Team Brainstorming
GEN01
The people who know your buildings best are those on the frontline, engage them to build your opportunity pipeline.
The best ideas come from the most unlikely of places
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Many hands make light work, or so says the adage. This is definitely true when it comes to building a pipeline of conservation measures. So round up all of your team and representatives from relevant groups and hold a brainstorming session. For the ideal make-up of your brainstorming session, you would want to include people who see the building at all different times of day, from different user perspectives, so try to get people from cleaning, catering, engineering, the security team, general office staff and anyone else you can get along. Past experience tells us that some of the best ideas come from the most unlikely sources.
The Brainstorming Session
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The usual rules of brainstorming apply, the objective is to get as many ideas as possible recorded. The brainstorming session is not the place for ideas to be discussed or evaluated, feasible or not, that gets determined at a later stage, for now all you need is a pipeline of ideas to work with, there are no 'bad' ideas.
A good way of getting the team engaged is to personalize the objective: "If you personally were paying the energy bill what would you do to save your money?" or "If the cost of every truck load of waste is to be taken from your salary what would you change?"
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Once you have a list of ideas you can start to divide them into yes, no and maybe piles. Key to retaining peoples engagement and commitment is to share the output with them and let them know which of the ideas are the initial focus, remembering not to criticize any ideas, even the mad ones!
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The Expected Benefits
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Through holding the brainstorming session you will achieve a number of objectives:
1 - You have built your opportunity pipeline which you can evaluate against your key criteria to determine which should be implemented.
2 - you will have communicated to an audience the importance of your objective, it must be important as you are investing time and effort into it. This will naturally align them with your goals. There is little more powerful for staff engagement than them seeing one of their ideas coming to fruition! It is not unusual for a few days after the brainstorming for a participant to come forward and explain that they have been thinking about it since and they have had a great idea.....more initiatives then follow.