Communicating with employees in Hospitality businesses

Internal communication is an important part of making recycling a success in your workplace. If you completed a waste action plan in Step 2, you’ll find this a useful starting point when it comes to communicating your recycling plans with staff.

It will help you to begin by being clear about:

• Why your business needs to recycle – go back to Step 1 for all the great reasons why your business needs to recycle, including the legislation requiring it.

• Who manages waste within your business? – for example, who empties the bins? Name individual employees, cleaners and facilities staff. Point out that it’s everybody’s responsibility to put their waste in the correct bins.

• The location and type of recycling bins and storage facilities – the first section of this step will help with this.

• Which external providers manage the waste and recycling collections – and when and how often do collections take place?

• How should items be presented for recycling? – for example, clean, dry and loose.

Setting your recycling communication aims and objectives

Setting communication aims and objectives will help focus your communications on supporting your wider recycling objectives, as well as enabling you to monitor whether they’ve been achieved. Your objectives could be as follows:

• Raise awareness of recycling opportunities in the workplace

• Inform employees of your recycling and waste policy, your business’s legal obligations, and what they need to do as individuals

• Make it clear how your company manages its waste, the benefits of recycling and why you want your employees to recycle

• Educate, inform and motivate employees to recycle – provide instructions and practical support on how to recycle in the workplace and for those working remotely

• Change behaviour – all employees choose to recycle, making recycling the norm

An example of an aim and objective might be:

Aim: To encourage the school catering services team to start or improve recycling in the school’s kitchen.

Objective: To raise awareness of what can be recycled across the catering unit by installing recycling bins, signage and promotional posters in bin areas by the end of 2024. 

Did you know 

At primary and secondary schools, the kitchen and canteen areas produce the majority of food waste. This includes food prepared and not served, and food served but not eaten. Over a school year, primary and secondary schools in England produce over 80,000 tonnes of food waste. Food Waste in Schools WRAP, 2011 

Planning who you need to tell

It’s essential to communicate your plans effectively to all your employees, including those working remotely, to help them understand how, why, when and where to recycle.

Think about the different types of employees – full-time, part-time, temporary or seasonal staff – and the different roles within your organisation:

• Senior management

• Managers

• Team leaders

• Facilities staff/cleaners

• Recycling service providers

• Production staff

• Office staff

• Remote workers

Assigning a named employee to take responsibility for communicating your recycling plan with staff will help make sure everyone is kept informed and doing their bit. Remember that recycling requirements will differ depending on staff role; for example, office-based staff may be more likely to recycle office paper, whereas food services staff may focus on recycling food waste and packaging. 

For larger businesses, you may wish to send recycling messages to team leaders to cascade down to individual employees.  For example, senior managers will need to brief managers about enforcing your waste and recycling policy, and managers may then need to liaise with waste service providers and directly with the facilities staff/cleaners responsible for sorting and managing waste for collection. Managers, Heads of Kitchens and other team leaders will need to ensure their staff members follow the recycling policy and reinforce what can be recycled, how and where. 

Creating effective communications

Using consistent and complementary messaging across different communication touch points across your business – from education emails to signage at recycling points – can help encourage people to recycle and change their behaviour.

Using branding to give your recycling communications a consistent look and feel will:

• Provide a recognisable identity for your recycling information

• Make the messages more recognisable and memorable

• Help build credibility and trust

Creating communication touch points across high-traffic areas in the workplace helps employees understand what they can and can’t recycle. To help with this, we’ve created a tried and tested ‘Business of Recycling’ identity that you can use to show your business’s support and commitment to recycling. This, combined with the existing national Recycle Now logo, helps reinforce recycling messages both at home and work.

Download these FREE communications resources to get started. They’re designed for you to use or print. They include:

• Letterhead/header - to help you promote recycling in the workplace, highlight successes and reinforce the actions you want employees to take

• Email signature – a regular recycling reminder to employees and external audiences

• Instructional recycling posters – in A3, A4 and A5, to show what can and can’t be recycled for each type of waste; these can also double up as bin stickers to ensure materials are collected correctly

Monitoring the impact of your communications

Once you’ve begun your recycling communications, remember to review them regularly to see how much of an impact they’ve had and spot where there may be room for improvement. Note successes so that you can share them with your team to encourage them; success could be specific actions taken to achieve objectives or consistent, credible presentation of meaningful results.

Above all, identify activities that worked well and those that didn’t, and share learning from this. Review the findings, and then list your key recommendations for future communications.