Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – The Jump way
The Jump Insight Seminar, held in London last week, was convened by Graham Simmonds, managing director of Jump, who welcomed everyone with a short excerpt from the 1967 film, The Graduate, which includes the line, “Ben, I want to say one word to you. Just one word: Plastics”. The often-debated true meaning of the line aside, Graham hoped “Plastics” would be a catalyst for further discussion for everyone in the sector to think about sustainability.
“Jump is delighted to be working closely with Servest. Our engagement programme helps clients save energy, reduce single use plastic, boost wellbeing and much more, and there’s a great fit with Servest in its role as a leading FM provider that sees the importance of technology, innovation and colleague engagement. In recent years much of the focus in the FM industry has been on kit and infrastructure, and by working with Servest we see a great opportunity to develop the people side of FM and help clients like Scottish Courts save money and achieve other ‘soft’ benefits such as higher colleague motivation and stronger team building.” says Graham Simmonds, Managing Director at Jump.
The first panel, chaired by Amanda Carpenter from the Legal Sustainability Alliance, focused on “Building the business case for engagement” and highlighted the challenges that face teams developing and implementing sustainability and wellbeing programmes, chief among which seem to be communication and engagement. Amanda introduced Špela Rapoša and Amy Ritchie, representing the sustainability and environmental management team from the University of Strathclyde who work across a range of green areas including sustainable transport to biodiversity, on to engagement programmes such as Jump as well as voluntary projects. Having run their engagement programmes for the past five years from Glasgow University’s city centre campus, their overall goal is to engage personnel in actively reducing the university’s carbon footprint and push the overall sustainability goal throughout the institution.
Špela Rapoša and Amy Ritchie from the University of Strathclyde outlined the challenges that Jump tackled, including staff time not being enough to truly engage, and existing programmes being boring and prescriptive. Jump is more dynamic and allows for flexible involvement by facilitating engagement in many ways with a main objective to encourage behaviour change toward sustainable habits. To date, the programme has seen an engagement rate of 44 per cent across 17 teams and shows huge potential to network across faculties too, building relationships across departments and facilities.
The next speaker was Stephen Didsbury, head of waste and public protection at Bexley, a flagship London borough for recycling for the last 13 years, who focused on the importance of engaging residents in positive behaviours. The London Green Points scheme, which encourages residents to recycle and reduces waste, rewards them for the recycling they do by offering incentives, also makes use of a leader board. Financial savings are sustainable as a unitary authority, Bexley saves £102 for every tonne of waste not sent for disposal and the scheme has resulted in an 11 per cent reduction in residual waste in Thamesmead East, one of London’s most difficult to reach boroughs. Concluding with a Q&A session at the end of the first half, a clear takeaway point was that rewards schemes are great for motivating engagement.
The second half of the seminar was kicked off by Henry Majed, director of partnerships at the Innovation Gateway. Opening by stating: “people are all too quick to say, ‘we’re completely different!’ but struggle to actually share how they are different to others. Not knowing what you don’t know appears to be all too common practice.
First up was Michael Lynch, engagement lead for workplace sustainability at RBS. Using Jump as a pilot with 2,000 colleagues in 52 various locations, in Bristol, Manchester, London and Edinburgh. The company enjoyed an 80 per cent sign-up in locations, with over 2,630 actions logged, 44 per cent open rate of their eNewsletter, 87 per cent said it helped colleagues protect the environment and reduce costs, and saw a 10 per cent reduction in ‘out of hours’ electricity consumption. All of this combined contributed to being awarded Best Bank 2017 at the Better Society Awards. To date, they now have 40,000 positive actions logged.
- ‘Values’ alone are not enough anymore. SHOW the plans you’re putting in place now, and for the future.
- Measure and manage the data you have for your benefit.
- Keep your data accurate and detailed to gain investor and stakeholder buy in.
- Design and reinforce behavioural change through technology.
And finally, Dr. Neil Smith, sustainability manager at Bournemouth University brought the discussions to an insightful close, with a summary of actions taking place over the next seven years on campus.
With 16,000 undergraduates, 4,000 post graduates and 2,000 employees, the Talbot campus is regularly referred to as a small town in its own right! And with that, obviously comes challenges of monitoring the environmental impact. Through embedding new sustainable development goals into the university’s vision for ‘Bournemouth 2025’, they are finding innovative ways to motivate and reward staff to reduce their carbon footprint.
He stated: “Before, sustainability as a term acted as a restriction. Now, with these new goals, tools and ideas, people can easily access exciting and broad new achievements with regards to the environment and sustainability.” Using Jump, the university has been provided with incredibly insightful data and results on engagement with the app. For example, they have seen a 5 per cent energy reduction on sites, 2,712 hours of exercise completed, and around 40 per cent of all staff are now signed up to the scheme, which is the best ever result in university history. T
he evening then continued with networking drinks, providing a fantastic chance for the industry professionals in attendance to share their thoughts and experiences of sustainability, and the past, present and future of environmental and ethical business.
