Put the sparkle into staff engagement

9th December 2014

Day 3 of EAUC Sustainable Christmas is Staff Engagement and Human Resources

Christmas is the time of year for giving of time and well needed supplies. If you’re looking to engage staff, the holidays are a perfect time to build high morale and camaraderie among your staff. With the proper decorations and festive gatherings, it’s possible to turn even the biggest office Scrooge into a jolly old Santa Claus. Promoting a sustainable Christmas is easy too as it is about giving and community engagement.

Supporting the community

In last month's homepage poll, we asked you about how your institution supports the community at Christmas as it's a great time to give back and engage your staff and students. 40% of you are doing food hampers/collections which is a great way to give back. Volunteering and Christmas concerts/events are also popular with 33% and 20% respectively.

EAUC staff volunteering day

Every year EAUC staff spread the joy of Christmas by getting out of the office, getting our hands dirty and mucking in with a day of volunteering. Over the last few years, we've had the pleasure of spending this time at the Butterfly Garden and looking after our furry, four-legged friends at the Cheltenham Animal Shelter!

This year we're helping local Cheltenham charity County Community Projects (CCP)
who runs a scheme - called Hamper Scamper - where teams of volunteers from local businesses fill hampers with donated food. Together as a team we've collected four huge boxes of food and will spend the day in our Christmas jumpers preparing them to be donated to those in need.

The total number of over 65s living in food poverty has reached 1.5 million, according to new figures. They will go to the elderly, and to vulnerable families.

Switch off

It's also a key time to remind all staff that they need to switch off over Christmas, especially with all the additional lights and decorations that are up at Christmas! Loughborough University has shared some top tips for the Christmas switch off:

Before you leave the office for your Christmas Break...

• Shut down all PC's and laptops
• Switch off all monitors
• Switch off all printers and faxes (where possible)
• Switch off all lights and fairy lights
• Switch off all heaters, air con units and extract fans
• Switch off any research equipment that doesn't need to be on
• Where possible consolidate experiments into the minimal number of ovens, fume cupboards etc.
• Set any timers on equipment to stay off over the break
• Unplug any transformers or phone and laptop chargers that are not required
• Unplug any Christmas decorations, not only do they use energy, they could be a fire risk
• Close all the windows around the building

What are your teams doing to engage with your staff? What do you think? Head on over to Facebook to weigh in!

Staff Engagement and Human Resources is a Framework within Learning in Future Environments (LiFE)
> Check out more resources on 'Staff Engagement and Human Resources' on the Sustainability Exchange