Without a holistic approach to energy-saving, many organisations are losing out on engaging their most important asset in their net zero efforts: their people. The same people who operate, maintain and decide what energy consumption looks like every day. Technology clearly matters. But the assumption that technology alone will deliver the energy transition leaves the largest lever of all untouched.

The data backs this up too. Evidence from the UK’s Energy Savings Opportunity Scheme (ESOS) scheme suggests that around 97% of recommended actions are technology-based. Leaving only 3% focused on people-based solutions.

The challenge is rarely a lack of technology. It is the human part of energy management. Who owns the problem, how they are using data, what gets prioritised, and all the bad habits that quietly undo good work. Handovers lose value. Enthusiasm fades. Good technical intent drifts.

This is the problem EnCO was created to solve.

Who we are
The EnCO Foundation (EnCO, for short) is a not-for-profit Charitable Community Benefit Society run by industry practitioners, for industry practitioners. EnCO is on a mission to make people-based solutions mainstream in global energy management and create energy conscious organisations everywhere.

‘People-based solutions’ is the term we use for the effective combination of technology, process and culture that makes energy performance stick. It includes what used to be labelled ‘behaviour change’, reframed into something more practical: how teams work, decide, govern, learn and improve.

How we got here
EnCO began as a response to a gap that practitioners across sectors kept running into. Consultants could propose relevant individual interventions but struggled to embed them. Organisations could fund projects but couldn’t sustain the gains. Individual behaviour change programmes were delivering results in some organisations, but the approaches behind them lived in the heads of a handful of experienced practitioners. No shared framework existed to describe what ‘good’ looked like on the human side of energy management.

A group of experienced practitioners, all part of the Energy Institute community, began piecing an idea together. They drew on decades of delivery experience and lessons from adjacent fields such as safety culture and quality management – where the shift from technology-only to people-and-process has long since happened – to develop the EnCO framework. And started what was at first simply an initiative to get this framework and surrounding theory into the hands of more practitioners. This became The EnCO Foundation, set up to support the industry.

What started out as a small working group is now a growing international community and centre of excellence for people-based solutions. Today, EnCO is a thriving network of trained consultants in 23 countries, as well as committed and certified energy conscious organisations across every sector, region and even size.

A community of practice – for practitioners, by practitioners
For Energy Institute members, this is perhaps the most important part of the story. EnCO is, first and foremost, a community of practice. It is a place where practitioners exchange what is working on the ground, stress-test approaches with peers, and contribute to the shared methodology the Foundation maintains and develops. The community meets regularly through working groups, case study exchanges and open forums, and it is deliberately international in outlook.

At its core, EnCO is a framework designed on the premise of continual improvement and commitment to good energy management practice. This is all made actionable through the five EnCO pillars that underpin the EnCO Matrix – a tool that supports the benchmarking of an organisation’s energy consciousness and supports the ability for continuous review and regular improvement.

The five pillars define what ‘energy conscious’ looks like in practice:

• Engagement: ownership and participation across the organisation, not just in facilities or sustainability teams.
• Alertness: making energy visible, understandable and hard to ignore, so people notice waste and act.
• Skills: building energy literacy and role-specific capability to spot opportunities and deliver change.
• Recognition: reinforcing the right behaviours through feedback and celebration, not only targets and reports.
• Adaptability: keeping programmes resilient as priorities, people and operating conditions change.

The EnCO Matrix takes those pillars and maps them against levels of maturity – from initial awareness through to fully embedded practice. It is the practical assessment tool that turns the framework into a clear picture of where an organisation stands today (ie defining reality), where it could be and what to prioritise next. Two organisations can both score strongly on ‘Engagement’, for example, yet land at very different points on the Matrix overall because one has senior-sponsored ownership and the other is running on the goodwill of a single champion. Together, the pillars define the ‘what’ and the Matrix defines the ‘how far’.

If this resonates, there are three easy ways to get involved today: explore the consultant training pathway if you want to lead programmes; get your organisation’s benchmark score and kickstart the EnCO conversation; support The EnCO Foundation by joining as a member and attend our events or webinars to see the evidence for yourself.

Energy is a people business. Technology adds the finishing touch. But people are the enabler. If we want the energy transition to stick, we need to get the human side right first – let’s do it together.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are strictly those of the author only and are not necessarily given or endorsed by or on behalf of the Energy Institute.

• Further reading: ‘The power of sharing experience on the road to net zero’. Achieving net zero emissions will require greater collaboration, cooperation and sharing of knowledge from a broad range of stakeholders, writes Paul Webb MEI, Chartered Energy Manager, Author, Podcaster and founding Director of B2B Energy.
• ‘Engaging colleagues in energy behaviour change in 2023’. A successful energy transition depends on behavioural changes, but these can be challenging to inspire, maintain and direct. Dr Mark Burrows, Client Development Director – Plan Zero, Mitie Energy, and Member of the EI Energy Management Panel presents some recommendations.