Partner Article

Energy efficiency the key to savings

It’s corporate social responsibility focus week on Bdaily. Here, the Energy Saving Trust emphasise the importance of energy efficiency to businesses saving money.

At the Energy Saving Trust, we continually strive to highlight the link between energy and monetary savings.

Much of our work shows consumers and businesses how using energy differently or being more energy efficient can improve their bottom line, as well as helping the environment.

Our energy saving figures indicate that the average UK household could save £325 a year through being more energy efficient showing the potential benefits for consumers.

In addition, according to the Corporate Leadership Council, organisations that are highly engaged with energy efficiency have the potential to reduce staff turnover by 87 per cent and improve performance by 20 per cent.

These figures go a long way in highlighting how being more energy efficient can have a positive impact for both businesses and consumers. However, the key question is how to get staff and customers truly engaged with energy efficiency so all the benefits can be realised.

At the Energy Saving Trust we see three clear ways to achieving this. They are making the link between sustainable improvement and financial improvement clear; educating employees about why sustainability is important for a business; and employee training on sustainable issues.

The first step involves making clear the link between sustainable improvement and financial improvement. This requires buy-in across the whole organisation, with a particular focus on the finance department and director. Once you have this cross-organisational buy-in then these positive changes can start to be made.

Engaging and inspiring the workforce on the sustainability agenda is an important next step.

This can be done through creating a visibility and awareness of the business’ sustainability strategy, and then ensuring that the employees become active stakeholders in its success.

Without clear, dynamic, inspiring and ongoing communications on environmental, climate and sustainability issues, you won’t get employees on board.

In addition to strong internal communication, it will be important to support this with employee training whenever possible. This can provide staff with simple and practical advice on how to save energy and money or more complex energy efficiency insight, which can either be used within the organisation or communicated to customers.

The training does not need to be across the whole organisation and can simply be a collection of “sustainable champions” that educate others.

Energy Saving Trust has developed a standard for best practice energy efficiency advice for employees from a variety of different businesses. Organisations such as Good Energy and Calor Gas are able to offer this level of endorsed energy efficiency advice to its customers, with this helping Good Energy top Which?’s Energy Company Satisfaction Survey.

For the good of the environment, your organisation’s own bottom line and your organisation’s reputation, it makes sense to have energy efficiency as a focus for your business. With the difficult economic climate, it’s time for all businesses to make the most of the environmental and economic opportunities from having energy efficiency at its heart.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Energy Saving Trust .