Climate Smarter Offices Challenge
- Vattenfall
Fossil free living within one generation: that is Vattenfall’s ambition. As one of the largest energy suppliers of electricity and heat in Europe, Vattenfall sees sustainability as a major responsibility to which everyone can contribute.
They used the PHI Accelerator to mobilize its employees to become more sustainable, starting with employees from the departments RE&FM, Communication, HR, Sustainablity and Environment.
The Climate Smarter Offices Challenge: three weeks long, one challenge every week that encourages sustainability.
- Assignment:
The energy transition is an essential part of Vattenfall’s core business and therefore affects everyone in the organization. This requires that all employees are aware of the urgency and are able to translate it into their activities. Vattenfall has employed the PHI Accelerator to draw more attention to sustainability using the program name: The Climate Smarter Offices Challenge
- The PHI approach:
The Climate Smarter Offices platform, completely in Vattenfall’s house style, was developed and started on a small scale. In this way, the tool could be tailored as well as possible to the entire organization. After defining the overarching themes, PHI and Vattenfall jointly developed the substantive challenges for the pilot. The three-week program included challenges about: living without fossil fuels, an economy without waste and travelling sustainably.
- The result:
In September 2019, the Climate Smarter Offices Challenge was launched with an invitation to participate on a voluntary basis for 132 Vattenfall employees, located in the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden and Great Britain. Of these, no less than 83% took part in the challenges. 14 teams with creative team names such as REalgreenFM, The Climateers, The Green Optimizers and The Carbon Collective competing for 3 weeks to win.
In the challenges, participants were informed about their personal impact, the impact of fossil fuels, the impacts of their own business operations, the prevention and processing of waste and the impact of travel.
Vattenfall’s employees were already reasonably aware of their own impact and shared ideas for reducing their impact en masse. Nevertheless, 93% of the participants indicated that they had gained new knowledge about sustainability in the challenges.
Important themes that emerged from the shared ideas and results are measuring the CO2 impact of Vattenfall’s business operations, a mobility policy that encourages more sustainable travel, reducing the volume of disposable coffee cups and encouraging more sustainable choices by sharing figures and results.
