The world is sinking into a difficult socio-economical crisis. Companies are laying staff, reducing wages to try to raise benefits and save their business.Is it the best way to manage the crisis? I believe it does not need an expert to understand that in our circumstances it is not the adequate solution. Reducing the number of employees or their salary is only making it worse, since it is less money that re-introduced to the market again and more unemployed people costing to government. This is for the global picture and I have been wondering couldn’t companies think about a different way to act on wages and employees costs? Yes there is and it relies on innovating, investing your staff into the business’ life. Why? Because it is the only way to ensure they will change their behavior in a certain way that you can make further savings without laying them.

Employees’ culture can change?

As soon as you have defined where you will need to push your employees to change, everything is about managing the change, preparing the transition and communicating. Yes once again you will never have a good result in your transition if you do not communicate enough and invest your employees to achieve the defined goal.

The change management can be organized by a person, a team or a specific department, in any case you will have to clearly define and communicate to all your employees the goals and the change manager, so that the project is clearly understood and accepted. This person/team responsible for the change management will have to be the perfect example, showing the targeted behavior, allowing the employees to have someone to compare too. Depending on the targets and the people you have to face, you might need to send mails during the project announcing it or organize workshops, meetings, seminars that will allow your employees to accept and agree.

Bottom-up Procedure

Because the employees’ green transition is not only about what you – manager – want but also about changing people’s behavior for something good, it is important to establish in parallel a bottom-up process in order to collect employees’ impression, problems or any information that will give added-value to ensure success of the project. From this process, you can collect ideas; interesting initiatives that your team might not have thought about it and it will for sure enriched the whole process. A bottom-up process can be done by a specific email, by dedicated meetings and workshops, again be sure to apply the adapted solution to the type of people you face.

Allow innovative ideas come forward; motivating employees should be an innovative process, depending again on the type of person you employ, you can find ways to motivate your teams to follow the green spirit. For example, in one of the companies’ that I worked for, the company HQ implemented a “Citizen’s week” where all employees are called to participate to specific action organized by the company (in his case humanitarian actions). Some companies have implemented green award: the best eco-employee gets a gift or whatever you are able to offer. You strategy must fit the employees you are targeting and make them want to change.

At this point, you have to make sure that everybody that is concerned have understood the objective, the reason that the project is launched in order to ensure the important participation and of course the best results. The question is: do you know your employees? Changing behavior is a tricky project that need lot empathy, understanding and human relations; you cannot start your project if you are still a stranger for your employees. The key words of the second part are 3: communicate, understand and explain.

Next week, 3^rd Step Employees’ green transition

Whatever the size of your business, if you ever need to evaluate a cost line of your business, do not hesitate to contact me camilledelcour@missblue.org. With your knowledge of your market and a precise analysis with pertinent tools, we can easily and cheaply find a way for you to get productivity, effectiveness and more profit by just making small changes that you never thought about. I can provide you excel database tools aligned to your type of business, or any other help you can possibly need to make your green transition a reality.

Read 1^st Part