Human Resources have been taking part in Green Impact for a few years now, but we like to keep it fresh by switching the teams around. Taking this approach has proved to be really helpful in generating new ideas and integrating the Green Impact mentality in parts of the department that were hard to reach in previous years.
This year, for various reasons, we (Luke, Rachel and Sara) put ourselves forward for the challenge; with Steven Angesty, our GIPA, making up the rest of the Project Team. We all met to have a look through the workbook, and to be honest we all thought “How are we going to find time for this.” We needed to take a step back.
When we really had a think about it, there was one key area we needed to tackle first – engagement.
Our department has put plenty of great work into Green Impact in previous years. The problem was that not all of that great work was shouted about. This year we were going to SHOUT about our successes, set-up competitions and challenges, giveaway chocolate, communicate interesting and sometimes shocking facts, a little bit of naming and shaming and posting a range of somewhat comical photos and videos.
As these were not typically the kind of things you’d expect to receive in your inbox, we decided a more informal method of communication was needed, so we set-up our own Green Impact Google Community. The Community allowed colleagues to speak their mind about environmental challenges and it gave us the opportunity to post things we’d not necessarily want to send out as an email… Steven really helped keep the interest in the Community going by creating a meme for each criterion (example below).
Now we knew how we were going to do it, we were able to concentrate on what we were going to do. To make the task feel less daunting, Steven created a communications plan for the team, which allowed us to keep the Community up to date along with keeping us on top of the workbook.
You’ll be hearing from each of us over this final week, telling our personal thoughts on what we think have been our real success stories.
