Mr. Weissman

Eco-Friendly Practices

Developing a Competitive Environmental Program Within Your Chain

By Arthur Weissman, President and CEO, Green Seal, Inc.

In our last article, we outlined how hospitality companies can develop and implement corporate environmental programs throughout their organization. In this article we focus on building an employee recognition program that supports the implementation of a new environmental program and can provide staff with training and leadership opportunities. In addition to setting up online tools, reporting templates, and supportive resource staff to help your frontline employees adopt your Brand’s new environmental program, a successful environmental program is also able to engage employees on a personal level. By tying an employee’s individual motivations to the strategic mission, goals, and targets of your new environmental program, you can encourage a higher quality and frequency of their engagement needed to achieve the performance goals of the program.

Targeting Your Audience

In the development of any program it is important to clearly identify and understand the intended audience or target group. Within your Brand there are many levels of administration and service provision that will be involved in the implementation of your new environmental program. In identifying who will need recognition to adopt the program, consider the following motivational incentives for each type of employee:

• Senior Management can usually support ideas that assure efficiency, improve general attitudes of employees, increases ROIs and productivity, and build customer/ employee loyalty.
  
• Staff Employees can support ideas if their input and contributions are recognized by peers and supervisors, they are provided an array of attractive and individually unique rewards, and there is open communication with all levels of management.
  
• Program Managers commit to ideas that support efficient administration, make the workplace exciting, and foster a sense of pride in the workforce.

In developing your incentive program to support the roll-out of your new environmental program, you may also want to survey what motivates the members of your Green Teams on the departmental or property level. Ask them why they are interested in helping to promote the new measures proposed and what they hope to achieve for the Brand, as well as personally, by meeting the goals you have set.

Identify Program Goals and Develop Criteria

Once you’ve identified which employee groups will be included in the environmental program, the next step is to determine how you will encourage them to adopt the new policy. The more specific and simple that you can make employees’ objectives, the easier they will be to implement throughout the organization. Specific objectives could include the following: improve productivity or consistency in reporting energy, water, or waste data; increase employee creativity in drafting or establishing new methods/procedures; increase the depth and scope of data reporting; and improve likelihood of achieving property-level reduction targets.

After you have 2-4 objectives established for the incentive program, you will also need to identify how your Brand’s Green Teams will be evaluated for award consideration. Criteria often refer to a specific percentage of online reporting completed by each Green Team over a fiscal quarter; a specific number of times the Green Team conducts a comparative analysis on the performance and cost of environmentally responsible vs. regular products in a year; or a specific number of employees that receive training on the company’s new environmental program in a quarter. It’s important to base these criteria on the expected functions of the Green Teams that you establish on property or departmental levels. If the criteria are not clear or specific enough, your employees will not be motivated to achieve them.

Building the Budget and Choosing the Right Awards

The next aspect of developing a competitive environmental program in your Brand is to develop a budget that can provide your employees a high quality and genuine award scheme. When considering the types of expenses the program will require, you will want to identify the types of promotional and training materials you will need to communicate the program to your employees, the expected number of Green Teams that will receive recognition, the type of presentation that your company would like to provide Green Team members, and finally the labor that will be required to administer the program. In determining the type of recognition event to provide, consider the organizational structure of your Brand; would recognition within the departments suffice or should recognition of Green Team achievements be given before the entire company? You might also want to consider having a tiered award scheme, where smaller goals and criteria are awarded quarterly, with a larger goal or criteria set for achievement by the end of a fiscal year or series of years.

When making these decisions it is also important to remember that praise and recognition of employees is intended to reinforce, recognize, and motivate behaviors that promote or expedite the implementation of the Brand’s environmental program. To show genuine recognition, awards should be meaningful, relevant, and timely, tailored according to the skill set, interests, and needs of recipients. The various types of awards that you might want to consider may include:

• Salary increases, bonuses, tickets for entertainment events, paid vacation days, or alternative work schedules;
  
• Reserved parking spaces, internal company coupons or discounts, and plaques;
  
• Organic or sustainable market incentives such as external coupons or pre-paid gift cards for environmentally preferable gifts and services; or
  
• Cross-training and mentoring opportunities for award recipients.

Ongoing Dialog about Your Environmental Program, Incentives, and Achievements

Now that you’ve built out the goals, criteria, and recognition scheme of your incentive program, the next step is to articulate it to your staff. You should try to incorporate awareness about the incentive program throughout the roll-out and implementation activities of your new environmental program. By using teasers and kick-off events to educate your employees about the new program and incentives that are available to them (while helping to achieve the environmental targets), you can open a conversation with them from the very start about the environmental program.

Promote the use of the program’s blogs, bulletin boards, and news groups as a means for employees to recognize and stay up-to-date on the achievements of Green Teams working throughout your company. To keep the incentive program at the forefront of their thoughts, you should repeat messages and phases so that the program’s goals, criteria, and awards are clear and simple to understand. It will also be important for you to respond to employee feedback about the new program and recognition process. In presenting awards you should also make note of the type of audience that the Green Teams would prefer and what type of audience your company’s culture expects.

Evaluation and Ongoing Improvement of the Incentive Program

Once you have completed the first few rounds of recognizing the environmental achievements of Green Teams throughout your company, it would be a good precautionary step to collect feedback from your employees about the incentive program. Aspects of the incentives and reward scheme that you might want them to consider include:

• General reactions and impressions on receiving recognition or awards; How clear were the program goals and criteria for receiving the awards?
  
• Are there any marked changes in employee environmental awareness or program compliance behaviors of staff? and
  
• Administrative recommendations regarding benefits and challenges in program implementation, effectiveness of the adopted performance metrics, and budget constraints.

It’s important to conduct a basic evaluation of the incentive program, because it can provide you additional insight into what has helped expedite adoption of your new environmental program as well as what can still be hindering its acceptance throughout the company. By understanding these benefits and constraints both the incentive program and your environmental program can be modified and enhanced by the insight of your frontline employees.

Preliminary research for this article was done by Rani A. Bhattacharyya, Research Assistant to the CEO, Green Seal, Inc. She holds an M.S. in Recreation Parks and Tourism Management from Western Illinois University and has assisted rural communities in the United States and internationally with tourism development projects

Arthur B. Weissman, Ph.D., is President and CEO of Green Seal, Inc. He has experience in environmental science, policy, and standard-setting in public and private sectors. He has led the non-profit's resurgence as a force to make the economy more sustainable. He served as an international convener in developing the ISO 14000 standards for environmental labeling, and was the first Chair of the Global Ecolabeling Network. He has developed policy for the Superfund waste-cleanup program, served in the U.S. Senate as a Science Fellow, and worked for The Nature Conservancy. Mr. Weissman can be contacted at 202-872-6400 or aweissman@greenseal.org Extended Bio...

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