By Gary Onstad
Product Manager | The Ken Blanchard Companies
In December of 2013, The Ken Blanchard Companies completed a REV Sustainability Circle. Since then, the company has excelled at finding innovative ways to accelerate their sustainability efforts. In this REV guest blog, Gary Onstad details one of their more creative activities.
After completing our Sustainability Action Plan, under the guidance REV, The Corporate Sustainability Team (CST) of the Ken Blanchard Companies wanted to find a fun way to raise awareness of our plan and spark enthusiasm for putting the plan into action.
As a leadership training company we had a decided advantage in developing a strategy to inform and engage our staff. One of our instructional designers and Corporate Sustainability Team members put their heads together to develop a creative and fun solution—Blanchardy!
Blanchardy! is a fast-paced environmentally-themed game show hosted as a lunch and learn event at our Escondido campus headquarters. Loosely based on a popular long-running TV Game show, Blanchardy! contestants selected answers from categories on a game board created in a PowerPoint presentation. Point values were assigned to each question based on the level of difficulty. The clue was revealed and read aloud by the hostess, after which a contestant “rang-in” for a chance to win or lose the points by raising their hand-held flags.
The first contestant to ring-in successfully was prompted to provide a response to the clue, phrased in the form of a question. For example, if a contestant were to select “CO2 Cues for 40 points”, the resulting clue might be “Responsible for 19% of our company’s GHG emissions, this word also means a trip to the office and back”, to which the correct response would be “What is commuting?” Questions and answers like this help staff understand the impact of their choices on the environment and raise curiosity. The corporate website then offers solutions such as car pool sign ups and detailed carbon impact information. The room also had posters and cheat sheets with answer clues for the audience.
To increase the turn out we selected leadership team members as our contestants. We advertised the event on our internal sharepoint site and sent our meeting makers to all local staff members. This had several positive effects:
- Staff member turned out to root on their favorite department head.
- It demonstrated a commitment to sustainability by organization leadership, and
- Selected leaders studied our Corporate sustainability site thus better acquainting themselves with the sustainability plan and the topics that would be covered in the game show.
Over 40 staff members showed up on their lunch hour to participate and learned a great deal about The Ken Blanchard Companies’ impact and environmental plan, along with conservation ideas to take back home. Our game board provided five categories with five answers each. In the space of 45 minutes we covered all twenty five answers and questions as well as sharing a tour of our Sustainability Plan and the Corporate Sustainability Team Website.
The game was a huge hit with the staff. The six leaders selected as contestants gave very positive feedback. Both participants and leaders reported that they had fun, learned a great deal, and wanted to learn more.
Using gamification strategies, including events like Blanchardy!, is a valuable way to engage employees, inform, and raise awareness for environmental initiatives.
