Inspiring Employee Action on Earth Day

Would you like to engage your team with environmental action at work and in their personal life? 

As part of their ESG commitments, our client, an international shipping company, has an environmental target to raise staff awareness about environmental action. 

They used Earth Day to catalyse this commitment and commissioned a talk on individual actions for the organisation. 

In structuring the content for this event, Livvy used behavioural science to maximise the impact of the short session to inspire action around: 

• Energy reduction 
• Food – waste reduction and plant-based diets
• Single- use plastics
• Waste reduction – clothing and merchandise

Starting with action 

Working with the ESG and Marketing team, Livvy developed a session that took a neuroscience approach of ‘Actions drives Actions’ approach rather than the conventional ‘Beliefs drive Actions’ approach that assumes that if people know about a problem they will change their ways.

Rather than starting with the issue and the problems, the talk started with what was going well for environmental change. 

Furthermore,  each impact area began with examples and case studies of businesses or employees or offices around the world that were taking action e.g. all the organisations tackling surplus food or the plastics initiatives taking place on ships, or the receptionist who had bought no new clothing for a year. 

This was followed by examples of other actions individuals could take at work or at home. 

The necessity for action (the issues) were highlighted in terms of planetary and human health, in order to engage people using different motivating factors.

The Earth Day trial pledge

The other behavioural science principles that were applied to the session were: 

1. Trials –  giving something a try overcomes pre-conceptions
2. Public commitments- making a commitment publicly increases the likelihood that people will follow through with action. 

At the end of the 35-minute session, people were invited to pledge, on the virtual whiteboard, an action they would trial for the next two weeks. 

The pledge board was filled with various actions, from not flying for personal travel in Europe, to someone who committed to plant 100 trees. 

To continue the discussions each office was given conversation prompt cards, developed by ZeroNorth, that included questions such as: 

• What inspiring actions do you know about within shipping?
• What can we do to inspire family and friends?
• Share a memorable experience you have had in nature

Following the talk the ESG team were congratulated on kicking off Earth Day in such a way:

Here is the organisation’s summary of the event.