Influence of internal values and social networks for achieving sustainable organizations

The LOw Carbon At Work (LOCAW) project has studied the everyday behavior of employees in six organizations in order to achieve a more sustainable Europe. Of these six, four organizations were involved in backcasting workshops to obtain future scenarios aimed at significantly improving engagement with pro-environmental behaviors by 2050. From these scenarios policies were extracted from the workshop participants that achieve this aim in their organization. Agent Based Models (ABM) were designed to model the organizations using actual information from the organization; the design also placed special emphasis on the representation of the social network. ABMs were then used to simulate the effects of the different policies derived from the backcasting scenarios. In this paper, the results for two organizations, UDC and Aquatim, are shown. These experimental results demonstrate the influence of different social networks and internal motivations of employees to determine the effectiveness of a given policy.