Energy management: where to begin

Over the next 12 months we are going to guide you through the process of establishing an energy management strategy that is fully embedded in your organisation. It’s a process like any other and in this introductory strategic overview we want to give you the basic secrets to success; knowledge, power and resilience.

Knowledge

This element is all about knowing your organisation, knowing your energy use and having the evidence to back up your recommendations and ideas. The fundamental parts of this are:

• Data
  Put in place a structured process to record energy consumption effectively and validate your utility data to ensure it is correct to give you the most accurate picture of energy use.
• Research
  Getting a clear understanding of your business’s current energy use against that of a similar business will help you to manage energy usage effectively. Making an honest assessment of the attitudes towards adopting energy-saving measures within the business will help to set reasonable goals.
• Preparation
  Carry out a full energy survey to determine where energy savings can be made. All information gathered will help to produce an energy policy with short, medium and long-term energy-saving targets.

Power

Chances are (as the person dealing with energy management) you don’t have it – or not as much as you’d like – but you know some people who do. Therefore, armed with your data and ideas, you need to make sure you have those who make the decisions on board.

• Commitment and Support
  Make the case to your management team about what benefits a good energy saving strategy would have and how it could be delivered. For example, emphasis on financial savings, potential tax reductions, a ‘green’ reputation and a more comfortable environment for staff are all possible benefits to implementing good energy management practices.

Don’t just stop with the senior team though, if energy management is truly going to be adopted within your organisation, you need to get everyone involved.

• Engagement
  Engage with the wider organisation and representatives of staff from all areas of your business. Highlight the strategy’s benefits through training sessions and create an energy awareness information pack to help with motivation.

Timothy Holman, Head of Operations at TEAM says:

Getting the ear of the right people in your organisation is key, understanding their priorities and demonstrating how good energy management can help them achieve their goals too.

Resilience

You can’t do it alone and you need to ensure this is a strategy that will permeate your organisation. This is the only way to ensure energy management becomes fully embedded in every day working and attitudes and outlasts changes in staff and departments.

• Establish a team and a plan of action
  Depending on the size of your organisation you will need to identify key individuals who will be able to help you deliver the changes needed. They will need to represent a cross section of the areas that your business covers in order to embed the philosophy and behavioural change throughout your organisation. Then set out the practical steps to achieving the targets set out in the energy policy and allocate tasks and give colleagues certain responsibilities.
• Report
  Monitor the progress towards your energy-saving goals and ensure your organisations operations are running efficiently to maintain energy saving targets. Embrace some great reporting tools and roll out energy dashboards to communicate your achieved targets to your stakeholders and staff.

Timothy Holman, Head of Operations at TEAM goes on to say:

Understand the audience and think about how you would like them to respond to the information they see. Tailoring the design and the configuration to different stakeholders will help you get your messages across.

If you would like to talk to us about embedding a comprehensive energy management strategy within your organisation, contact us today or call us on 01908 690018.