Canada Steamship Lines’ Stephanee Legault engages employees on land and on water

Stephanee Legault is a Living Planet @ Work champion at Canada Steamship Lines and was selected as one of Living Planet @ Work’s 2014 Champions of the year. Learn more about the initiatives led by Stephanee which helped to drive employee engagement on sustainability both at head office and on board CSL’s ships.
Parka? Check. Long johns? Check. Woolly hat? Check.
At the beginning of November, Stephanee Legault and three of her colleagues at Canada Steamship Lines (CSL) packed their warmest clothes and headed north to see the polar bears they’ve done so much to protect.
Last November, Stephanee formed an employee involvement committee, made up of fellow marketing, communications and IT staff, to create a greener workplace at CSL.
Working from scratch, the committee members set about engaging their colleagues in sustainable changes with a little help from WWF’s Living Planet @ Work Program.
It was the culmination of a year of achievement at the Montreal-based shipping company that earned Stephanee the 2014 Living Planet @ Work Champion of the Year Award.

In the office, the team targeted paper and ink use. Bye-bye single-sided printing – Stephanee and her team worked with the company’s IT department to switch all the printer default settings to double-sided.
To rally co-workers for a great cause, they organized events like “Sweater Day”, where almost 50 staff members clad in their most unattractive winter sweaters turned down the thermostat and attended a lunch and learn on climate change.
The committee also motivated almost half of CSL’s head office employees to participate in a hugely successful “Active April” fundraiser for WWF, raising over $8,000.
Office “thermometers” kept track of every kilometre staff walked or biked to work, along with every flight of stairs they climbed.  For every kilometre walked or biked, CSL agreed to donate $3 to WWF, while for every flight of stairs the company chipped in $1.
“We had tons of people taking the stairs, walking and biking to work,” Stephanee recalls. “No one was taking the elevator anymore.”
The top two campaign winners joined the company’s president, Louis Martel, at WWF’s CN Tower climb in Toronto.
Nor did Stephanee and her team forget about their shipboard colleagues. The “Ship Efficiency Challenge” encouraged crew members to submit ideas for cutting on-board energy use.  To generate a little extra excitement, CSL’s executive offered a reward for the best ideas: a polar-bear-viewing expedition to Churchill, Manitoba with WWF experts.
“Their ideas on ways to improve the footprint of the vessels was a huge win for us,” says Stephanee. “Our technical team was really impressed by a lot of the stuff that came out of it…not only the monetary savings, but the CO2 emissions reduction, too.”
For Stephanee, the key to creating a buzz around sustainability is plenty of face-to-face communication and a healthy dose of rivalry. “There’s a sense of friendly competitiveness but it sort of brings everyone together,” she says.
Hats off to Stephanee, the employee involvement committee and the entire CSL team for their creative, bottom-up efforts to shrink their environmental footprint and support WWF!
Interested in leading footprint reduction initiatives, hosting environmental campaigns and fundraising for conservation programs year-round with your colleagues like Stephanee? Join Living Planet @ Work and get free access to tools and resources to help you.