Talking Green Jujitsu with Nestle & Greggs
On Monday, I addressed an IEMA event on Employee Engagement for Sustainability in Newcastle, sharing the platform with Andy Griffiths of Nestlé and Paul Rhodes of Greggs. We had delegates from across the North of England and record numbers for such an event which shows how important the topic is.
Up first, I started by parodying the standard me-too approaches to employee engagement from switch it off stickers to giving out jute shopping bags. I then went into how to do Green Jujitsu, using lots of client examples (you can see a similar presentation here).
I was followed by Andrew Griffiths of Nestlé. He explained that the company’s factory in Newcastle was serving as the pilot for their sustainability programme. A couple of things he mentioned that I really liked were:
- Nestlé’s messaging principles are Positive, Immediate, Certain in contrast to the traditional green Negative, Future, Uncertain;
- They organised a session where employees could try out electric cars to lower the fear of the unknown. By installing chargers, they now have a number of employees who have purchased EVs to commute to work;
- They flow indicators down through the structure from KPIs to Process Performance Indicators to Activity Performance Indicators.
Paul Rhodes of high street bakers Greggs gave the third presentation, and I scribbled down the following:
- It is very difficult to engage employees effectively in a fast changing, high-turnover environment such as retail, whereas the production and logistics parts of the company are much easier;
- Instead of asking for voluntary energy champions, Greggs designated assistant managers as champions as that is the right level in the organisation to make sure corporate targets are implemented;
- They use the sausage roll as an unit of measurement – “The energy we are losing here is the equivalent to baking X sausage rolls” – as everyone understands the sausage roll at Greggs.
It was a really great event and it was a pleasure to be part of it!
Photo by James Dixon
2 Comments
Leave your reply.