Description
People are less engaged in sustainable practices at work than they are at home. Individual employee behavior leads to sustainability problems at work such as: excessive energy and water use; unnecessary solid waste and carbon emissions. At the same time, employees are less engaged and struggling to find purpose in their work and workplaces. Many businesses have top-down sustainability approaches that use company-wide environmental programs and consultants to train upper-level leadership. Few, if any, seek to engage employees from the bottom-up. This project’s goal is to engage employees directly in workplace sustainability, thereby enhancing existing sustainability practices’ collective engagement. Using The Natural Step ABCD Method, biophilic design and applied improvisation in a 12-week curriculum and experiential workshop, the thesis examines the increases of awareness of an individual’s potential environmental impact in the workplace. Through developing and executing a pilot workshop, this thesis presents data that offers environmental sustainability practices as one option for disengaged employees to find purpose in their workplace