An Exploration Of Parameters Affecting Employee Energy Conversation Behaviour At The Workplace, Towards IOT-Enabled Behavioural Interventions

Energy conservation is one of the widely recognised important means towards addressing CO2 emissions and the resulting global issue of climate change. Furthermore, public buildings have been recognised as contributing significantly to the consumption of energy worldwide. More importantly, occupant behaviour, a factor that needs to be studied further, can have a high impact on the energy consumed within public buildings. Through our study, we have conducted an exploratory study on the parameters affecting employee energy conservation behaviour in public buildings, towards constructing a behavioural model that can be employed in IoT-enabled personalised energy disaggregation initiatives. We propose an extension to an existing model of employee energy behaviour based on Values Beliefs Norms (VBN) theory, with the addition of five parameters – comfort levels, burnout, locus of control, personal disadvantages and energy awareness. In addition, we discriminate between two groups of inter-related energy conservation behaviours at work – popular and unpopular energy conservation behaviours – and explain our resulting behavioural models’ utility towards IoT-enabled energy conservation, within workplaces. We find that promoting employees’ energy awareness levels, as well as positively affecting their environmental worldviews and personal norms are important factors that should be considered in behavioural interventions toward energy conservation at the workplace.