Sustainability has become a part of everyday life. At home and at work. Whether it’s reducing waste, conserving energy, switching to electric vehicles, minimizing emissions, or increasing circularity, businesses increasingly recognize and act upon the importance of sustainability. A great way to take your sustainability game to the next level is by appointing green ambassadors in your building or organisation.
In this article we’ll give you seven reasons why appointing green ambassadors – or, as we like to call them at hello energy, building heroes – is such a great idea.
1. Building heroes create awareness and promote sustainable practices
Building heroes can help create awareness of sustainability issues at the workplace and promote better practices. For example by organizing workshops, training sessions and expert talks.
This way, heroes can inspire their colleagues to change certain behaviors and reduce their environmental impact.
2. Building heroes can hold management accountable and help the business reach its sustainability goals
Building heroes are not only there to help and inspire colleagues. They can also be guardians of the company’s sustainability goals. Heroes can periodically check whether the company is still on its path towards meeting its reduction targets.
Make sure to hold regular sustainability meetings and invite your hero to these meetings.
3. Building heroes enhance the business’s reputation
Saying that you care about sustainability is one thing. Actively proving it in your everyday practices is another thing. When you’re performing well in terms of sustainability, it’s great if the world knows. A building hero can help carry out your message by holding talks, giving interviews, being present at career events, and more.
With a building hero, you give your sustainability efforts a face.
4. Building heroes can save the business money
Sustainability is often an investment that pays itself back. Think of installing solar panels, decreasing resource use, electrifying and reducing gas use, installing energy efficient lighting and machinery, and insulating your building.
Having someone that actively promotes such measures, can speed up the process and increase those savings.
Did you know that – as a company active in The Netherlands – you are obliged to implement all energy saving measures with a payback period of maximum 5 years, as of 2023? RVO published list of energy saving measures that companies in various sectors are required to take.
Also if you’re not obliged to take these measures they can inspire you on how to save costs and become more sustainable.
5. Building heroes keep the conversation going
In 2023 hello energy launched online building communities. The sustainability challenges we mentioned earlier will be part of this online environment). On the online building community, users can discuss anything sustainability, ask each other questions, talk about hurdles they encounter in reducing their impact, etc.
Building heroes can take an active role in this discussion, keeping the important conversation on sustainability going.
This conversation can of course also take place in the offline world. When you have building heroes, people will know where to go when they want to discuss sustainability. Be it informally at the coffee machine or during lunch, or formally during periodical sustainability meetings and during events, workshops and talks.
6. Building heroes are a central point for anything sustainability related
People now have someone to turn to when they have ideas on how to improve sustainable practices in your building. Also, the hero can be a source of information. If people want to understand how they can contribute to sustainability, they know on who’s door to knock.
Also, they can function as the communication channel between employees and management, passing on good ideas that emerge on the ground to the boardroom. Because often employees have a better understanding of the opportunities for improvement in every corner of the organization than the management does.
7. Building heroes lead by example
It’s way easier to improve your behavior when someone else gives you the right example. Also, it’s much harder to keep telling yourself excuses for unsustainable behavior (I can’t do without a car, reducing waste is too hard, vegetarian food doesn’t taste as good a meat-based meals), when you see someone else living sustainably.
This gives us that extra push we sometimes need.
In April, hello energy launches its newest feature: sustainability challenges. Every challenge, your building community members can decide to be an ambassador. But also if your company is not joining hello energy’s sustainability challenges, you now know that appointing one or multiple green ambassadors (or green heroes) is a great idea.
