The winners of Amey’s employee-focused “Springboard to Net Zero” campaign, aimed at generating innovative ideas to help the business reach its net zero ambitions have been announced.

The infrastructure services and engineering company wanted to support and encourage its employees to engage with the carbon agenda so pledged to plant a tree for every idea submitted and implement at least one of the submitted ideas across the business.  

Over the course of campaign 262 employees submitted ideas which were evaluated using a 5-criteria scorecard. This aimed to decide whether ideas tackle a suitable problem and provide innovative solutions as well as assessing their impact, scalability potential and whether it can be implemented across the business.  

Out of the final eight shortlisted, two submissions were picked as winners and will be progressed across the business. With the other six receiving support to refine their ideas for potential implementation next year. 

The winning ideas: 

Carbon psychology – Lewis Welch, Secure Infrastructure 

·       Behaviour change is essential to reducing our carbon footprint. Lewis suggested using a set of questions created by a psychologist to map the behaviour of our sites and offices. This would allow us to set a roadmap to change, focusing on target areas of improvement. 

Energy saving for employees working from home – Jane Szandrowski, Group 

·       With a lot of people working from home and the introduction of hybrid working in the future, the energy consumption from office buildings has been transferred to people’s homes, rather than just being reduced by people not being there. Jane suggested securing energy saving incentives for our employee benefits site – for example the installation of solar panels. This would help offset the extra energy people are using whilst working at home whilst also saving employees money. 

The winners will each receive a family membership to the National Trust, as well as ongoing support to implement their ideas into the business and see them come to life.  

Andy Voase, who sat on the review panel, commented, “We all recognise the importance of tackling climate change, but there is no silver bullet – the solution lies in a myriad of individual and collective actions. So it was fantastic to see the response to our recent Springboard campaign, which saw 262 ideas from across all the divisions.” 

One of the winners, Lewis Welch, after finding out his idea won, commented, “It’s a real honour to win the first springboard to Net Zero competition as this is something I am very passionate about, however seeing the quality of the final presentations along with understanding just how many ideas were submitted has given me an added sense of pride and confidence that my idea is something that can make a real difference to us as a business and our customers. 

“My behaviour change idea – Carbon Psychology came from an historic understanding of such practices. However, since starting my new role with Amey in December 2020 it became very apparent that there was a keen interest from all corners of business to drive down energy and save carbon although most conversations were generally linked to capital investments or offsetting programs. My initial thought was that only when we actually change the way we behave as people will any investments into technology actually work. I saw the ideas campaign and decided to push my idea through to try and get it heard and invested in. 

“The implementation program of this initiative is really exciting and it’s something I am hoping many others will support with, no human being behaves the same and this program taps into that understanding and will give us the ability to implement and shape plans to help improve behaviours rather than placing signs and stickers everywhere directing people to switch things off or do something different. This is a whole new approach for us at Amey and now it is time to deliver.” 

The other winner, Jane Szandrowsk, commented, “The idea came from a call I was on when someone said that that Amey must have reduced its carbon emissions massively over the last year with not having as many people in the offices, and while that may be true, there are now more employees working from home, so their carbon footprint has increased.  This got me thinking of what Amey could do to help their employees and the wider community. 

“I’m thrilled to have won as I think it’s important to educate people on the damaging effects of carbon emissions and the ways that people can make a difference in their own homes.” 

(Picture – Amey)