Understanding your energy culture: the key to change?

Energy management is increasingly a focus for organisations, driven by fluctuating prices and the need to meet climate change targets. Technology and management systems alone will not lead to the desired energy performance – a good ‘energy culture’ is required to ensure that technology is used correctly and management systems flourish.

The Energy Institute has therefore developed a new initiative to help organisations understand and improve energy management, or rather, it is using an ‘old’ initiative in a new and exciting way.

Let’s take a step back from energy management and into the realm of improving health, safety and environment (HSE) in organisations. Since the late 90s and early 2000s efforts have been underway to improve the safety culture of companies. It is recognised that there are three phases to improving HSE performance: 

There are parallels here with energy management:

There is now an increasing awareness that, whilst having an energy management system in place is a good start, this can only be effective if it is accepted, used and improved by the workforce.

Despite there being many initiatives to try to change people’s behaviours around energy management (online training courses, posters, advertisements, notices, etc), feedback surfaced during EI industry workshops that existing resources were often under-utilised and that there was a willingness to talk, but actions are not followed through.

Unlike these traditional behavioural interventions, which focus on changing the individual (such as through training), Hearts and Minds targets the culture. This approach acknowledges that company processes (i.e. the energy management system) and people’s behaviour are not independent - both must work together. Only then will the benefits be realised.

Following the success of the Hearts and Minds Understanding your culture tool, which has been used by hundreds of companies to engage with staff and understand the organisational safety culture, the EI has produced a new tool called Understanding your energy culture. It is believed that this tool can add value by providing a structured approach to improving the ‘energy management culture’ of organisations.

To help develop the Understanding your energy culture toolkit, the EI engaged with 40+ people with knowledge and experience in the field of energy management to build a profile of what constitutes an energy management culture and to begin fleshing out how organisations at the five different established cultural levels behave.

14 different aspects of energy management culture were identified in a stakeholder workshop and further defined in ten follow-up interviews. The new assessment tool was subsequently tested in five pilot workshops with a broad range of industries to understand the potential effectiveness of the tool and to identify areas for improvement. The finalised toolkit was made available in summer 2017.

So what will this tool achieve? How will it be used? The Understanding your energy culture tool can be used to kickstart an energy management improvement programme. The methodology is very effective at:

Using it in meetings and workshops will give you a clear view of the current energy culture from the entirety of the organisation, help you see what good practice looks like and what changes need to be made within the organisation. The workshop should be held periodically (e.g. yearly) to keep people engaged and check progress of the organization on their journey along the ‘culture ladder’.

The tool was recently utilised in Abu Dhabi as part of a partnership the EI has entered with the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Group (ADSG) to launch the ADSG’s ‘Energy Flagship’ pilot programme. The programme combines energy efficiency knowledge sharing and training activities with energy auditing and behaviour change. As part of this, the EI delivered an interactive session on energy management and behaviour change to 130 senior level sustainability professionals in Abu Dhabi using the unique Understanding your energy culture tool. The session generated positive results; helping audience members gather a holistic understanding of their own organisations’ energy cultures and the practical steps that could be taken to make improvements.

The focus on improving safety culture in the oil and gas industry for the last 20 years has led to great improvement in safety performance. The way that culture has an impact on safety also informs how it can have an impact on energy management performance. The drive for transferring good practice in the area of safety culture to energy management is based on sharing knowledge and skills across the whole of the energy sector.

Understanding your energy culture is available to purchase at https://heartsandminds.energyinst.org/toolkit/understanding-your-energy-culture