Climate Habits is a practical and flexible workplace programme that brings people together to address their personal climate impact. I’ve been helping to refine the product and find market fit.
The founder, Judith, had already run a pilot of Climate Habits with a large national employer, combining weekly Teams presentations over three weeks, a WhatsApp group chat and a Miro board to get groups of colleagues together to consider and take action on their personal climate impact. She had great stories of the lifestyle changes people had made, and it sounded like the accountability from sharing personal progress with work colleagues really helped.
I liked the concept, and Jude’s positive, practical approach to getting people to take action by consciously considering the process through the lens of behavioural science:
- What are my default habits when it comes to recycling or driving, and why?
- What support do I need to take the next step to cook or shop in a more sustainable way?
- How can I prime myself to apply my principles to decisions in the future when I’m speccing out big ticket items like home improvements or a new car?
- And how do I overcome the inertia and its-all-too-complicated-ness of living sustainably (answer: stay positive, do the things you can, don’t get bogged down)
I’ve been working as a technical advisor to help scale and develop Climate Habits. First on the list has been to develop a more flexible, efficient web application platform, so participants can use an app on their phones or laptops to enrol, choose the lifestyle actions they want to work on during the programme, and assess their progress. Alongside the app, we’ve been working on the – I’d say equally hard – challenge of trying to articulate what Climate Habits is about and why people should get involved, on a client-facing website.
Read my full post about developing the Climate Habits web app over on the Climate Habits site.