Energy Efficiency – encouraging employees to take action! - CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa -
CSR in Europe, Middle East and Africa » Energy Efficiency – encouraging employees to take action!
Energy Efficiency – encouraging employees to take action!
Climate Change and energy efficiency seem to be the most important buzzwords of the early 21st century. With movies like “An inconvenient truth”, recent reports from the IPCC  and the Stern Review and many corporate and governmental awareness campaigns like the “You control climate change” campaign from the European Commission, climate change has become one of the main topics of the past one or two years.

HP hasn’t been silent in the past couple of months either and has made two relevant announcements: With the announcements to reduce our company’s energy use by 20% by 2010 and the announcement to collaborate with WWF to reduce our CO2 emissions by 15% by 2010, we’ve taken steps towards further reducing our environmental impact as a corporation. My colleague Rita summarized our collaboration with WWF in her blog Corporate Social Responsibility in APJ .
 
I strongly believe that change can only come about if everybody in society and in a corporation makes a contribution. This is why our Corporate Affairs team launched an internal energy awareness campaign for employees in the Europe, Middle East and Africa region. We want to make a connection between products, employees and the environment and educate our employees about the importance of energy efficiency and how HP products address this issue. Finally we want to encourage and provoke personal action.

The internal awareness campaign includes, among other things, management announcements, posters, ideas competitions and a new intranet portal where employees can get more information about energy efficient products and learn how they can make a contribution to reducing HP’s carbon footprint. We have also developed a fun, interactive online game called “Watts On?” about energy use in the office and we now see employees battling over who turns off the most energy-hungry equipment in the virtual office setting and who gets the highest score to win the monthly prizes.

I really enjoyed the preparation of this project and I’m looking forward to hearing how other corporations communicate with employees on topics like climate change and energy efficiency. What worked for you and what didn’t?

Jeannette Weisschuh, Head of Corporate Affairs EMEA
Posted 04-16-2007 7:18 PM by BlogArchive
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