Integrating sustainability through employee and guest involvement is essential for the success of your hotel’s ongoing green operations and programs. We have covered numerous topics in this GREEN TEAM series including focusing on internal operations, engaging employees to capture ideas, best practices to engaging employees to be part of the solution, using art to raise awareness and creating a toolkit to support and guide green teams. Our final focus ties everything back to corporate sustainability goals to take your green teams to the next level.

Align Green Teams with Corporate Sustainability Goals

To take your green team to the next level your hotel should link them to the corporate sustainability goals. One way to incorporate this is to have a staff person from the corporate sustainability program lead the green team, which will provide synergies between the corporate objectives and the green team programs.

Other strategies to help link green teams to corporate sustainability goals include:

• Create a paid in-house position to oversee the green team or hire a consultant to help
• Integrate sustainability metrics into employee’s performance goals
• Link bonuses/compensation to sustainability goals
• Create a senior-level, cross-functional team that brings department heads from key departments together to link sustainability intitiatives to green team initiatives
• Train employees to understand which sustainability issues are important to the business by setting the context and help employees understand that their small actions can make a difference

Intel is a good example of company-wide support for environmental performance. They have tied a component of every employee’s bonus to the company’s environmental performance. One year, a portion of the bonus, was tied to reducing their carbon footprint.

Intel found that their green teams were active enough that it made sense to have a corporate convening structure to help align their activities with corporate initiatives. “We aren’t trying to dictate everything that they do, because so much of what is important to them is what is important at their locale,”  explains Carrie Freeman, Corporate Sustainability Strategist at Intel.

“We didn’t want to hamper the green team efforts, but we also wanted some alignment with our corporate initiatives,” continues Freeman.

The hotel industry should refer to the pioneers of “greening” even if the companies are not in the hospitality industry.They have spend countless hours and funds into research and development of sustainability programs and structures. It is a good place to start and play ideas off of.

The green teams at Intel still have the latitude to focus issues of interest, such as planting on-site organic gardens or reduce shopping bag use, but for 2009 they were also asked to help incorporate awareness, communication and education on reducing office energy use, providing some alignment with their carbon reduction goal.

Sustainable hotel business expert Scott Parisi stresses that getting your employees to green your hotel operations is where the greatest value lies. Along with Andrew Winston author of Green Recovery, Scott also challenges hoteliers to, “Ask your employees to focus team efforts on innovating to reduce energy use or to design new products that satisfy green-minded customers. Green teams, if used right, can morph from mainly engagement tools to something even more fundamentally valuable to the business.”

Green teams can be a great ally and resource for creating excitement around new green ways of doing business.

Conclusion

Engaging employees is not an easy territory with a simple formula for success, but rather an art than science. Harnessing the power of green teams and aligning their efforts with corporate goals is a learning edge for most hotels.

While the best practices outlined through the series provides ideas to get started, challenges do exist. Some key challenges a hotel might face as they dive into green teams include:

• Metrics: It is critical as a business to track what success looks like. However, it is not always easy to gather data on progress. Software tools are becoming available to help green teams track results.
• Engaging business units/departments: This is a key challenge especially when they are not interested in sustainability issues. It is important to articulate the business case in terms that are meaningful to them.
• Strategic versus grassroots: Corporate needs to decide if it makes sense to link employee activities to the corporate strategy or give them the flexibility to address issue at individual hotel locations.
• Volunteer or paid time: Do employees implement ideas on their own time or is it part of the job? In these strained economic times, what is the best way to reassure employees that they will not be penalized for participating in a green team?
• Corporate structure without losing the grassroots passion: Another challenge is how to manage the tensions between providing enough structure to link green team activities to a corporate strategy, without losing their grassroots energy, creativity and passion.