Day 479: The Full-Circle Effect

Last week, I was lucky enough to participate - as a presenter - at the Burnaby Board of Trade's Green Talks! event. Five minutes on any topic about the greening of our business. I chose to talk about the major challenges we had in getting employees to care about waste sorting, about their commute, about the energy use at our facility. But I also showed how we slowly changed that mindset, and how after three years, the organization had achieved some impressive results. I talked about the need for branding, guerrilla marketing (quick'n'dirty/cheap & fast/funny), and communication. This was after all a change we were asking of our employees and we needed to do a good, no - great - job in communicating why we were making this change. 

Which is more effective?

A company-wide email stating something like "Effective immediately, all employees will sort their organics into the green bins in the lunchrooms" with the email printed and taped above the bins.

OR

The new green bins, each bin adorned with distinctive, highly visual posters and labels, with the company's green mascot clearly shown, and a real live friendly person standing there explaining how and why we will sort our organics to prevent them from going to the landfill, and who gives you a lollipop as a reward for listening and sorting.

(Yes, we really did this.)

Seems pretty obvious I think. If you really want people to understand the need for a change, you have to talk to them about it. One of the building blocks of Training Within Industry (TWI) is called Job Relations (JR), and one of the core principles of JR is that you tell people in advance about changes that will affect them.

Seems pretty simple right? So why are people so surprised when the company-wide emails don't drive effective change? Why do organizations keep doing it and expecting results? Isn't that the definition of insanity?

I think it's because sending an email is EASY. Putting in some effort to (1) lay the foundation for the change, (2) talk to people about the change, (3) answer their questions about the change, (4) encourage the right behaviour with praise/reward isn't hard, but it's not as easy as sending an email. I'm pretty glad that I work with people who are willing to put in the effort to do it right. So much so that we put it on our wall.

So from being able to show off our sustainability successes at this event, and being really proud of all that we had accomplished in a few short years, less than a week later I turn around and have my doctor (my respirologist) tell me that I have developed pollution-triggered asthma. That's right. All my years of running, triathlon, cycling, swimming, skating, all those activities and accomplishments didn't make much difference - the air I was breathing on a daily basis was causing my lungs to constrict and would have eventually turned into COPD if I hadn't pushed to have it checked when I did.

The irony of this whole situation isn't lost on me. 

I'm not certain what it means - for me - yet. But I'll figure that out.

AMac