Peer comparison as motivational trigger to save energy in office environment

To ensure a sustainable energy development in the commercial sector, attitudes and human behaviour need to be modified towards a more efficient and conscious energy usage. The goal of this research is to assess evaluations and to test the effectiveness in reducing office electricity consumption. The aim of the engagement campaign is to provide employees with a user-friendly tool that improves awareness of their energy behaviour in the workplace, enabling better management via the visualization of consumption and persuasive tailored information on office electricity use. In this study, the system was tested on an office building in Italy, participating to the campaign from February 2014 to January 2016. A combination of persuasive communication strategies such as graphical real-time and historical feedback based on real data and comparison tools to encourage competitiveness against “similar” employees were provided to users through a user-friendly interface. In addition, personalized energy saving prompts were sent via web-newsletters to the users. The study concludes that energy related persuasive communication is effective in reducing electricity consumption in dwellings but employees in this study did not demonstrate “normative” comparison as potentially motivation form of feedback.