Celebrating company champions: Trish Crowe-Grande

Trish Crowe-Grande is an Assistant Brand Manager at Procter & Gamble on the COVERGIRL brand. For the past several years, she’s also been helping to build, from the grassroots up, a Green Network at P & G’s Toronto headquarters. In 2007, P & G put sustainability at the core of their business operations by establishing five key strategies, one of which is employee engagement. With the support of that corporate commitment and with the partnership of the WWF’s Living Planet @ Work employee engagement program, Trish is ushering her pioneering work into its next phase. Read on for excerpts from our interview with Trish.
“On a personal level, I have been concerned with the man-made and natural disasters that had been happening and how the Earth is responding. Being a parent, I was concerned about the long-term implications of not addressing what was going on. I had heard about P&G’s Sustainability Ambassadors network so I decided to join as a way to connect with other P & Gers who shared my interest in sustainability. That was the trigger for me to think, well, there must be others here in our Toronto building who are interested in sustainability. I was able to connect with others. Earth Day was coming up, and we thought we would drive awareness, by making sure the company president’s Earth Day message went out on voicemail and email, and by putting up posters. And that’s how our Green Network started up.

(c) Procter & Gamble
“Our building has a servery on every floor – a place to have lunch or to meet informally for a cup of coffee – and Styrofoam cups were made available on the servery counters. Our cafeteria staff was able to give us a pretty solid ballpark figure of what was being used: about 2,000 Styrofoam cups a day in our building. We were just horrified! So we said, “Okay, since we want to reduce waste, targeting the cups would be a very good start.” We figured that if we were taking something away, we had better hand out something in return, so we gave everybody their own ceramic mug, and said, “We ask that you use your new cup, because soon, there will be no more Styrofoam.” We said we were going to phase it out; it wouldn’t be cold-turkey, but by the new year – January – it would be gone.
“At the beginning, some people had difficulty with the change. So we sent out some reminder emails to raise awareness, and, slowly but surely, the behaviours changed – you would see people walking around with their mugs. Now we have full reduction of Styrofoam cups.
“We have a representative from the cafeteria staff on our Green Network. She was interested in the network, and cafeteria management was interested in having someone from their team be involved. It’s been great. Our cafeteria set up a program that rewards employees who bring their refillable mugs to the cafeteria: they get 10 cents off their cup of coffee when they do. And the cafeteria now has recyclable paper cups and at times have takeout utensils made of recyclable material as well.
“I connected with some people in our IT area who were very committed to reducing the use of paper in the building, so that initiative was included in the Green Network Team Action Plan. IT partnered with Xerox to streamline our technology. Now it allows us to do double-sided printing, and also selective printing so that we’re not seeing terrible amounts of paper being printed and forgotten and thrown out. Once again, this was something we phased in, by introducing the technology on a floor, letting employees know about it and get used to it, then eventually rolling it out through the building. Altogether, we’ve seen a reduction in our paper use of 39 per cent.
“As the Green Network has become more visible to the population as a whole here in the building, people are understanding what I’m doing. It is known that I’m involved in this and that it’s a very important part of what I do here at P & G. When I was starting the network up, it was pretty much on the side, but now I have my direct manager’s and upper management’s support to incorporate it into my own work plan, to have expectations that a certain percentage of my time is involved in this work, and to have measures of success.
“At the beginning, our Green Network was ad hoc and free-flowing. Working with WWF Canada helped us streamline our focus. With Earth Week this past year, everybody had a core day or event or communication they were responsible for, and then they made a report back to the group. People felt a real sense of ownership and accomplishment after the week was over. It really helped with our credibility as a network. So we’re taking that success story and building it into our organizational structure to make it really come to life.
“Our biggest hurdle, in terms of employee engagement, has been capacity – understanding that everybody has very busy day-to-day lives. WWF has encouraged us to think about tools – mechanisms and approaches – we can leverage to build our capacity. We’re learning how to build the rhythm of events and education so that it’s not going to be overwhelming.”