Earth Month Guide 🌍✌️
Engaging employees through sustainability is a great way to increase retention, belonging, and productivity! And – April, Earth Month, is a great time to gear up! (Psst Earth Day is on April 22, a Saturday this year)
Check out this guide for a number of free, fun, and impactful ideas to get your employees and company engaged this Earth Month!
Table of Contents
1️⃣ Find out your carbon footprint
What gets measured gets changed!
Becoming a carbon literate company or group can start with finding out your personal carbon footprint! Our quiz takes less than 2 mins (more like 1 min really!) and you can do this during an all-hands, lunch meeting, or other group forum!
After completing the quiz as a group, here are some sample discussion points:
- Was your carbon footprint higher or lower than the country average?
- What category is your easiest opportunity to reduce your carbon footprint? (Commute, diet, flying, home energy)
- What category is your most challenging one in terms of reducing your carbon footprint?
- Review each category (Commute, diet, flying, home energy) and have employees share personal ways they reduce their impact or share ideas
- Discuss a few changes that can be made at the office or workplace to help individuals reduce their carbon footprint
Level of effort: low
Platform: All hands, team meeting
Time: ~15 mins
Slack/chat channel compatible: yes (can easily be used for a chat channel activity)
2️⃣ Learn clever terms
Our clever terms series helps people add some fancy climate words to their vocabulary!
You can review a few or all terms during a team meeting or drop a link to one each week in your company chat and have folks discuss how they would use this word today!
Level of effort: low
Platform: All hands, team meeting
Time: ~15 mins
Slack/chat channel compatible: yes (can easily be used for a chat channel activity)
3️⃣ Print, frame, and display the coffee menu
The Coffee Menu is such an easy and eye-pleasing way to learn about carbon footprint and get carbon curious!
Print, frame, and display this in your kitchen for Earth Month and onwards.
It comes in many different languages so be sure to send it to your global colleagues!
Level of effort: low
Platform: Office kitchen
Time: n/a
Slack/chat channel compatible: n/a
4️⃣ Learn about home energy usage
How many kWh did your household consume use last month? Case in point 🙂
What gets measured gets changed! With your employees, have everyone dig up their energy bill from last month and use the following talking points:
- How many people used less than 250 kWh last month? 500 kWh? 1000 kWh?
- What was the average kWh consumption last month among employees? (create a spreadsheet and have people put in their consumption with or without their name. Add number of people in household as a column or square footage if you’re feeling fancy!)
- Talk about the carbon footprint of energy usage (see more in the post)
- Talk about ways to reduce energy usage. Here are some tips!
Level of effort: medium (a little more effort to pre-learn and plan)
Platform: All hands, team meeting
Time: ~15 mins
Slack/chat channel compatible: yes (can easily be used for a chat channel activity)
5️⃣ Review historical CO2 concentrations and learn critical numbers
Knowing the concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) is key info for everyone in the 21st century!
Using our post and resources, learn the critical numbers together and ask each person to find out what the CO2 concentration was when they were born! Key learnings:
- CO2 concentration in Feb: 420.5 ppm
- 450 ppm – if we surpass this we surpass 1.5C goal
- 350 ppm – we need to be below this for a thriving planet
- Birth year – what was the CO2 concentration when you were born? Found out here!
In your discussion, it’s ok to not have all the answers and to have some open ended questions. There’s opportunities for more research and learning down the road!
Level of effort: medium (a little more effort to pre-learn and plan)
Platform: All hands, team meeting
Time: ~15 mins
Slack/chat channel compatible: yes (can easily be used for a chat channel activity)
6️⃣ Average carbon footprint in different countries
Did you know that the average carbon footprint of an individual is very different depending on the country they live in?
- Vietnam: 2.1 tonnes
- UK: 8.3 tonnes
- US: 17.5 tonnes
Check out different countries and have employees guess a few diff countries, then have a discussion on what factors contribute to the difference. A few hints (policy and legislation, GDP, size of country – larger countries = larger homes and larger vehicles, renewable energy, public transportation infrastructure, consumption)
See instagram post here.
Level of effort: low
Platform: All hands, team meeting
Time: ~15 mins
Slack/chat channel compatible: yes (can easily be used for a chat channel activity)
7️⃣ Shower Challenge
Which team has the shortest average shower time? HR or Sales? New York or Chicago? You won’t know until you host the Shower Challenge – a fun way to be competitive and also reduce your impact and water footprint!
It can be as simple as starting a spreadsheet!
Level of effort: high
Platform: All hands, team meeting (to announce, more touch points throughout)
Time: ~1 hr setup
Slack/chat channel compatible: yes (can easily be used for a chat channel activity)
8️⃣ Learn the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals
The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals are a set of 17 goals that create a framework for peace and prosperity. Originally created for member nations, many corporations have adopted the goals to help guide ESG and corporate social responsibility initiatives.
Through Clever Actions, we’ve created a google slide deck you can re-use to share the goals with employees and apply it to future initiatives!
Level of effort: low (slide deck already created)
Platform: All hands, team meeting
Time: ~15 mins presentation
Slack/chat channel compatible: no (better done through a meeting)
9️⃣ Pick your own Clever Action
Clever Actions is a free sustainability framework for employee engagement!
There are over 90 actions categorized by level of effort, level of impact, United Nations Sustainable Development Goal, and more! Pick a few, or better yet, get your employees to pick a few to check-off for Earth Month!
Level of effort: medium
Platform: All hands, team meeting (to announce, more touch points throughout)
Time: ~1 hr research and plan roll-out
Slack/chat channel compatible: yes (can easily be used for a chat channel activity)
