Good behaviour: how United Utilities is getting its staff on board sustainability

‘Excellent’ is a level that most corporate social responsibility managers and business owners are still aspiring to when it comes to the impact their measures are having on staff behaviour around environmental sustainability. That might explain why Chris Matthews, head of sustainability at United Utilities (UU), admits to being “amazed” at the results of a recent poll of employees at the utility company.

The aim of the survey was to find out how well UU staff are engaging with environmental sustainability at work. It found 77 per cent of employees thought UU was acting responsibly on the issue, but – perhaps more importantly – 81 per cent of employees felt they knew what action they could take to make a difference.  

For Matthews it is vindication of a programme he has been leading for almost two years to encourage behaviour change to realise energy efficiency at the company.

“To me, they are excellent results. This is clear evidence that our programme and its effort to raise awareness and change behaviour are starting to have an impact,” he says. 

The programme has employed a variety of initiatives to bring about change – some innovative, some borrowed and some common sense – but importantly for UU, collectively they are helping the company reduce its carbon footprint, something it simply cannot afford to ignore.  

United Utilities is the UK's largest listed water company with a turnover of £2 billion. It owns, operates and maintains utility assets, including water, wastewater, electricity and gas and serves 20 million customers worldwide.

It’s total carbon footprint in 2007/8 stood at 401,512 tonnes of CO2 equivalent (tCO2e), but this is set to rise to over 500,000 tCO2e over the next 12 years because of investments in assets it has to make under its licence in order to deliver environmental and customer improvements (the company’s operation carbon footprint has nearly doubled since 1990 due to £10 billion investments in assets).

Given these pressures and the asset intensive nature of UU’s business, Matthews says it would be “easy to bury your head in the sand” and just take the financial hit of rising greenhouse gas emissions (come April companies with energy bills exceeding £500,000 will have to start paying for their CO2 emissions under the Government’s new emissions trading scheme, the Carbon Reduction Commitment).

Matthews’ view is that it would be morally wrong to do nothing. But there is a strong business case, too, to taking action on climate change. Research commissioned by Business in the Community from Ipsos MORI, showed companies that made corporate responsibility (CR) a priority outperformed their FTSE 350 peers on total shareholder return by between 3.3 per cent and 7.7 per cent a year between 2002 and 2007 and experienced lower share volatility.

Key to success in this area, is a commitment at a the top of an organisation to CR and reducing carbon emissions – something that is by no means a given when you consider the challenge a company like UU faces when it comes to reducing its carbon footprint over the coming years.

Board level backing has certainly been essential to the roll out of the behaviour change programme at UU, says Matthews, but critical to its success has been mid-level management engagement with the programme.

“We introduced the behavioural change programme in autumn 2007, starting with a first phase that set out to understand UU’s culture so that a bespoke programme, specific to UU’s culture, could be developed,” explains Matthews. “With this phase complete, we began the roll out of this programme – Think Carbon – in autumn 2008.”

It continues to this day with a programme of leadership workshops, which target middle managers to equip them with the knowledge and confidence to lead their teams on climate change. 

Matthews says the Think Carbon Leadership Workshops have been the most effective element of UU’s behaviour change programme because they target the managers that are directly in charge of the company’s carbon emitting divisions – and there are a lot of them.

“Our leaders in the field, where most of our carbon is emitted, have a key role to play. This year we are targeting 400 managers to attend the workshops with 140 so far on board,” he explains.

And there is evidence that leadership meetings can lead to positive outcomes both for those attending and climate change itself. At one such meeting, it was decided that those attending would pitch carbon-reducing ideas in the style of Dragon’s Den. The winning idea received funding of up to £20,000, says Matthews.  

Also making inroads at UU has been the Carbon Champion initiative. Here individuals or whole teams across any part of the company have come forward, usually voluntarily, to contribute to raising awareness about sustainability. To date around 40 Carbon Champions are taking a lead on sustainability at UU.

“I leave it to each business unit to decide how many champions they want and what they do, as long as it contributes to raising awareness and driving out meaningful projects where all employees feel they can make a contribution,” explains Matthews.

Straightforward communication techniques have also been employed to get staff onside, with perhaps the easiest and most fun, according to Matthews, being the development of posters around a monthly theme setting out in humorous ways what individual employees can do to make a difference. And Matthews has a top tip on the best place to position them: the inside of cubicle doors in staff toilets.

A bonus system is already embedded in the business processes at UU and this has proved to be an effective way to encourage staff behaviour change around climate change issues.

Every UU employee has two elements to their bonus – delivery of shared measures that relate to the organisation and delivery of personal objectives. Each UU employee also has a ‘scorecard’ and achievement against a scorecard is one element used to calculate an employee’s bonuses.

Matthews, says that across 95 per cent of employees, there is “at least one climate change related measure in the organisational unit scorecard”  – a high percentage, suggesting that bonuses can be an effective way to deliver behaviour change on sustainability in the workplace.

Going forward, Matthews is looking at new ways to engage staff in UU’s carbon reduction strategy. One innovative idea that is still at early stages of being developed is an employee-based carbon trading scheme.

“We are exploring the introduction of a carbon credit card for a small team,” says Matthews, who – despite having concerns over the bureaucracy of running such a scheme – is still keen to see if it can result in a change of behaviour.

Cleary the employee survey findings show that UU’s behaviour change programme is having the desired effect on staff at this particular organisation, but is it a programme that can be emulated by other, smaller companies, and across different sectors? Matthews believes it can, although not necessarily in exactly the same way.

“The common denominator is that a change of behaviour is required – and to me that doesn’t matter whether you organisation is small or large, the opportunity exists to do something to make a difference,” he says. “You might argue it is easier to make changes in a smaller business where there is less bureaucracy. The way in which you go about effecting the change might differ – i.e. a larger company might create a programme, but thinking about the way you travel to work doesn’t depend on your company – it depends on you.”

Excellence may still be out of reach of most companies when it comes to getting staff to drive through environmental sustainability measures, but the case of UU demonstrates that bringing staff on board should be a key part of any business looking to reduce its carbon footprint.

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