EXCLUSIVE: Royal Bank of Scotland engages staff with its sustainability goals

EXCLUSIVE: Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is engaging employees with its sustainability and energy-efficiency goals as part of its corporate social responsibility (CSR) policy.

The organisation’s environmental target framework focuses on one initiative each month to boost employee engagement with different environmental aims. Throughout February 2016 it is focusing on energy consumption through a campaign called Turn it off.

RBS has communicated the campaign to employees, starting at board-level, via posters and stickers placed on electrical equipment in as many of the bank’s 2,500 buildings as possible. This includes creating an end-of-day checklist to ensure equipment is switched off.

RBS has also partnered with eco-cup organisation Keep Cups to give all employees who have signed up to take part in its CSR policy a refillable and sustainable cup to keep and re-use.

Michael Lynch, workplace culture manager at RBS, said: “We wanted to address our environmental sustainability as an organisation, and we are mindful of environmental impacts on the wider community.

“We are building the network with our employees and suppliers around our CSR policy currently and we wanted to be more ambitious with engagement and include targets that we haven’t included in the past. We need to demonstrate that we are doing the right thing as an organisation and shouting about it internally.”