Building Energy Management: Communicating

COMMUNICATE

You do not necessarily need to communicate benchmarks and targets per se, but in implementing any changes you will need to communicate with your colleagues, staff and senior management. It is worth considering who needs to know what, and how best to communicate the relevant information to different stakeholders. Again, staff members themselves may well have lots of creative ideas as to how to go about this, so engage them – at the grass-roots, senior management levels and in-between.

A few ideas and thoughts to get you started:
• Use the competitive spirit within people and reward achievements.
• Consider existing channels of communication and their effectiveness – notice boards, environment committees, signs, emails, company newsletters, annual reports, smart meters (smart meter FAQ), energy use labels on equipment, integration into job evaluation or line management responsibilities, integrate desired behaviours into training programmes. And don’t just make communication one way – from you to them – but two way, encouraging feedback, ideas and engagement.
• Do you need to build capacity (knowledge, skills) in order to use a new technology well? In which case consider the sort of training needed.
• What metrics do people respond to – does KWh/m2 mean anything to many staff and colleagues? Would it be helpful to provide some background information to the energy management story, like where you get your energy from, how it is generated, how much is lost in transmission etc?
• Do you want a big launch of the Building Energy Management programme? If not, how are you going to make sure everyone knows what you are doing?

Finally, ensure that achievements and success stories are filtered back to stakeholders.