- 6. Behaviour change
Why culture impacts carbon reduction delivery
Embedding culture and behaviour change practices that are critical to accelerating decarbonisation could benefit overall operation of organisations in the built environment.
According to Environment Agency programme and change manager Natasha Clark, reaching net zero calls for “radical change that sticks”. She added: “PAS 2080 [the standard for carbon management] recommends that we take a structured approach to behaviour and change, embedding carbon thinking into everything that we do.”
However, Natasha believes that understanding how to ensure the mindset shift needed is embedded will deliver broader business benefits for organisations than just meeting carbon net zero commitments.
“We need to seriously consider what it means to not invest in the right enabling environments. By understanding the risk, we can ensure the need to achieve true organisational behaviour change and behaviour change within our supply chains is valued,” she explained.
Nonetheless, Natasha said that as an industry we “have a lack of observing individuals and understanding their voices”. She added: “We often have little to no change management resources or behaviour change practices endorsed within big corporate organisations for transformational change.
“[when it comes to decarbonisation] we have short timeframes to embed our new ways of thinking and our new ways of working.
“But continued low investment into transformational change leads to degraded change delivery and degraded solutions. Without creating an enabling environment for change, we exert influence and achieve change by using coercive behaviours that don't last for very long. That approach won’t deliver sustained, heartfelt change. And that could potentially be the undoing of us reaching and sustaining net zero.”
Investing in cohesive behaviour change
Natasha urged the infrastructure industry to value transformation and invest in behaviour change management.
“If we all invest in behaviour practices to ensure that we think and act differently and make low carbon solutions and carbon emissions central to all our decision making, we can deliver cohesive behaviour change to achieve our goals,” she said.
Deploying behaviour change practices must start with observation. “The first rule of transformational change is making absolutely no assumptions,” explained Natasha. “Really take the time to invest in understanding what makes your people tick and how people are currently behaving. You can't change your behaviour unless you fully know what is on offer already to be able to move that behaviour to something new.
“Spend longer observing your people, their motivations, their capabilities and then you can start to think about what actually needs changing in that situation.”
The next step is to turn observations into a diagnosis. “Observe your teams, your individuals, your partners, your stakeholders and the current behaviour that they are displaying to you,” said Natasha. “What does that look like but what do you need those behaviours to look like in the future state when we are trying to do something new? When we've sustained those new behaviours, what does that look like together? Joining your observations and that gap analysis between now and those future behaviours is actually the start of you formulating a change management strategy.”
Using group social behaviour to build critical mass
Once a plan is developed, Natasha explained that individuals must feel that they are both psychologically and physically able to perform a new behaviour. “We need to provide clarity on what was expected of them and give them multiple ways to actually interact with the change, to be able to engage with that new behaviour,” she added. “Individuals must want to carry out that behaviour, more so than competing behaviours.”
Transformational change also needs to build critical mass. “It's really important that you use group social behaviour to build a coalition of followers who are actually delivering on that change and taking people with them in that wave,” said Natasha. “When those conditions are met, people will feel empowered to enact a particular behaviour and it's only practicing that new behaviour, and then being recognised and rewarded for doing so, that it becomes the new learned set of behaviours.”
Natasha urged the industry to focus on creating an enabling environment for change to underpin decarbonisation ambitions.
“Traditional project management needs to move into the new method of also being coupled with behaviour change practices so that we are in a really strong position,” she added. She said that this will secure the behaviour change necessary to see a return on investment in people-related practices and “get the benefits that we're chasing, which in this case is, managing whole life carbon”.
To embed behavioural change, Natasha said the sector must look at the delivery model being used for change and question whether we are really valuing transformation and investing in both project and behaviour change. And, if not, Natasha asked: “Why would we take that risk on our investments and our futures, when there are proven methods to achieve transformation?”
