Awake

To get the staff on board with your sustainability aspirations, it takes more than telling them about it. Awake specialises in engaging the hearts and minds of the people.

5 Reasons Why Building a Culture of Sustainability is Good for Business

Aside from the obvious environmental benefits, embedding sustainability into the DNA of the organisation delivers the following

The business will be seen to be walking the talk in the eyes of stakeholders by engaging in sustainability at a fundamental level
Staff will be engaged and compelled to contribute toward company environmental targets, such as carbon neutrality
Energy and resource use is reduced by having environmentally conscious staff, resulting in decreased waste and higher efficiency
As environmental issues gain increasing prominence, an employer which stands for sustainability becomes an employer of choice
A sustainable culture is self-regulating. By embedding sustainability in the core fabric of the business, green innovation flows naturally and there is less need to regulate and enforce it - it comes naturally as "the way we do things around here"

The Sustainable Culture Program

Awake has a set of tools and models which engage and align your people with your environmental commitments. Our approach is highly customisable, but typical steps are as follows

Step 1: Diagnostics
Through a combination of online surveys, interviews and focus groups, Awake measures attitudes towards sustainability and current levels of awareness, engagement and alignment. The data gained through this crucial step informs the design for the subsequent steps, ensuring that interventions are targeted at the greatest needs in the business.

Step 2: Raising Awareness & Engaging Responsibility
This step involves workshops for all staff to gain experiential clarity of their role in engaging with sustainability. Rather than a lecture from the front, the focus is on guiding staff through exercises to examine their own behaviour around sustainability.
Workshop content includes

Values Identification and Alignment
How My Values Relate to Sustainability
Personal Responsibility for Sustainability
Cognitive Dissonance exercise
Empathy Exploration

Step 3: Building Personal Power for Sustainability
This step involves workshops for supporting people to put sustainability into action. Content includes:

Values-based Decision-making
Interpersonal Skills for Sustainability
Action Planning
Prioritisation Skills
Tools for Keeping Awake

Ongoing
Periodic assessments can be conducted in order to evaluate the impact of the interventions at each step of the way. Results can be used in the design of subsequent steps.

Our Team or Yours
Awake can either deliver the steps above to your people, or train a team of internal champions to facilitate the content. This latter option is particularly applicable to "green teams" within organisations, to give them the tools to make a real difference within the culture. The support provided to such a team includes

Training in the models, exercises and content
Initial co-facilitation support
Ongoing check-ins, debriefs and skill development

To talk to Awake about building a culture of sustainability, click here