Stop talking and start listening: behaviour change at scale

By uncovering the needs of small- business owners, we pivoted the government away from their standard approach, helping them to spark real behaviour change.

The Problem: UK SMEs aren’t engaging with energy efficiency initiatives.

What we did: We spoke to business owners and office managers from small businesses across the UK to discover their everyday needs, frustrations, worries and behaviours, as well as their attitudes toward energy efficiency.

The outcome: We discovered five major motivations that drive business owners, and we showed BEIS that rather than remove reported barriers, it would be more fruitful to tap into innate motivations.

What if the government could help small businesses save £500m from their energy bills and reduce pollution and carbon emissions? That was the challenge that the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy brought to Fluxx. Promoting energy efficiency is difficult; those £500m savings are spread very thin, so the impact on individual companies is often small. Traditionally, the government has believed that there is a knowledge gap.

Businesses, they believed, don’t know what savings are possible, so education and marketing is the most effective solution.

Fluxx started by interviewing dozens of real business owners. We quickly learned that knowledge is not the problem, and that energy initiatives are often undertaken for surprising reasons.

Over the course of six weeks, we spoke to many colourful characters running different types of businesses across the UK: the owner of a building company who came to life when she spoke about teaching her employees to pack a skip like a game of tetris, a restaurateur who built a supply chain based on friendships, a heating engineer who got health and safety certifications to make his company look bigger, an office manager whose goal was to make the company feel like home.

So it’s not that these business owners don’t care about the environment, it’s just that there are other things they care about more. With that in mind, we uncovered five broad motivations that drive business owners and office managers: business growth, self-fulfilment, people, ethics and money. We also discovered that the financial savings to be made by individual businesses are so small that most don’t bother pursuing cost-cutting energy initiatives.

Why, then, were these business owners doing things to reduce energy consumption? We found that the reason always traced back to one of the five motivations. For example, we spoke to the facilities manager of an events venue who was completely driven by people, going to great lengths to ensure the happiness of his employees and customers.

When he realised that the kitchen staff felt uncomfortably hot and customers in the event space felt uncomfortably cold, it was a no-brainer to install a ventilation system that would even out the temperature between the two. It happened that this system was highly efficient and massively cut energy costs, but he had been motivated by people rather than money.

The reason why BEIS’ energy initiatives haven’t worked in the past is that they tried to remove barriers that don’t exist.

Few people would admit that they don’t care about the environment, so if a survey asks why an individual isn’t energy conscious, they’ll answer that they haven’t learned about what they need to do, or say they don’t have the money to make improvements.

These aren’t barriers, they’re excuses.

Because, ultimately, no one wants to feel like they’re being judged. The best way to encourage energy efficiency is to shut up about energy efficiency and start talking about the things that actually motivate people.

This new way of approaching the problem went on to inform the alpha phase of work, where ideas based on insight are iteratively tested and measured.