Company Green Team Shifts from Learning to Doing in Cultivate Sustainability Course
Challenge
Optime Care commissioned TripleWin to offer a custom version of the 11-week Cultivate personal sustainability course to the company’s Green Team.
At the time of the project, Optime Care had not yet embarked on a formal sustainability journey. However, the company had been experiencing an upswell of internal interest in sustainability from its employees, resulting in the formation of a volunteer Green Team. At the team’s helm was the Senior Vice President of Quality, an executive leader with a personal passion for sustainability and a commitment to integrating climate action into the company’s culture and operations.
By offering the Cultivate course, the SVP wanted to catalyze voluntary action and empower his Green Team with the ability to self-direct the selection and planning of workplace initiatives. To do this, he needed his team to have a shared base of knowledge on the most relevant concepts, issues and practices from the sustainability field.
For Optime Care, the Cultivate course presented a unique value proposition, different from other educational offerings on the market, in that it was:
- Comprehensive: The Cultivate curriculum offers foundational knowledge that goes beyond a “Sustainability 101” course, providing in-depth, carefully curated information packaged as impact modules.
- Action-oriented: Motivational content and interactive tools guide learners through the creation and execution of their own personal sustainability action plan.
- Impact-driven: The course uses behavioral assessments to quantify changes in learners’ habits before and after the course. The results are used to estimate reductions in their personal environmental footprint (carbon emissions and water use), guiding sustained and purposeful change.
Solutions Delivered
TripleWin’s Educational Team facilitated a seven-week asynchronous Cultivate course customized for Optime Care’s Green Team employees.
The custom course featured 7 of the full course’s 11 modules: 3 providing a holistic overview of sustainability, along with strategies for successful behavioral change; and 4 covering categories of environmental impact selected by Optime Care based on their relevance to the company’s operations.
The impact modules linked participants’ personal values to specific sustainability measures they could take using interactive “DIY Sustainability” cards. Learners selected cards that aligned with their values, ambition, and desired size of impact and then used them to outline a personal action plan.
Project Learnings
To build their personal sustainability action plans, course participants were asked to sort the DIY Sustainability cards into three “buckets”: already doing, want to pursue, and not now/not applicable.
Participants were most inspired to “pursue” action on Food measures and Material Goods & Consumption measures. Many of these had a “moderate” to “large” impact and a “moderate” difficulty of execution, showing that the most appealing actions were ones that balanced impact with ambition.
Client Outcomes
Cultivate earned strong reviews across the board from Optime Care’s Green Team. On learning effectiveness, employees rated the course 4.4 on a 5-point scale, halfway between “very effective” and “extremely effective.” They found the interactive elements—the quizzes, games, DIY Sustainability cards and action planning tools—engaging and valuable.
Behavioral assessments showed that Green Team members made significant changes to their daily habits. By implementing their personalized sustainability action plans, course participants reported a reduction in their personal carbon emissions by 43% and water use by 69%, on an average, annualized basis.
Course participants also found their learnings on personal sustainability to be highly relevant to their work environment. Feedback on the course revealed that learners quickly began applying insights from the Material Goods and Consumption, Food, and Waste modules to their office operations.
For companies like Optime Care, deploying the Cultivate across the entire workforce—as an on-demand, self-paced course, or as a next-generation employee benefit—would be TripleWin’s recommended next step in catalyzing employee action on sustainability.
Experts
TripleWin Advisory is a boutique corporate consultancy focused on circularity solutions for industry. TripleWin offers a suite of tools to support clients in charting a practical, circular and sustainable course for their business. These tools include:
- Carbon inventories and setting science-based and Net Zero carbon goals
- Materiality assessments and sustainability roadmaps
- Building circular business models supported by financial analysis
- Risk scenario models using the TCFD framework
- Workshops and courses to build employee agency and corporate competency
We work with leaders in the following industries: apparel, footwear & textiles; information technology; metals; beauty; food & beverage; healthcare; building construction; human resource management; and retail.
TripleWin Advisory is an approved CDP climate change consultancy Accredited Service Provider (ASP). We are woman-founded, owned and led; a public benefit company.
Optime Care creates partnerships for personalized care with a specific focus on disorders affecting smaller patient communities. As the specialty pharmacy for AscellaHealth, the Optime Care team coordinates every aspect of care, including medication delivery, reimbursement, disease education, and compliance. Its mission is to minimize the daily impact of rare and chronic disorders on patients and their family members.
Headquarters:Earth City, Missouri
Industry:
Pharmaceutical manufacturing
Main Product:
Orphan drugs and rare disease care
In their words
“My main motivation for choosing Cultivate was to provide the Green Team members with additional education and insight into the climate crisis in hopes that they take real action, including talking to their coworkers, friends and family about the importance of individual actions.”