Staff Engagement: Less Obvious Benefits & Opportunities

[Derek_Parkinson]

The benefits of staff engagement are well understood. They are often discussed in terms of improved recruitment and retention of staff, and promoting a deeper understanding of a company's values among the workforce. Such discussions often focus on the internal aspects of the company, and it is easy to overlook how staff engagement can deliver business benefits in its external relationships.

First and foremost, engaging staff on sustainability issues will help a company to do the right things rather than just say the right things, says Michael Emmott, a public policy adviser at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

“It's the difference between being a nice company and being a good company. To be a good company it will need to translate its values into action, and that won't be easy unless the workforce understands them. Staff engagement helps to make the message live. You need your values to have an impact on operations,” he says.

In the context of the low carbon agenda, the direct impact of changes to staff behaviour may be small however. “Many of the things an employee can do are limited. If I work in serviced offices the contribution I can make – maybe cycling to work, turning my computer off when I leave at night – may be low compared to emissions from the heating and lighting systems used in the building, which will usually be centrally controlled anyway,” says Emmott.

He is surely right on all these points, but there may be other benefits that make a low carbon engagement programme worthwhile. These can include raising the profile of a company, establishing it as a leader in its field and helping to build relationships with prospective customers. An example is provided by a personal carbon budget scheme developed by consultancy WSP, a provider of engineering and construction services currently working on high profile projects such as the World Trade Center site in New York.

From internal to external engagement

The scheme, the first of its kind in the world according to the company, has been running internally for about three years, and WSP plans to make it available to external companies from 2010 on a not-for-profit basis. “We’re looking for a small number of companies to trial a wider extension of the scheme,” says the company. As part of this, WSP will provide an “off the shelf” package that can be rolled out across a business, and guidance on how to implement it effectively for a period of 12 months.

The proposed licence fee will be determined by the size of the organisation, with companies of between 100 and 1,000 employees being charged £3,000; those with between 1,000 and 10,000 employees being charged £6,000, and enterprises with upward of 10,000 employees being charged £9,000. The WSP package will include instructions for administrators, marketing and campaign materials, access to an online carbon calculator tool and a support helpdesk, and preferential agreements with a range of green product suppliers.

“It wasn't our original intention to make it available externally. It had a gentle start in WSP and has now been going for about three years. We decided to make it available when clients expressed an interest. We're still being gentle on it, and you could think of it as still in beta mode – we hope the launch will create a pioneer's group,” David Symons, WSP Director of Environmental Business told Low Carbon Board Report.

Originally launched in the UK by Symons, the scheme has now been rolled out to WSP operations in other countries gaining a total of 720 volunteers. Staff track their quarterly emissions online, and at the end of the year those who have used more than their target allowance pay up to a maximum of £100 into the scheme. Staff who do better than their allowance receive a bonus payment at the same rate. In 2010 WSP has set the carbon cap at 4.5 tonnes and the reward scheme at 5 pence per kilo up to a threshold of £100. According to the company, many staff opted to pass their bonus payment to a green charity, while penalties also went to this nominated charity. “Our teams on average reduced their carbon footprint by 10% last year in the scheme,” says WSP.

Before pressing ahead with their inhouse version of the PACT scheme, there were several key points to consider. “There were about three or four boxes we had to tick – the cost of the scheme, we had to be fairly certain that staff would respond, and roughly how many would sign up. Obviously, we also had to be sure we could make it work,” says Symons.

A range of benefits

There have been significant benefits for the company, some perhaps less predictable than others. “As individuals many of our staff are environmentally conscious, and PACT captures their enthusiasm. Some of our staff have specifically told us that they joined the business because of PACT – it tipped the balance in our favour. More generally PACT has helped to give us a strong differentiation from the crowd more generally,” says Symons.

The scheme also gives the company valuable insights into how personal carbon budgets work, he says. “It's one of those topics that is in the air at the moment – a recent report from IPPR [Institute for Public Policy Research] recommended personal carbon budgets, as did a recent statement by the head of the Environment Agency. In the event that it becomes mandatory, we will have built up an understanding.”

PACT also supports the company's other work on sustainability, he says. “It's part of a much larger sustainability programme, made up of four parts. It falls within the part requiring WSP to manage its own impact responsibly. PACT is one of the more innovative things we have done in terms of engaging staff, but we have mainstream approaches, such as launching e-learning materials on sustainability to make sure that all the advice our staff give is correct.”

Of course, there is a more hard nosed view of the decision to roll out PACT to other companies. WSP's credentials as a leader are likely to be boosted even among those companies that take the view that the PACT scheme is not for them, while those that do opt in will provide WSP with valuable information and contacts that could lead to future business opportunities. And then there is the media attention PACT has attracted. “Putting it in hard numbers we think our coverage in 2009 was worth around £1.4 million in terms of advertising equivalents,” says Symons.

Key questions:

 What are the aims of our strategy for engaging staff on the low carbon agenda?
 How well does our low carbon strategy support our business objectives?
 What opportunities does it offer for engaging with prospective clients or partners?