Engage your employees and save £6000 on your bill, says the Carbon Trust

A new tool which helps engage your employees in energy efficiency could save you 15% or £6000 on your business energy bill, according to the Carbon Trust.

Image by Tomé Jorge via Flickr

With a new online tool called Carbon Trust Empower, an individual employee could cut 220kg CO2 a year - for larger businesses, the Carbon Trust estimates that this could lead to savings of as much as £150,000 a year.

Carbon Trust Empower lets employees explore different ways of saving energy, whether at their desk, at the printer, in reception, the kitchen, the corridors and even the toilets.

It creates and tracks personal action plans, and enables office managers to view their employees’ individual energy savings.

Richard Rugg, Director of Carbon Trust Programmes, said: “Companies often struggle to harness the huge energy savings that an effectively engaged workforce can help deliver. Part of the problem employers face is making actions practical, fun and sustained. By creating a virtual tour entirely from an employee’s viewpoint, every aspect of Empower has been designed with the end-user in mind. Employees are a critical ally in cutting energy waste.  Get them onboard and reap the rewards in lower bills and reduced carbon emissions.”

Whitbread and Oxford City Council have already signed their staff up to the scheme.

Chris George, Head of Energy & Environment at Whitbread, commented: “Whitbread has a clear target to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 26% by 2020.  To get there we have embedded sustainability into the heart of our business and we are working closely with our teams and business partners to reduce energy and water consumption. We believe that Empower is a strong learning platform which will help our teams to understand how we can work together to reduce energy consumption within our portfolio of buildings in the UK.  It is a straightforward and user-friendly tool, which is easily accessible online and may lead to tonnes of CO2 emissions being saved across our business. It also demonstrates that as we save energy, we also save money, bringing real commercial benefits to the bottom line.”

Meanwhile Paul Robinson, Team Leader, Energy and Climate Change at Oxford City Council, said: "Oxford City Council is committed to tackling climate change, and engaging and empowering employees is a critical way for us to make significant carbon and financial savings.  The new Empower tool is great fun to use and we intend to roll this out to all our staff in the near future as part of our commitment to reduce our operational carbon emissions by 28% by the end of March 2012, relative to the 05/06 baseline emissions.  We will also encourage our Low Carbon Oxford partners to use it with their staff too."