We’ve made the business case, now to what you were waiting for, if I we didn’t need to prove the WHY to you. Chances are the discussions have already started at your hotel due to the emergy trend amongst the big Chains and traveling sites creating their own Green Directories (Travelocity) and Eco-Tourism Guides (Orbitz).
A green team often starts off with a few passionate employees going to HR and creating a green employee network or club. They go through a company’s formal process to charter a team and give the group an official status within a company. These groups typically are not linked to corporate sustainability priorities and self‐organize to work on issues they are interested in. Funding and executive support can come from a combination of facilities, the corporate sustainability officer (CSO), environmental health and safety (EHS), human resources (HR) or the corporate foundation.
Another mechanism for creating a green team is for the CSO or EHS department to formally sponsor a team and act as a hub by providing priorities, structure and resources. Leading companies are supporting their green teams by providing Web 2.0 tools to encourage communications and dialogue, convening the teams to share best practices, creating tool kits to get them started and training them on how to be sustainability change agents.
Some companies have dedicated paid staff to support their green team, while others have a voluntary leader. In some cases, the volunteer leader is on the corporate social responsibility (CSR) team.
A hybrid structure is evolving where a “corporate green team” is created to bring representatives from key departments together to help implement and support strategic corporate sustainability initiatives. They also act a cross‐functional umbrella group to screen ideas that are suggested by green teams, identify resources to support new initiatives and help to link green team activities with corporate sustainability objectives.
FOUR EMERGING TRENDSFour key trends emerge as one reviews the best practices of existing green teams:
- Focus on internal operations:Many green teams initially focus on ways to improve internal operations, addressing such issues as energy and water use, recycling in the office, composting food waste, reducing the use of disposable take‐out containers and eliminating plastic water bottles, without a formal link to corporate CSR priorities.
- Reduce employee footprint at home:Some companies, such as Wal‐Mart, have focused on providing employees tools and resources for being more sustainable in their own lives. Other companies such as Hewlett Packard, Genentech and Yahoo! provide resources and tips for employees to be greener at home. The theory here is that if you can get employees excited and engaged in their personal lives, it will translate into bringing a sustainability lens to their day‐today work.
- Bring consumers into the equation:A few companies, including eBay and Intuit, are linking their consumers to green practices and helping them reduce their footprints, strengthening relationships with customers.
- Link to corporate sustainability goals:Larger companies, such as Intel, Genentech, eBay and Yahoo!, are working to maintain the grassroots energy of green teams, while at the same time linking their efforts to broader corporate sustainability goals. In addition to their informal green teams, Intel has created three Sustainability Action Teams to help engage employees on key corporate sustainability objectives, such as reducing energy consumption. And while the informal teams still have the latitude to pursue their interests, they are encouraged to help educate employees and raise awareness on key strategic issues.
Based on a review of existing literature and interviews, Table 1 summarizes a range of practices that are used most often by green teams and Appendix A highlights the best practices and lesson learned from specific companies. The 10 most innovative best practices are detailed below.
Start With the Visible and Tangible: Focus on Internal Operations
Some argue that small changes in the workplace, such as eliminating water bottles, are trivial, compared to corporate initiatives that focus on more strategic issues. Kevin Moss, Head of Corporate Social Responsibility at BT Americas disagrees.
At BSR 2009 recently he stressed, “Allow the trivial things to happen.” He used to think it was a waste of time to have staff focus on issues like eliminating paper cups and water bottles, but he now realizes that for many employees, these small actions are important because they are visible and tangible.
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Look out for EcoGreenHotel’s July Eco Newsletter as we bring you: Get Senior Management Involved and Engage Employees.
About EcoGreenHotel
EcoGreenHotel is dedicated to helping lodging facilities address environmental issues and achieve the Triple Bottom Line. EcoGreenHotel.com is also a great resource for tools, checklists, current news and trends, as well as a marketplace for green products and services at EcoGreenHotelStore.com. EcoGreenHotel also offers green marketing services for existing green hotels.Credit/Source: Green Teams: Engaging Employees in Sustainability. November 2009. By Deborah Fleischer, President GreenImpact. GreenBiz Report.
