Simple. Effective. Engaging. The key to achieving your sustainability goals is through employee education – ensuring employees have access to simple, effective, personalised, and engaging educational tools; which are focused on minimising waste, efficient energy management and smarter water consumption.
Employee education plays a fundamental role in bringing about a much needed shift in peoples behaviour. In response, we have looked at how we, as a leading environmental solutions company can demonstrate leadership in the provision of environmental education for Australian businesses.
Education that changes behaviours
Veolia delivers its ‘Getting Wise About Waste’ initiative to address the key challenges businesses face in engaging with their employees on correctly utilising a split-waste stream system.
A split-waste stream system allows for various materials to be source-separated (onsite), removing recyclable content from general waste (land-filled) content. This mostly involves separating materials which are made up of plastic, paper, cardboard, glass and aluminium; all of which are recyclable.
Many business have found that the implementation of a split-waste stream system, coupled with Veolia’s ‘Getting Wise About Waste’ education program has assisted in delivering the reduce, reuse recycle message to stakeholders such as employees, cleaners, contractors, facilities managers, retailers and the general public, through a simple, effective and engaging format.
Educational resources that work
The pinnacle of Veolia’s ‘Getting Wise About Waste’ program is a fully interactive online learning portal for waste and recycling education– titled the EduPortal.
The EduPortal provides clients with tailored information to help staff on site across various positions, understand how to identify different waste streams and locate the correct receptacle within which to dispose of these materials.
The system is built specifically for each client and has the capability to provide customised content, based on site-specific, state-specific or waste-specific information.
The benefit of this customised information is that it is targeted and therefore minimises employee’s exposure to information that may not be relevant to their waste and recycling needs.
The site offers an increased level of interactivity by allowing customers to undertake content testing to ensure retention of information. These results then form a reporting basis for management from both Veolia and the client, to determine where further training and education is required, whilst also providing data on completion rates across the employee base.
Supporting offline learning
Understanding and catering for operational staff is an essential element of Veolia’s ‘Getting Wise About Waste' program. This group, mostly made of employees such as cleaners, contractors and facilities managers are site-based, often without access to a computer, and in many cases have English as a second language.
As such, Veolia delivers the ‘pocket-guide for waste and recycling’ which, as the name suggests, is a tangible pocket-book reference document to assist in the timely identification of varying materials and ensuring their correct disposal.
The pocket-guide demonstrates exactly the same information as the EduPortal and further details the importance of each individual’s role and responsibility in contributing to their employer’s aim of minimising the amount of waste being sent to landfill; therefore reducing their environmental impact, by once again reiterating the concept of empowerment through education.
In addition to the pocket-guide, Veolia delivers a comprehensive range of colour-coded bin signage demonstrating relevant waste and recycling information, identified not only by text, but also supporting imagery. Veolia translates all signage into over 10 different languages, again with supporting imagery to ensure that there is a greater level of understanding amongst the audiences where this information is most relevant, and most accessed.
Water and Energy Education
Veolia also offers offline, online and on-person educational tools which can be applied to commercial, industrial and municipal organisations. This includes site visits, delivery of printed materials including brochures and signage, as well as online case studies which demonstrate the value of educating workforces on better energy management and smarter water consumption.
Air Conditioning Clinics
We continue to run our Trane Air Conditioning Clinics, which are a well-known series of training courses on the fundamentals of Heating, Ventilating and Air Conditioning. This series has a long history with Trane worldwide and we have been providing these clinics all around Australia for over 30 years.
The audience of these training courses is broad encompassing HVAC design engineers, installing contractors, service technicians, building system operators, architects, building owners and others.
The Trane Air Conditioning Clinics covers discussions in the areas of HVAC Fundamentals, Equipment and Systems to bring a combination of an overall awareness to the industry as well as the use of latest technology in HVAC to both the technical and non-technical audience.