Wake up your staff - and get fresh ideas!
When did you last get a useful suggestion of one of your colleagues to improve your organizations environmental performance? One week ago – or two years? The longer this time span, the less live is there in your system - mark these words!
In the early stages of EMS implementation there is usually no lack of ideas from all sides, also from people and units you’d never expected. They bring forward suggestions to save energy or material, and even to improve processes and products. This is a valuable source of impulses for every EMS-organization, and the clever EMS-manager gladly registers these ideas and eventually implements them if applicable; one by one.
But what happens after this stage? EMS becomes daily business, gets integrated in everyday work (that’s good!), and gets forgotten for most employees (that’s not so good). My research and other studies even show that many CIP-Programs in ISO-14001-certified organizations just ‘forget’ to focus environmental issues as well! What’s worse than this is that EMS-managers forget that the employees are still a powerful source of ideas.
So what to do? Wake them up! Use one or more of the following strategies:
- Check your installed CIP-system. Rename it if necessary, make clear that not only quality and cost-reducing suggestions are welcome, but also everything that supports your environmental policy.
- Make environmental issues a fixed discussion point in regular team meetings on every level.
- Bring up environmental issues as special events for the whole staff, such as an “energy week” or a “bike-to-work”-day. Use such events to collect new ideas and suggestions of employees.
- Some employees are more interested in environmental protection than others. Gather them around you to support your work, and provide special training, promotion, and other incentives.
- Visualize! A picture can tell great stories: Where are we – and where will we go? Use your black board to show the current sate and compare it with your targets. Communicate and thus keep the topic running.
Need help with this or more ideas? Contact me.
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