Corporate Grass Roots

Two years ago, a co-worker brought me a draft of a letter to the Senior VPs of the large corporation for which we work in the cubicled salt mines. The letter was a plea for the cause of energy conservation within the company. We’re a multinational Silicon Valley software company of roughly 5,000; surely, we could be doing something — anything — to green up.

We cranked out a final copy of the letter and began asking colleagues to co-sign with us. It felt somewhat revolutionary (Sure, we work for The Man, and sure, he checks our email and peeks in our web browsing, but we're free-thinking individuals, dammit, not mindless proles...); we were earnest and enthusiastic and ready to take on the big guns with our well-honed rhetoric.

Thankfully, before we dashed off the letter to corporate, the local facilities manager — a seasoned DC lobbyist, and all for our cause — asked us to reconsider our actions. Somewhat chastened at first, we did, and instead wisely decided to form a small task force to see what we could do locally, with the long-range plan of using our presumed success as a proof of concept to sell the conservation argument up the ladder to corporate.

Even as I get older and  — ahem — more respectable, it bores me to do things slowly and methodically, but ultimately, we made the right choice. Sure, I'd love to see change happen through punk rock, bold art, and strong words, but change doesn't happen overnight, and no one likes to be shown up — especially those with initials in their job titles — and the letter, signed by 50 employees might have seemed a bit mutinous to our paycheck-endorsers. Sometimes, it’s simply not necessary to fight corporate city hall loudly, as morally empowering as it might feel at the time. In fact, if we had, we might have more easily forgotten our cause after getting a lip service response. Instead, we now have a hugely successful locally-grown initiative that is indeed the model of conservation we’d hoped for.

Thanks to buy-in from the site manager, and local facilities, IT, and business unit group heads, as well as excellent employee support, the initiative within months reached our initial goal of reducing the amount of electricity our site uses by 100,000 kilowatt hours (kW h), annualized, and we have since saved another 50,000 kW h per year.

At our site of approximately 300 employees, computers outnumber people nearly five to one, so clearly there was some (as the suits like to say) “low-hanging fruit” to be had. Thus, our biggest gains have been made not by changing expensive building systems like HV/AC, but by improving inefficiencies in our computing operations. We’ve given away unused equipment, shut down rarely-used equipment, set machines to power-savings mode, and asked fellow employees to forgo power-draining "screen savers" (that’s right, kids, it takes a lot of CPU power to draw those pretty multicolor 3D pipe designs and such) in favor of turning off their monitors when they leave for the night. Electricity rates vary, so cost savings are somewhat tough to estimate (certainly over $20,000 per year though), but in terms of usage, our simple housekeeping measures have so far conserved enough energy to power 18 average New England homes, yearly.

What’s more, we haven’t spent any corporate funds to achieve our substantial savings. We even convinced our vending machine contractor to install on our soda machines energy miser sensors, which power up a machine only when they detect motion (i.e., a customer), while maintaining beverage temperature as necessary.

In addition, we’ve greatly changed the way that we use the computing power we do have — not only centralizing data storage on robust servers, but sharing their processing power as well. We then access those servers not with power-hungry tower-style computers, but with laptops which, on the average, use one-quarter the power of most bigger, desktop CPUs.

We’ve continued to maintain, not increase, our energy usage, and to share information with other sites and encourage them to set up similar local initiatives, and have slowly — and successfully — been pushing energy awareness and savings up the chain of command. We’ve even been cited positively by corporate executive staff, when asked what we as a company are doing to green up.

Not bad for a few local folks with a chip on their collective shoulder and a hopeful eye toward change. Our grass-roots solution demanded that we change first — not simply talk the talk of revolution — and it ultimately proved far more effective than our initial demand for that same change in corporate. Our well-written and thoughtful letter to corporate would have been, essentially, an op-ed piece without a newspaper to print it and only a very small audience to read it.

The tendency in most large corporations is toward apathy and wastefulness, but it needn’t be. Sure, we’re all more thrifty at home than at work, but what a simple thing it is to turn off the lights when you're done in the copy room, or to police up computers left on in empty cubes. It’s no skin off my nose, and though I’d rather see executive pay come back in line with say, reality, wastefulness breeds more wastefulness, and it’d be nice if the suits had fewer excuses when it’s time for raises to be handed down to those of us toiling in the mines.

Comments

[Mike]

Great idea, Ben! Thanks!