(Photo Credit: Ian Schneider)Four years ago Kilroy Realty Corporation didn’t have any sustainability program, but since then it has been named the number one real estate company across all asset classes on sustainability in North America by GRESB. Sara Neff, senior vice president of sustainability for the West coast publicly traded office real estate investment trust explained that achieving this meant hacking the company.
“Hackers have principles,” Neff said during a round of lightning talks at the Environmental Leader & Energy Manager Conference in Denver.
In her rapid-fire presentation, Neff shared those principles and how her company applied them so that attendees can pursue similar transformations. Here they are:
1. The world is full of interesting problems to be solved. When starting new program or continuing one, work on what’s interesting. The problems you’re tackling are giant. “There’s no reason to do what everyone else in your peer group is doing first,” Neff said.
2. No problem should ever have to be solved twice. Replicate, replicate, replicate, and communicate, Neff recommended. “Once you have one success, you have to immediately bring it to other people,” she said. “Nobody likes to find out that they have to solve a problem that somebody else already solved.”
3. Boredom and drudgery are evil. Neff mentioned the enormous volumes of environmental data out there. A great way to make everybody hate sustainability, is to make them do work that’s miserable, she said. Neff recommends making things easier. At Kilroy, they used things like automated benchmarking and working with their utilities to upload data automatically so Neff’s team didn’t have to do it by hand.
4. Freedom is good. Neff recognizes how busy her life is and that there just isn’t enough time to everything, so she suggests empowering other people you work with to do projects. “Can I do a walkathon in our building? Yes you can,” she said.
At the end of her rapid-fire talk, Neff urged conference attendees to measure results, and share them with everyone who helped with a project, showing exactly how much was saved. “Let’s all become hackers,” she concluded.
Stay tuned for more updates from #ELEMCON18.
