The greening of the reluctant cook
You can't have a sustainable organisation unless you have employees that are environmentally committed. Pedagogics can help them learn, according to two DPU-researchers.
By Torben Clausen (toc@dpu.dk)
How do you make employees think 'green'? HORESTA, which is the Danish union of hotels and restaurants, asked themselves this question in 2003. After the organisation had given counsel on environmental issues to member organisations for years, HORESTA decided that what was needed was really more awareness of the importance of the individual employee's behaviour.
And so the organisation contacted DPU's Monica Carlsson and Jeppe Læssøe, both of whom do research into the relationship between pedagogics and a sustainable development. Their assignment was to develop methods that could make employees active partners in energy-saving programs. "It's highly unusual for researchers from the field of pedagogy to receive research grants towards energy-saving measures. HORESTA acknowledged the fact that a pedagogical approach was called for," Monica Carlsson explains.
A significant part of the strain on the environment from hotels and restaurants is caused by the way employees use mechanical and electronic machinery. The traditional response has been to roll out information campaigns to make employees change their behaviour, but the earnest advice is more often than not without any lasting effects. Those recalcitrant cooks just won't put a lid on (the pots, that is) even though it saves energy. What to do, when better information fails to lead to better behaviour?
Incorporate employee's knowledge
One solution is to incorporate the knowledge of the employees, according to the two researchers. More often than not, employees already know what the problems are based on their own experiences in the day-to-day work. Furthermore, they have a direct interest in discussing solutions, because the solutions bear an impact on the workflow. This is why the DPU researchers have developed a model for employee participation. This is a novelty for many hotels and restaurants, workplaces that do not normally invite employees to participate, or at least only in very limited ways, Jeppe Læssøe explains. Therefore one aim with the project has been to expand the scope a little.
"Organisations tend to include employees in the idea-phase in particular, and while it is true that the employees often bring valuable contributions to the table in this phase, they only contribute to a fairly limited part of the process. What we have found are potentials for including employees in many other phases than merely the idea-phase. At some places employees are put in charge of further development of ideas. For instance there was one project about some solar collectors up a roof. The employees went on to determine how this could be done, they contacted with people who could install the panels and they produced a budget for the project."
Many roads to involvement
It was important to the researchers to inform management about the multiple ways it is possible to include employees in an environmental transformation process. Among the methods described in the project are:
- Employees go off to another hotel and are shown what that hotel has done to save on power consumption.
- A small team of four or five employees is set up to examine in detail new ideas for how to save energy and to produce finished proposals to management.
- The employees that are influenced by a decision take part in a discussion with management with the aim to generate consensus about a decision.
- Employees are offered incentives in the form of a bonus based on savings. The bonus might be something extra on the pay-check, a company party, or maybe a deal where people can 'earn' some new piece of equipment if they save enough energy.
- Once a decision about purchase of some new equipment has been made, relevant employees are invited to take part in the purchase process to ensure that the right product is chosen.
One positive example of employee inclusion was a hotel that had many short-term low-level and young employees washing dishes in the kitchen, Jeppe Læssøe explains. The young dishwashers did not show much responsibility, and if a stack of plates accidentally toppled and they all broke, a shrug was the common reaction. The hotel management came up with an information campaign in the shape of texted messages to the employees. The researchers came up with another idea – to do things the other way around:
"They have to insist that a hotel is a workplace for adults, and the youths should be treated as adults. You do that by talking to them, by asking them for ideas to improve things. The result may not be measurable in kilowatts, but the hotel management is very pleased with the rather more responsible behaviour from the youths," Jeppe Læssøe says.
These activities are not meant as replacements for technical solutions, such as measuring the energy consumption at various points in the organisation, but they do generate a new sort of insight, and they allow for a new approach to transforming knowledge into changed behaviour.
Not much room for a learning space
It can be very difficult to transform a good idea into practice at a hotel or in a restaurant. These are very often quite small organisations in a very competitive line of business. Economy and the survival of the business may account for more than matters of sustainability, the environment and the future of our planet. One immediate consequence of this is that development activities are often pushed back.
"Everyone, all the way down to the dishwasher, is aware of the importance of economy. One practical experience of this project was that we found that our notions of development work as a means to change were in danger of being ignored due to pressure of time and economy," Monica Carlsson says.
There is in other words, a dire need for creative solutions. Rather than huge staff meetings set up to develop and assess ideas, you can work in small flexible groups that meet at lunch. Once the development work is up and running, many employees fall back into a passive role as receptors of information. Therefore we also need outside impulses to break the daily routine," says Jeppe Læssøe.
"It could be someone like us, who take a new approach to existing problems like the young dishwashers. It could also be an analysis of the equipment that revealed a high passive energy consumption, which you could then use as starting point for a discussion about workflow and routines."
Conflicts and choice
There is, however, no easy pedagogical fix to make an organisation sustainable all at once. No matter how bright your ideas for energy saving measures may be the organisation will have to make allowances for a number of issues that have little to do with the environment. Monica Carlsson and Jeppe Læssøe point out the fact that the organisation has to balance several issues: the environment versus economy, social life in the organisation and the customer relations as well. A proposal that is perfectly sound from an environmental point of view may be problematic for the customer service. This is one common reason why sound advice from environment experts is often ignored.
One example is hotels' reluctance to put up sensors in hotel rooms to turn off lights when the rooms are not occupied. Many hotels fear that this may lead to unpleasant surprises for guests, and so they refuse to introduce the sensors. An elderly lady who suddenly finds herself left in darkness in the bathroom will probably never come back to that same hotel, they think. By including employees, management can identify this kind of obstacle and thereby avoid spending valuable resources on ineffective information or on forcing through technical installations that will not, in the end, be sustainable after all.
The researchers, however, warn against thinking that such conflicts must be resolved, or that it is even possible to balance the different goals.
"The notion of balance means that if we are good enough at juggling objectives and interests, you can actually set up a win-win situation. But there are certain dilemmas and conflicts of interests that can't just be dissolved," says Monica Carlsson.
Instead you have to work with multiple objectives until you can make a choice based on reflection. From a managerial point of view, however, one might ask if this is not, in fact, a job for management? Are employees in danger of complexity overload if you squeeze this into their already frantic work-pace? Jeppe Læssøe agrees that this overload can become a problem, however, he also mentions two counter-arguments: Firstly that employees who are kept out of the loop may lose motivation, secondly that management must think of employee inclusion as a gradual learning process, one that also requires a management that is capable of strategic planning.
"You include employees where you can and where it makes sense. Gradually you can expand on the competencies and the incentive. As we researchers say: sustainable thinking is a learning process in itself," he closes.
About Monica Carlsson and Jeppe Læssøe
Monica Carlsson and Jeppe Læssøe are both associate professors at the Department of Curriculum Research at the Danish University of Education, where they research into pedagogics and didactics in relation to health and the environment.
Visit Monica Carlsson's and Jeppe Læssøe's personal homepage.
Monica Carlsson
Read more about Monica Carlsson
Jeppe Læssøe
Punchline
"Sustainable thinking is a learning process in itself."
-Jeppe Læssøe
Read on
In this conference paper Jeppe Læssøe and Monica Carlsson expand on key points in the article.