Eleanor Akers, Director and Founder of Innovative Energy Consultants, helps businesses around the world reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, and sees decarbonising travel as a largely untapped opportunity. Making it easy for employees, suppliers, and customers to travel sustainably helps businesses achieve their net zero goals, helping them win contracts in both the public and private sectors and do their bit to stop climate change.
A business’ travel emissions are greenhouse gas emissions caused by employee commuting and business travel. For service providers like accountants, marketers, and consultants, emissions from travel can be their largest sources of emissions. So reducing these emissions is a core part of their overall decarbonisation strategies.
Unfortunately, the low-carbon choice is often more expensive. Innovative Energy Consultants’ research shows that for average inter-city journeys for two people in the UK taking the train is 3.5 times as expensive as driving. Making sustainable travel choices, like booking a train ticket, can also add to employees’ mental load. Eleanor is passionate about removing barriers to sustainable travel, and here she shares five simple steps companies can take to make sustainable travel easy and cost-effective for the whole workforce.
Facilities
A surprising number of people are put off walking or cycling to work because of a lack of showers and hair dryers. No one wants to sit in a meeting with wet hair or feeling sweaty and uncomfortable. Making showering and hair-drying facilities available to staff is a simple way to make active travel easier.
Another common concern is theft or damage to bicycles left outside. Providing secure, dry storage facilities goes a long way towards making cycling an attractive commuting option.
Directions
When inviting stakeholders to an event or giving employees directions to other sites, put the location of the nearest train station or bus stop, along with information on cycle lanes and storage facilities, at the top. Prioritising information about sustainable travel ahead of information about parking facilities nudges visitors into making sustainable travel choices.
Season ticket loans
Buying a season ticket can be a great way to reduce the cost of commuting by train. On some rail networks savings can be as much as 25% over a year according to Northern Railway. Unfortunately, for many commuters handing over the lump sum required to purchase the season ticket is out of the question.
This is where employers come in. By offering interest-free season ticket loans as an employee benefit, companies can make it possible for their employees to spread the cost of the commute and take advantage of the savings from a season ticket.
Car sharing
Let’s face it, everybody knows that if you get a lift with a colleague you can’t go home until they’re ready to. When employers provide incentives, such as priority parking or entry into a raffle it can often be enough of a benefit to make up for the loss of flexibility.
Adding a question to mileage expense forms, asking how many people were in the vehicle, is another free and simple way to nudge employees into car sharing. The goal of this question is to make people stop and think whether they could have travelled with a colleague. For behavioural changes to take effect, it’s important to create buy-in rather than make top-down demands.
Sustainable business travel policy
Having a Sustainable Business Travel Policy in an easily accessible area, like the employee intranet or HR portal, clearly sets out expectations for booking business travel. When businesses make it clear that they are empowering employees to spend up to a specified additional amount to travel by rail rather than flying or driving, they create clear expectations.
Choosing the cheapest mode of transport is often seen as doing the right thing. By clearly setting out their sustainability goals and budgets in a Sustainable Business Travel Policy, businesses empower employees to make the sustainable choice.
‌By Eleanor Akers, Director and Founder of Innovative Energy Consultants, a Manchester-based sustainability and strategy consultancy specialising in the UK and North American markets. Innovative Energy Consultants is data-driven and uses inherently sustainable thinking to support businesses in identifying and taking the next steps on their sustainability journey. The consultancy’s unique combination of market-leading technical expertise and full-service offering enables it to support businesses to create sustainable value at every stage, from education to implementation.
