Staff environmental awareness surveys

Most NHS organisations in the UK are aware of the challenges of climate change and the need to reduce carbon emissions. The NHS carbon footprint is 18 million tonnes CO2 per year and its buildings consume over £420 million every year for electricity, gas and oil.
    
The NHS Sustainable Development Unit this year produced their report ‘Reducing Carbon-Improving Health’ which included the initiative of running effective energy/environmental awareness campaigns to engage all healthcare staff. Running these campaigns in NHS organisations requires careful planning and resources. But the results can be effective.

Environmental Awareness Surveys
A properly designed staff awareness/motivation survey can help to design a successful campaign. NIFES has pioneered the design and use of these surveys for energy/environmental awareness campaigns and have been using them in NHS organisations for the last 12 years.
    
It is important to measure two key elements:

• Awareness – what people know (knowledge)
• Motivation – what moves people (internal drivers)

NIFES tailors surveys to individual organisations. The questions are mostly ‘drop and click’ multiple choice but some questions require respondents to enter their views. The survey quantitatively measures levels of awareness and motivation. The survey gives each respondent two scores: one for awareness and one for motivation. Each respondent can be plotted on a NIFES Awareness and Motivation Matrix.
    
This maps out where staff are in terms of their awareness and motivation. The results shown on the graph are for NHS staff in an NHS organisation who responded to a survey earlier this year. Each dot represents a respondent. The yellow dot shows the average. Different matrices can easily be generated to show variations by site, job function, age, gender and experience.
    
Clearly the desired quadrant is top right “High Awareness and High Motivation”.  There are already a number of staff in this quadrant. These people make excellent Environmental Representatives or Champions as they are already aware and motivated. Those in the top left quadrant are relatively high on motivation but lacking in awareness. These people generally want to help but often lack knowledge and are unsure exactly how they can help. So they simply need some awareness raising to move them to the top right quadrant.
    
Those in the bottom right quadrant are a difficult category: they know what to do but lack motivation. This lack of motivation can be totally unrelated to sustainability issues. Fortunately for the Trust shown above only three respondents are in this quadrant.

Some questions in the survey do not measure awareness or motivation but simply ask employees to identify barriers to saving energy, effective incentives and their view of the best methods of communicating the energy saving message. Other questions seek to garner specific ideas on saving energy and improving environmental performance. These can elicit a number of carbon/money saving suggestions related to operational issues which may otherwise not be registered. All this data can be analysed and provide valuable information for crafting a campaign strategy.

Benefits of a Survey
There are a number of benefits from using an online survey. The survey:

• Quickly identifies and recruits volunteer Environmental Representatives
• Quantitatively measures staff awareness/motivation levels
• Different types of staff can be analysed on the matrix
• By repeating the survey at a later date, shifts in awareness/motivation can be plotted
• Helps tailor a campaign strategy based on facts
• Identifies quick win opportunities
• Identifies barriers to improved environmental performance

The survey itself has an awareness raising effect.

The surveys are developed for online use ensuring ease of completion and accuracy. The link to a survey is provided by NIFES but the organisation needs to make it known via a global email from a senior manager. Often the link is sent out by the chief executive in a normal weekly communication to all staff. Typically for an NHS organisation with over 5,000 staff a response rate of around 8 or 9 per cent can be expected which is sufficient to have a representative sample. The surveys are fully W3C compliant and a generic survey can be viewed at http://155.212.3.182/survey/229868/2377/
    
In a number of NHS organisations typically 20 per cent of staff would not have regular access to a computer as a normal part of their work. These staff are often working in catering, laundry or portering roles but can make a very useful contribution. So it is usual to supply managers with hard copy versions of the survey for staff to complete at a staff meeting. NIFES will then enter this data electronically.
    
Once the data has been analysed, NIFES will produce a report containing recommendations on the shaping of an appropriate campaign strategy tailored to the organisation.

For more information
NIFES Consulting Group
Tel: +44 (0)115 984 4944
Fax: +44 (0)115 984 4933
E-mail: training@nifes.co.uk
Web: www.nifes.co.uk/energy09