The Role of Workplaces in Encouraging Everyday Environmental Decisions: The Case of Food

Tony Craig (The James Hutton Institute)
Jennie Macdiarmid (University of Aberdeen)

Workplaces are important settings in which individual environmental behaviours can be encouraged. The overall environmental performance of large organisations is clearly important from the perspective of their corporate social responsibility to play their part in meeting the environmental goals expected of them. Beyond this though, the workplace is important as a key setting where everyday behaviours are carried out. Quite simply, the amount of time people spend at work makes the workplace environment worthy of serious investigation – not only for workplace behaviours specifically, but for everyday behaviours more generally. This presentation will discuss a number of research investigations within a programme of work studying factors influencing the consumption of healthy sustainable diets, with a particular focus on eating decisions in the context of a workplace canteen. A number of empirical studies are used to provide an empirical foundation for a number of social simulation (agent-based) models with the aim of understanding how to shift the population towards healthy, more environmentally sustainable diets. Whilst an understanding of the whole diet clearly requires that all eating occasions (breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks) be studied, we focus here mainly on the practice of eating lunch at work, and will reflect on how practices at work have the potential to influence other people in the population through the wider ‘eating network’ of individuals. The eating network of employees of an organisation includes people within that organisation (e.g. people that are seating in the proximity of a person during lunch), but also people outwith the organisation – including friends and family, with whom an individual eats during the day. This is potentially very important, because it introduces the possibility that interventions within workplace environments may have positive and policy relevant impacts beyond the organisation itself.