Tenant engagement is one key to ensuring your building’s performance meets energy conservation expectations as designed and can take advantage of any additional energy saving that result from submetering and other tactics. What are the most effective means of engagement today? What factors affect behavior and decision-making?
- Start with the property team: education will lead to engagement
- Engage and educate tenants in their space
- Assist with energy reduction efforts
- Track results and repeat
Educate & Engage:
Start with your building operations team, then occupants. They will help champion the effort.
Share energy efficiency goals and benefits with occupants. Share data; provide energy usage results from submetering and energy management software. Review real-time results through online access with occupants. Provide Utility ‘Toolkits’ that provide building operations staff and tenants ready to use tip sheets, benchmarking tools and data; and other collateral to share with their staff like interactive tools, video or posters. Assess each tenant’s current usage, then create baselines and identify ways to improve with resulting cost savings. Explain why and how to conserve energy with specific steps. Develop materials that can be co-branded for building owner and commercial tenant. Use language that is impactful to the business audience: cost per square/foot; greenhouse gas emissions, etc. Contests between tenants or buildings can build engagement. Build in baselines for real energy savings.
Form a partnership with your tenants:
Create a green team or committee comprised of building management plus tenant and owner representation. Establish overall performance goals for the building that tenants and management can have an impact on. Create a forum for tenant suggestions.
Communicate:
Create a communication plan that is impactful: make regular contact with tenants with updates, tips, and success stories. Consider creating dedicated co-branded collateral that keeps focus on energy conservation for your tenants. Leverage available data to make available usage information, benchmarking data and best practices. Create a lobby display; launch your utility conservation efforts with an engagement event and keep the momentum going by celebrating achievements. Tie in marketing and leverage social media to showcase tenants, individual champions, and winners, results, and specific conservation behaviors.
The key: Measure energy conservation, track results and maintain consistent 2-way communication with your tenants.
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QMC’s tenant engagement tips
