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Sustainable behaviour

8 November 2016

Behaviour change

Our Up to uS sustainable behaviour programme is designed to promote and encourage both employees and students to adopt responsible behaviours. Developed over the last three years, using social change theory, it encompasses a range of activities on a national, local and individual level that truly embed behavioural change.

Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, the programme has built-in flexibility that allows us to maximise the different opportunities for behavioural change in each of our different properties.

Our sustainable engagement programme is designed to target five key behaviours around energy saving, water saving and waste reduction.

In all of our properties we use digital screens, social media, and in-property exhibits to display top tips on how to live a little greener. These are bought to life each term with a dedicated student campaign around one element of green living, for example warm & winning.

At a local level, we have recruited a network of 163 employee sustainability champions in across every city which we operate. We empower our sustainability champions to help make their properties greener by giving them a workbook of actions to complete across the academic year. This workbook is accredited by the National Union of Students and every action is simple, clear and easy to implement. Completed actions qualify the teams for either bronze, silver or gold awards. All cities are tasked with obtaining a minimum of a bronze award for their properties and this can be achieved a number of ways due to the range of actions to choose from.

Finally, at the individual level, we engage with our students directly by providing them with opportunities to join our employee teams as volunteers to help them implement the actions in the Green Impact workbook. Students are also presented with the energy performance of their property over the course of the year to provide them with feedback on the actions that we are encouraging as part of Up to uS.