Engaged Employees in Energy Conservation : exploring how to get there

Abstract: Energy consumption is one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions and to climate change. Renewable energy sources are one way of mitigating the problem, but behavioral change and reductions in consumption are also required. In addition, little is known about how energy conservation behaviors are driven or hindered at workplaces, but it has been found in previous research that employee engagement is an important factor. Therefore, this study takes a mixed method approach utilizing the framework of Community-Based Social Marketing at a pharmaceutical manufacturing site in Sweden to investigate drivers and barriers to energy conservation, designing an intervention aiming at increasing employee engagement as well as changing behaviors, and evaluating the study using interviews, surveys and real time measurements. The findings of this study suggest that several factors act as barriers and drivers to energy conservation behaviors at work, e.g., interest, organizational culture, work processes and commitment from the company and management. The designed intervention, an inclusionary trans- disciplinary workshop, seems to have increased engagement and has preliminarily influenced pro-environmental behavior changes, as well as mitigated some barriers and strengthened some drivers.