Influencing employee behaviour at work

Legal technology doesn't have to be complicated. Law firms can cut carbon by looking at the most everyday technology - like turning off the lights.

Engaging your staff in environmental issues is not easy. Firstly, what are the burning platforms that you should chose to support? And when you've selected your campaigns, either through imposition in response to management, or through informed consensus with people in the know (sometimes the same people), there's still the question of how can you connect everyone in your business to the cause. Burning platforms have a habit of increasing carbon emissions too.

The question that I still haven't fathomed after three years' "working in" sustainability, is why people will turn their lights off when leaving home in the morning, but don't tend to turn the lights off when leaving the office at night? Maybe it's a plot by the purveyors of the CRC to ensure that our wastefulness ensures that the new carbon economy will thrive. Or perhaps we are all subconsciously taking on the evil forces of darkness, by bringing them light!

Hardly. It's about learned behaviour. I think it was called operant conditioning when I did my psychology degree 25 years ago. Skinner and rats and electric shocks and all that. There must be a point at which we switch off from doing what we know is the right thing to do and simply fail to switch off. I remember the drought of 1976 and being told to turn off the tap whilst brushing my teeth (as well as being advised that flushing the toilet infrequently was also a good thing to do - this was pre hippo bags after all). We ended up needing a new toilet at home (enough of that, Ed.) and I've carried the habit of turning off the flow of water in between scrubs into adulthood.

There's a lot to be gained by looking at the way we used to do things when we were kids. In many respects, if delegates at Copenhagen and Kyoto had simply asked the global population to think of environmental issues as they would have done as 7 year olds, maybe we could crack the question of global warming. Tell a 7 year old that it is crazy that more water is spent creating a bottle of water that is bought in the supermarket (as a result of the manufacturing and transport process, let alone the power used in both and to keep it chilled) and they will soon lead you to the tap in the kitchen, with a look of "Why don't you drink this, dummy?" on their faces. Kids understand the basics, adults confuse matters by learning behaviours based on wastefulness and a lack of care for others (the very traits we accuse children of) and then we try to apply logic to put right our wrongs.

For example, I heard recently a senior person from Coke speak at a conference about how they are significantly reducing the power consumption of their fridges. Commendable. But a child would ask the question, "Why can't Coke be made to taste nice when it is warm?"

So I like to look at environmental issues through the lens of a 7 year old and I'm lucky to have one at home, who has developed a reputation for being a mini environmentalist. Ask Millie about global warming and she will show you how it's the same as a person getting hot under a blanket. Ask her about waste and she will point out the volumes of paper and plastic that encase most of the items bought in our local shopping centre. I asked her whether she would tell her friends about all this sort of stuff and she set up her own blog.

Yes it is true, 7 year olds can blog too. (Although their Dads do have to keep reminding them that their readers are waiting for the next entry). If you would like to get back to basics, where CRC is a misspelling of CBBC, have a look at her efforts. She gets some interesting feedback too.

And stay tuned for more from my 7 year old expert - as I shall be asking her to offer pearls of wisdom to us all in future blog entries. Maybe, us adults want to protect the planet for our children's future, but our children want to protect it now.

In the meantime, imagine you are back at junior school again and someone has told you that the polar bears will need to learn how to swim to the local zoo and that we may all end up going to the North Pole for our Summer holidays, on cruise ships. Then turn off the lights on your way out.

Marcus Jamieson-Pond is a corporate social responsibility manager at Addleshaw Goddard LLP.