Mar 29 2010

How to Warm Employees' Hearts (and Hearths)

Posted by: Jonathan Marshall

Think of some of the perks that make the best employers so special: an onsite gym, first-class child care, the 10-minute afternoon massage and, if you’re at Google, the 11 gourmet restaurants.

Now three leading British companies have announced a great new benefit for employees: subsidized home insulation. It may not be quite as enticing as a three-star Michelin cafeteria, but it will save employees money as it helps to save the environment.

Accenture, Aviva and HSBC are teaming up with EDF Energy and Sainsbury’s—a supermarket chain that has diversified into energy efficiency services—to provide the benefit to a quarter million workers. 

The companies launched the Insulate Now initiative today in support of the British government’s target of insulating all homes by 2015 and promoting 65,000 new jobs in the green home industry.

David Hall, who heads a non-profit that dreamed up the Insulate Now campaign, said,

Mobilising consumers to insulate their homes is a great opportunity to cut the nation's carbon footprint and cut our energy bills at the same time but it requires an innovative and creative delivery model. The collaborative approach of we will if you will brings together a coalition of some of the UK's biggest employers, helping us to target a massive audience through established and trusted channels of communication.

Poorly insulated British households reportedly waste about $750 million a year in lost energy. Proper retrofits could save about a third of that each year, offering an excellent investment return.

The US Department of Energy is also pursuing an ambitious home weatherization initiative. Last year, Congress authorized $5 billion in stimulus funds to support insulation, caulking and other retrofits for low-income families.

Worthy as the program is, to date it has only retrofitted about 30,000 homes, or 5 percent of the goal, and created  a small fraction of the jobs originally intended.

Perhaps, as the Brits are suggesting, it’s time to find a new delivery model.

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