug at their coffee bar rather than using disposable cups, and then receiving 10p off a cup of coffee.

Sky have also launched a carbon credit card - employees receive points for taking public transport or walking to work, or video conferencing rather than taking a flight. Prizes are given to people with the most points. Dev also described a personal coral reef available on their intranet - more points means more fish and perhaps a shark, few points means the reef starts to get dirty and all the fish swim away. I thought this was a really imaginative and engaging solution.

Overall, I thought this was an excellent case study because of the company’s innovative approaches to benefits, which is an area in which very little has changed recently. But more importantly, I think ‘The Bigger Picture’ illustrates how HR can work with the rest of the organisation to develop a clear and differentiated story of what an organisation is about, in much more than just financial terms, and which can act as a hook to truly engage employees. This story could be green HR, or it could be something else. What I think is important is that x (whatever it is) should be used as an overall anchor for a number of ongoing initiatives, and that these need to be sustained over a relatively lengthy period of time (as is the case at B Sky B).

However, green issues are obviously particularly important and you can see my personal commitment to save energy using the button at the bottom of the right hand side of this blog. My wife, Sandra, and I have also offset our remaining CO2 footprint of 14 tonnes per year.