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KN: Thanks everyone for joining us. Welcome to the Peer Learning Series webinar. Today we’ll be talking about tools for Green Team success, and we’ve got great speakers lined up for you today. So we’ll have a couple speakers go, and then have a short session for questions, and then at the end you’ll have another chance to ask questions.

Our first speakers today are Jamey Lowdermilk and Meghan Oswalt. Jamey is the Environmental Coordinator on the Helena Ranger District, and Meghan is the Program Analyst with Sustainable Operations. And they’ll be talking about Get Your Green On. So Jamey and Meghan, whenever you’re ready.

JL: You can go ahead, Meghan.

MO: All right, so, [UNINT.] having a speaker focus on the Get Your Green On tips. So the Get Your Green On tips are a weekly sustainability tip that is published in People, Places and Things. And these tips are coordinated with a Footprint of the Month. So each month all the Get Your Green On tips focus on one subject area. So in November all the tips focused on waste prevention and recycling and this month all the tips were focused on energy. So you’ll see below on the bottom portion of the slide we have an example tip here, and this is the Get Your Green On tip that went out around the New Year. And the Footprint of the Month in [UNINT.] towards the top so this one focused on sustainability leadership. And then the title or the topic of this particular tip is listed second. So we were focusing on a New Year’s resolution for sustainability. And then in the body of the tip itself we have information, encouragement related to the topic area for that particular tip, and we usually have a link to at least one reference, it’ll point you to our internal web site where you can find more information on how to accomplish the suggestions in the tip. So like I said these do come out in People, Places and Things and it’s usually towards the bottom of People, Places and Things.

Jamey, do you have anything you want to add before we go to the next slide?

JL: No, that’s all. We can give some history and how to use them next.

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So I’m Jamey Lowdermilk and I, about a year or two ago I sat on the Helena National Forest and I have been helping to organize the Green Team on this forest as well as the Lewis and Clark National Forest. And our Forest Supervisor, Kevin Morgan, asked for specific tips that he could bring up on staff calls that would help him to integrate environmentalism into the sort of conscientiousness of his staff. So that’s where they started, was in 2011, me trying to draft up a little piece of information and the way that I would try and come about these is if I was talking to a colleague about the footprint area for that month, what little piece of advice would I try and impart on them, or what little thing could they tell me that would impact their day. So that’s when we started to draft them. They were using the weekly staff calls, and then they started to go out to all the board members for the Western Collective, and since then they’ve grown into being a weekly highlight in the People, Places and Things, and they go out to all Forest Service employees. And the goal of these tips is to either, one, provide an implementable action item that people can do in their day to day basis to reduce their environmental footprint, or we sometimes use these as an opportunity to highlight success stories from around the country. So sometimes maybe you’ll see pictures of solar panels that a ranger district was able to install and use to reduce their environmental footprint. But that’s the history of where these came from. And now, Katie, if you’ll flip forward we’ll talk a little bit more about how they’re used.

So back to the Helena, just because that’s what I know the best, we have a Green Wall here where we try and keep our wall updated with information that’s current for the current footprint focused area. And we use these Get Your Green Ons as a way to key that information up there. So they go out to everyone in the office, and they also go up on the board, and then Kevin brings them up on the weekly staff calls, and the Green Team just tries to find ways to incorporate this information into all the other things we’re already trying to do. But you could use them in all kinds of ways. I mean obviously you can post them around the office, you can email them to your friends from People, Places and Things, or maybe you just use them yourself, to think about little changes that you might be able to make. We are always looking for new ideas, and so if you read these and you’re like, gosh, that – I don’t know if that’s the best piece of advice! Like, let us know, you know the people drafting these are Forest Service colleagues just like everyone on

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this call, and we sit down and we think, you know, what do we observe in our office that maybe could work a little bit better. But we are definitely open to some suggestions. So if you’d like to submit an idea, Meghan will give you some contact information on the next slide, but we’d love to hear feedback or if you have success stories we’ve got a web site where you can upload those success stories and we use that to pull highlights for these Get Your Green On activities. Next slide.

MO: All right. So, as Jamey mentioned, if you do have ideas for a [UNINT.] feedback [UNINT.] on Get Your Green On tips please feel free to email me with that information. My email address is posted on this slide. You can also call me if that works better for you. If you’d like to get a hold of our previous tips, you can find them on our internal web site, under ‘Resources and Tools’ and I’ve provided a link in this presentation and Katie I believe shares this presentation with everybody on the call. You can also check out our Footprint of the Month calendar so that you can maybe have some corresponding events and get some outreach ideas, and I’ve included a link to that calendar as well so that everybody is aware of what our focus areas are for each month.

JL: And I’ll just add that the, every year the communications team tries to survey the existing sort of national and international environmental focus activities to outline our footprint, our monthly footprint calendar. So if we are missing events or there’s ideas that are not reflected in this that we should include, like, definitely let us know, these are all works in progress and we would love to build on the resources that we’ve started to draft. And that, I think that’s all we’ve got. Do we want to do questions now, Katie?

KN: I think we’ll go through Meghan’s SharePoint slides and then we’ll ask questions, we’ll ask for questions. But Meghan and Jamey this is a great resource for our Green Teams to use, especially if they are having a bit of writer’s blocks and having trouble coming up with some tips. And Meghan is right, I will share the slides that were shared today with everyone, I’ll put it on the SusOps Collective SharePoint site, which Meghan will actually be talking about in just a minute. So they, all those links will be available for everyone. So Meghan’s going to keep presenting for us today, and she’s going to talk about SharePoint sites, which are a

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great resource to organize your Green Team. So whenever you’re ready, Meghan.

MO: Okay, thanks, Katie. So today I’m going to talk about SharePoint, and I want to point out that I’m not an expert. I’m merely sharing the experience and the information that I’ve gathered as I’ve worked with the communication team and the Collective on our SharePoint site. So before you start using SharePoint I think it’s really important to understand what SharePoint is and how it was intended to be used. SharePoint was really a platform for web sites, and I know that some people think it’s easiest to think about SharePoint in terms of a content management system. So a web platform that manages all of your web content. But that’s not really what SharePoint is. It does kind of serve in that role, but it’s really more of an integrative web platform that supports collaboration through adaptive web components. So features that you can adapt to your personal style and your team’s needs. And so the uses of all these different web components is really enhanced by proper management and application of them to what your team specifically needs from your web site. So that [UNINT.] simply is not difficult once you understand the basics of it. And in terms of collaboration, so far it aims to allow groups to share, locate and manage resources while staying organized. So it’s like SharePoint sites do lend themselves to keeping your team very organized. I would think of SharePoint as more of a collaborative web development system. And when Microsoft designed SharePoint it had one goal in mind, and that was for SharePoint to become the single point for all information aggregation, search and collaboration in your organization or in this case, for your Green Team. So next slide, Katie.

So now that I’ve give you a brief overview of what SharePoint is, I’d like to talk about a few of the features. The, I’m just going to share seven with you today but there are definitely a ton more. And it’s worth exploring if you’re interested in using SharePoint for your Green Team site. The first [UNINT.] I talk about is the calendar. SharePoint offers a calendar and you can link this to your Microsoft Outlook calendar in your in box, or you can simply use it to organize the meetings for your Green Team, or just for events that are going on during a particular month. Several calendars can be displayed at once in the SharePoint calendar, and I will show an example in a little bit from our SharePoint site. There’s a great federal holidays

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calendar that you can overlap with your SharePoint calendar, that helps keep everybody reminded of when we’re not going to be in the office. You can also add the SharePoint calendar to your Outlook calendar as an overlay in your Microsoft Outlook, so that you can do both your individual calendar and your SharePoint calendar all at once, without having to go to your SharePoint site. This is a feature that I actually use a lot and have found really helpful.

The next feature I want to talk about are document libraries. [UNINT.] A repository for documents where team members can create, collect, upload and manage several documents of [UNINT.] text in one place. And a document library is essentially like My Documents on your desktop or your laptop. It just provides a one stop shop or sharing place for everything that’s related to your Green Team, and I’ll give you an example of that here shortly. A really powerful feature of SharePoint are lists, and so these lists are really similar to what we think of when we design an Excel spreadsheet or we have a table in an Access database. Unlike a spreadsheet, SharePoint’s really awesome about doing a lot of predefined lists, so it has lists that are already created that you can then use and customize for your specific needs. And there are some common types of lists in SharePoint, and one is our communication list, and these are used for announcements or contacts or discussion boards, and then there’s tracking lists, such as your calendar or a list of links or surveys. And then there’s a custom list that you design yourself. If you are looking into SharePoint I strongly suggest that you play around with the predefined lists that are in SharePoint and then try to make your own custom list. It’s really helpful to get a hang of the lists first before you start trying to customize.

Another really strong feature of SharePoint that we have not used yet, but I think we’re going to start using, is workflow. So there are workflow features, these are available for your lists, your libraries and your documents, and this allows your team to set up an automated process, so [approval and backflow]. And this is really helpful if you’re working on a big project with a lot of different people involved, and partnerships involved. It helps you just keep everything straight and keep your timeline moving, while making sure that you’re accomplishing everything that you need to accomplish.

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They also have wikis and blogs on SharePoint, and these, these are really helpful if you can’t have a face to face meeting or the conversation is bigger than just a onetime meeting and you need the conversation to keep moving. Wiki [UNINT.] a quick collection of resources and ideas to inform and keep your conversation moving, but the great thing about wikis is that they are nonstructured, meaning that individuals can go in and add ideas or links or content as they come up with these ideas. And there’s no particular order to it. A wiki just allows you to put in information and the order that it’s put into a wiki is the order that it’s kept in. Which is kind of nice, even to the natural progression of conversation around a particular topic. Blogs are very similar to wikis. These are structured and they’re usually organized chronologically with the most recent posts listed first. So this is just another way of keeping the conversation rolling. ArcGIS is another feature, this is pretty new. It combined ArcGIS features with SharePoint and it allows you to have map [UNINT.]. The great thing about ArcGIS is that with SharePoint you can have an Excel spreadsheet and maybe you want to provide a visual component for your Green Team or for people that are accessing your Green Team site. But ArcGIS component allows you to do that. It is pretty useful in taking your Excel spreadsheet and mapping it out for you.

The last thing I want to point out, and what I consider one of the most important pieces of SharePoint are the customizable permission settings. Everyone in the Forest Service automatically has access to your SharePoint site. However, there may be times when you’re still working on a document and you're not ready to share it with everybody yet. You can restrict the permissions for an individual document, for a document library, for a list. And this is a great way to limit who can edit, visualize, delete and add items, particularly when you're still in the drafting phase. We use this quite a bit on our SharePoint site and I it very, very helpful.

So Katie, if you manage to get the [UNINT.] slides to ArcGIS map before we go to the web site.

KN: Yes, is that the one that you're looking for?

MO: Yeah, it’s perfect. So I wanted to make sure that everybody was able to see a demo or a preview of what ArcGIS capabilities are in SharePoint. This is actually a map from

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our internal SusOps web site. This is out of the box ArcGIS in SharePoint. So we took an Excel spreadsheet, with all of the Green Teams that we’ve contacted, and we were able to take that spreadsheet and map all those Green Teams. So each flag represents a different Green Team and the different colors represent different types of Green Teams. So one color is a regional Green Team, then we have a forest Green Team, a district Green Team, and then our research station Green Teams. So this is just one example of how ArcGIS is used in SharePoint and what’s really great is that it was as simple as putting in your Excel spreadsheet and using ArcGIS is SharePoint to take it to the next level. It wasn’t very difficult. So now we can go to the web site, Katie.

KN: Okay. I’m going to switch over to my [UNINT.] and then quickly Meghan if you can tell me if you can see most of what you’re looking –

MO: Yeah. I can see a fair amount of it, if you scroll down just a tad, Katie. Jamey, does that look okay on your side?

JL: You can see about half the screen but hopefully we’ll be able to get the point across.

MO: Okay. So, Katie, this – at the web site here, so this is our collective SharePoint site. This is what the entire site looks like. We have our teams listed down the left hand side. This is our home page, so we have our [data] information up, and then we have our announcements quickly here, to our left. They're also listed below the [UNINT.]. So this is what a SharePoint site can look like. This is not what they all look like.

KN: -- just want to let people know that they can scroll down for their screen on the right hand side of their bar to see more of what you’re talking about.

MO: Oh perfect. Thanks Jamey. Yeah, so Katie, can we get in the calendar across the top bar please? So this is an example of the calendar on the SharePoint site. Anybody that is part of our certain group or part of the collective can go in and add an event to this calendar. And I do have an example slide in the presentation so you can view this again. I also have a screen shot of what it looks like when you have this calendar in your Outlook calendar so that you can what that looks like. You can scroll through the calendar, you don’t have to just look at January, and to add a tip it’s pretty

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easy, you just hover over the bottom of a date box and ‘add tip’ should come up. So this is our calendar. Katie, can we go to the ‘Collective Resources’, towards the top? Thanks. So if we scroll down on this page, we can actually see a document library. And we have document libraries on most of our pages. The great thing about this is you can set up the various categories associated with your document library. Then you can also set up the view. So not all document libraries look this way. What we’ve done is we’ve gone in and said, you know, there are six categories, one of them is administration, communications, and if you just keep scrolling down the Get Your Green On tips are also housed in this particular area. So to add a new document is fairly easy. There’s an ‘add document’ link at the bottom of the library. You simply click there, you upload the document that you want to add to the library, and then you pick the category that it’s associated with and it’s automatically added to the library. It’s pretty easy.

So Katie, can we now go to the announcements. And so I think we want to go back to the home page, that might be easiest. So if we hit SusOps Collective, across the top, and then scroll down a little bit. So we have the announcements presented in two different places. At the top of our home page, and then we also have them in the middle of our home page. And you’ll see that when you’re in the middle of the home page, more of the announcement is shown. So there’s different ways that you can show your announcement, and have them [related] to people. And you can also create the announcement once, which is great, and then show it on various pages of your SharePoint site. So that’s another powerful component of SharePoint. Once you create an item, like a document library, you can put it in several different locations on your site and you can replicate it and use the same categories for other document libraries on your site.

So Katie you can go back to my presentation now, thank you.

KN: Is that where you would like to be, Meghan?

MO: Perfect. So what I’ve tried to do for this part of the presentation is outline the steps on how to get started and how to get access to a SharePoint site. The first thing you need to do is take the site orientation training. And I’ve provided a link to that training and its presentation. And then I strongly suggest taking additional SharePoint training in [UNINT.], I think it’s really helpful to just

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get a firm basis before you start playing around with SharePoint. Once you’ve taken training, then you just need to complete a site request form, and I’ve provided [UNINT.] as well. And then I strongly suggest reviewing your site owner responsibilities. When you’re a site owner for a SharePoint site you are responsible for adhering to the Forest Service web content and guidelines, and you also have to ensure that your site and your site members adhere to established SharePoint governance. So I’ve provided links for those documents as well. It’s pretty important to review ethos and make sure that you’re following all of the guidelines. And then step five, we just start building and sharing, so this is where you get to start playing with your SharePoint site. Next slide.

So one thing I do want to point out before my presentation ends is that everybody has what’s called a ‘My Site’ page, this is a SharePoint page and this is where you can download a photo of yourself and tell your professional story. So others can link to this particular My Site page from any SharePoint site where you’re listed as a contact or a team member. They can click on your name and it will usually take you there. I used this to help myself start learning about SharePoint. I think this is a great way to test out a few ideas and just see what SharePoint is all about. So if you go to the next slide, Katie. Here’s an example of My Site page. So you upload a picture, you can fill in details about yourself, your organization, you can connect with other Forest Service employees with My Site pages. It’s just a really great way to get started. And the way that you link to these pages or get to your My Site page is to visit any SharePoint site, and in the upper right portion of your screen there’s going to be a drop down, and you, with your name, you click on that and you click on My Site and it’ll take you to your My Site page. So that’s how you access your My Site page. Next slide please.

All right. So lastly I wanted to make sure that I shared some resources with everybody on the call. As [UNINT.] this is the group that provides support resources and manages the site requests, so this is where you’re going to go in, take your SharePoint training, and then submit your requests for your SharePoint site. So I’ve provided a link to that site. They also have a great frequently asked questions section that I’ve used quite a bit and have found helpful. I’ve also provided a link to the SharePoint users’ group, also known as SPUG. They provide great resources and they have monthly

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meetings to discuss various SharePoint issues or what’s happening with SharePoint, anything new that’s going on in the SharePoint world. Their next meeting is Thursday, January 24th at 12:00 mountain standard time. I think they’re a great group to get involved with even if you just sit and listen in on the call. They are full of great resources and a wealth of knowledge when it comes to SharePoint, and I would defer to them on the expertise side of this. So hopefully this has gotten everybody excited about SharePoint. Katie, I’m ready for questions if you’re ready.

KN: Yes, thank, Meghan, and thanks, Jamey, as well. So we have just a couple minutes to take questions for Meghan and Jamey. If you guys have any questions you press *1 and I think Eddie is going to give us some instructions about how to ask a question.

MV: That’s correct. So for all of our participants if you would like to ask a question you may dial *1 on your phone. And that will go ahead and basically raise your hand and I will go ahead and unmute your line and you’ll be notified when your line is unmuted. Please state your name and your question. So again, if you would like to ask a question, dial *1 and you will be notified when your line is unmuted.

KN: And it looks like on the webinar a couple of people have raised their hands, are they coming through, Eddie?

MV: Yes, give me one second here, I am pulling that up right now. One second.

KN: Okay, thanks.

MV: Okay, [UNINT.] you may go ahead.

FV: Thank you. I just wanted to point out that the resources links for FS teams and the SPUG group is a much better place to go for training than [Ag Learn]. They don’t make you do the little tests, it’s much faster and more interactive. Microsoft does a much better job of that. Thank you.

KN: Thank you for your comments. And it looks like we have just one more question, I think.

MV: Renee, you may go ahead.

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FV: Can you hear me?

MV: Yes we can.

FV: Oh. Never mind, my question has just been answered, thank you.

MV: Okay.

KN: Do we have any more questions, Eddie?

MV: We do not appear to have any more questions on the line at this time.

KN: Okay, and I think Meghan and Jamey have graciously agreed to stick around and answer questions if you guys think of them at the end, is that right, Meghan and Jamey?

MO: Absolutely.

JL: Yes.

KN: Okay, thank you both. So now we’ll be moving on and Laura Polanski is, she is actually, normally she’s the SusOps and Climate Change Coordinator for Region 5 but she’s currently acting as the National Climate Change Coordinator, and I’m Katie Newcomb, I’m the SusOps Coordinator for Region 6. And Laura and I will be presenting on behalf of Michele Parker, who is on leave today, but Michele developed a great training tool called Sustainable Operations Training for Managers. And as a manager or a supervisor, managers and supervisors have a unique opportunity to help their units achieve sustainability goals and reduce their environmental footprint. They can set an example and use their leadership position to help comply with federal sustainability requirements, save money, and be a sustainable--, help their unit be a sustainability leader in the Forest Service and the community. So Michele and, I think she led a team to develop this training to help supervisors and managers work toward long term success in sustainable operations. So Laura and I will go through this interactive PowerPoint that Michele has developed so you guys can see what the training looks like for managers and supervisors.

Excuse me. So this training is, was developed by Michele Parker who sits on the Tongass, so some of the information is specifically for the Tongass National Forest. But they're

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piloting this training opportunity and it will soon be available for all forests to customize for their own unit. So just keep that in mind that some of these examples are very Tongass specific, but the idea is that this interactive PowerPoint can be customized for other units.

So we will be walking through the eight tabs that you see on the top, and each one has a different subject of sustainability for supervisors and managers, and it’s a combination of information that is useful to the supervisors and managers, and then tools and resources they can use to communicate with their staff. So the first section is called Understanding Sustainability. And this section includes some definitions of sustainability and sustainable operations. What that means in regard to the Forest Service mission, and then what the Forest Service managers and supervisors can do to help incorporate sustainability into their operations.

So as I mentioned before there’s eight different subjects on the tabs that go across the top of the screen, and then for each different section, the details are outlined on the right side, so as you can see there’s blue boxes that say ‘Section Start, Why Should You Care, Federal Requirements,’ et cetera. So each different section has sub sections that you can interactively click through and you can go back and forth as you're using this training tool to learn.

So the next tab for the ‘Understanding Sustainability’ is ‘Why should you care about sustainability?’ and it actually links to an external PDF that’s available for all Forest Service employees and you can see a picture on the screen. And it just includes information about how sustainability fits in the Forest Service mission, and our local communities, what the requirements are, it’s just a one page information that anybody can use to communicate sustainable operations.

The next tab, under ‘Understanding Sustainability,’ includes information about federal requirements and what supervisors and managers need to comply with for sustainable ops.

And ‘Sustainability and You’ is the next page, and this is a good section that helps managers and supervisors think about how they can communicate sustainability with their staff, what they can do to lead by example, and how they can get involved in their Green Team in order to help further sustainability on their units.

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And the last page under ‘Understanding Sustainability’ includes information about the six footprint areas that the Forest Service uses for sustainable operations. I think everyone’s probably familiar, but these are energy, water, fleet and transportation, waste prevention and recycling, green purchasing, and sustainability leadership. So this page provides a list of the footprint areas, and then it has a lot of links for each one, about what the Tongass is doing to address those footprint areas. So this is a good example of how you could customize this for your unit and insert information specifically to where you are.

And that, this is, continued, the last three footprint areas are shown on the screen.

So the next tab is the Green Team, and Michele Parker actually presented a lot of information on the Tongass Green Team at the Peer Learning webinar in December, so if you’re interested in learning more about that you can reference the recording from December, but that information is really specific to each unit and you can just put, you know, contact information, what projects you're working on,, what line officer is involved in your Green Team, all that information goes under that tab.

So the third tab is called ‘Understanding Environmental Impacts,’ and this is where you can highlight the different sustainability projects and then the current state of your consumption on your unit. So the Tongass included three ways of doing this. The first is Tongass environmental footprint reports, and they worked very hard to document all of the projects they’re doing towards sustainability, their consumption for energy, water, how much waste and, waste and recycling they use, things like that. So all of that kind of information is included in these reports, and these provide links to those reports so the managers always have them available. Another way to look at your environmental impact is something that I think most units have done, which are energy and water audits. It’s important to know that energy managers in most regions were able to get energy evaluation training, so they were given the tools and resources needed to conduct their own energy and water evaluations in half. And just in case you haven’t flipped through an energy and water audit before we wanted to provide a quick snapshot of what these look like, so I just pulled a couple pages of an energy and water audit for the Tongass National Forest. So

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they go through your building and include information about your building envelope, your heating and cooling systems, how much electricity you use over the year, and what you can do to reduce your consumption.

And including this in the sustainability for managers training means that those audits are always available for managers to reference when they’re talking about sustainability projects with their Green Team or at a staff meeting, or things like that.

The final piece of information in Understanding Your Environmental Impact is training, and here is a link to new and seasonal employee training. This is actually available for all Forest Service employees and we developed, the Sustainable Operations Collective developed this document last year, and then we have updated it for this year, so I believe this will be coming out in early spring. And this is the document that includes key messages, resources, and local contact information and information about how to get involved in sustainable operations and the Green Team on your unit.

So the fourth tab in this training is called ‘Your Responsibility,’ and this helps supervisors and managers get a good overview of what the footprint focus areas are, how they can meet federal and Forest Service goals and requirements, and what tools exist to help them do that. So the section start just briefly explains this and it goes through three different ways that we are held accountable for our sustainable operations.

One of those is the Climate Change Scorecard, which I think everyone on this call is familiar with, but it’s a ten point scorecard that Forest Service units use to report accomplishments and plans for improvement in operations that affect climate change. There are four different categories: organizational capacity; adaptation; engagement; and mitigation. And sustainable operations falls under mitigation. So this is sustainable operations element 10 is included here because each Forest Service unit reports on it and therefore it is part of supervisors’ and managers’ performance evaluations. So information was just included here so they have a quick link to the scorecard.

Another focus of the Tongass and I think most units are looking at this in this fiscal year is high performance

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sustainable buildings. And we have different requirements for high performance sustainable buildings that are put together in a sustainability ranking system. And we actually dive into this topic quite a bit in a previous Peer Learning series. I think it was in March of 2012? So if you guys were interested in learning more about high performance sustainable buildings you can look there. But this is just to provide information for managers to know what’s going on with their HPSDs and what they can do to help further sustainability and increase their ranking in the system. So the next tab that I just wanted to quickly mention before I pass it off to Laura, that we’re also skipping, is the Tongass action plan. This is where you could again customize this training for your unit. But Michele has presented extensively on the Tongass action plan as well. So if you go to the SharePoint site where we have all the recordings you could learn more about their action plan. Now I’ll pass it off to Laura, who will go through the rest of the information.

LP: Excellent, thank you, Katie. I just wanted to mention one minor correction, that I’m currently serving as the Acting National Sustainable Operations Program Manager, as opposed to Climate Change Coordinator. I just wanted to make sure that was clear, only so many hats one can wear. [UNINT.] Of course. Didn’t want anyone to think that I was taking over a different program. So I wanted to talk a little bit about communications to staff. And as many of you know that are active on Green Teams, communication is really the key. If the education and engagement really stems from clear, transparent and frequent communications. So there’s a few resources that Michele highlighted here that have been really effective for the Tongass. – is this new and seasonal orientation document that was shown on a previous slide, and it’s an excellent resource for sharing with interns, seasonals, the new permanent employees. You adjust it basically to say, welcome to the Forest Service, we’re a conservation organization and this is how you and your daily business operations fit into our mission. Another thing is, that you can think about, Katie had mentioned an upcoming version of this is going to come out in the spring. You might want to think about being prepared to work with your local or regional human resources staff, and your director if you’re in a regional office, to integrate this resource into hiring communications, hiring packages. Anyone who has a direct connection with new employees, think about how you can help yourself by not being the only one who is spreading

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this message about this intro guide. And then another great one has this course on the Get Your Green On Tips that were mentioned before, and if you aren’t accustomed to flipping to the final page of People, Places and Things, definitely [UNINT.] comes at the very end of each edition. Next slide please.

So another piece of communication and the part that’s more fun is really thinking about how can you engage the power of competition to achieve your goals on the unit. And so this Get Your Green On contest is one that the Tongass Green Team used successfully, and for them they called it the Summit Mount Edgecombe Footprint Reduction Contest. A similar type of contest has been conducted by the Rocky Mountain Research Station, which was focused on Mount Elbert in their case, and the Pikes Peak Ranger District also launched a successful sustainability challenge that we both touch on in just a couple slides. Next slide please.

So what is this Get Your Green On contest? And this was really fun I think for the Green Team, I think it’s also a great way of providing visual feedback when it comes to those little steps that we each take towards our sustainability goals. So they just [UNINT.] but you can probably see the different colors here, the different little colored bubbles on the Get Your Green On Summit Mount Edgecombe photo there. And the idea is the individuals gain points in several categories and gradually climb up Mount Edgecombe as they do. So that the idea is you want to get up to the top. And when this is in full presentation mode, you can access instructions, directions and the point tracker by going into presentation mode and then clicking on each one of those hyperlinks there. So you don’t have to recreate the wheel here. Many of the things have been done for you. And really you could take any high peak of mountain in your region and apply this great idea. Next slide please.

As I mentioned that there have been some other contest examples. The first I’ll talk about is the one in the Rocky Mountain Research Station, this is the base of Mount Elbert, this is a footprint reduction contest, it is a five week contest, designed to increase awareness and encourage the adoption of green activities on a daily basis. Some of those green activities were turning off your computer each night, using task lighting or natural light to conserve energy, using your own water bottle instead of a bottled water bottle, composting food scraps, packing waste-free lunches,

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setting your computer to print double sided as default. So these are things that individual employees have full control over which I also think is a very important piece of how you [UNINT.] designing your contest. There’s also tremendous leadership participation and this is going to be key regardless of which unit you’re on, you really need the boost from the top. In this case the Assistant Director for Communications [UNINT.] demonstrated how sustainable operations is important by participating in the contest, and not only did she just participate but she actually accumulated a total of 5,800 points and climbed beyond the summit. And so that’s truly showing dedication to the concept.

Another sustainability challenge was held by the Pikes Peak Ranger District. About 40% of the employees participated in three different facilities, so pretty high engagement rate. And cash and day off awards were given. So this is another thing you want to think about, whether there’s a carrot involved in your competition, and just make sure that’s well known. Some prizes were given away that promoted a green lifestyle, so again thinking about your event, how can you make sure that, from, you know, start to finish, everything is green, including any type of incentive you might be giving. I thought this was interesting, that the [UNINT.] did a complete switch of handheld radio batteries, so clearly getting in touch with the [UNINT.] and the fire community is key. And this really brings a lot of new awareness. If this sounds familiar it may be because you tuned into the May Behavior Change Peer Learning webinar, so if you want to go back in a little bit more detail about the Pikes Peak Ranger District challenge I would direct you to the May Peer Learning webinar series slides. Next slide please.

So here’s another piece of communications that was used in Region 10. The Region 10 overall has an online newsletter, they call it Sourdough News. And one of the things that the Green Team did is to integrate sustainability messages in a four part series, it was called the Green Page, and so here you see the different topics. ‘The Capacity to Endure’ was one that was split into two different pieces; ‘The Tongass Clean Energy Diet: Going Light on Petroleum with Renewables’; and then the fourth part of this was ‘Energy Savings through Better Information.’ And then they also hit on some energy management topics related to both costs and pollution prevention. You see the Earth Day cleanup and then

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sustainable tourism. And so they, you can think about what existing communication channels do you have at your unit or your region, and how could you perhaps embed stories within those as opposed to creating a newsletter [UNINT.] sustainable operations. Just like [UNINT.] integration is the key. Next slide please.

Great. Now we’re going to move on to this idea of successes and awards. Obviously one of the best things we can do is not just, you know, shake our stick at employees and say, there’s an executive order hovering above our heads and we need to do it or else. But also thinking about what’s the carrot at the end of the road. And so rewarding employees for reducing environmental impacts is a great way to increase staff engagement. And you can think about, at the Tongass, you know, they have their leadership in sustainable operations system, they have their own Tongass Green Team award nominations and then they have regional award nominations that have sustainability as one of the categories. So they’re looking at sustainable operations awards at multiple levels. Next slide please.

Great. So I just mentioned LISO on the previous slide, LISO is leadership in sustainable operations, I imagine that several of you on the line are familiar with this tool. But leadership in sustainable operations basically provides an online platform for employees to [pose], to review sustainable operations projects throughout the Sustainable Operations Collective, through a combination of self reporting and success stories. And LISO actually has a direct connection to the Climate Change Scorecard element 10. In fact it has these outputs that can directly graph Climate Change Scorecard performance analysis; how a unit is doing on the top 10 action items in the Scorecard; and also the Climate Change Scorecard progress averages, if you’re looking at averages across fiscal years as opposed to a snapshot in time. So there’s really a lot of capacity within the leadership in sustainable operations system. If you haven’t taken a look at that you can get started by clicking on that hyperlink there provided on the slide. Next slide please.

And I guess I should really mention one thing more about LISO, and that’s that currently there are three different ways that one can report on Appendix G, if one uses Appendix G for Scorecard elements and reporting. One is the table that’s provided as a Word document. One is an Excel version.

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And the third one is a LISO report. We’re really starting advocating using that LISO report. One, it’s a much cleaner type of report. A lot of these here you just simply print and hand over to your forest leadership team for review. And also you know allows you to systematically track and graph your progress over time, as opposed to having to set up your own graphs and whatnot in Excel. So highly recommend using LISO for Scorecard reporting if you're not currently doing so.

So we talked about awards a little bit. Regional forester awards. So this is something that Region 5, my home region, has also done in terms of integrating sustainable operations and energy management as a regional forester honor award category. In our case, the award recognized the individual or group that demonstrated contributions above and beyond normal job responsibilities toward reducing the environmental footprint of a Forest Service unit in Region 5 through three things: project accomplishments, partnerships, and education. The emphasis for the Region 10 awards, the Alaska Regional Forestry Sustainable Operations Award, may have been a bit different, but the idea is still making sure that sustainable operations is highlighted as one of the key things that we’re rewarding our employees for. And if you have a regional awards program, think about who [UNINT.] that and whether you can either be a member of the committee or whether you can at least [UNINT.] to say integrate the SusOps award. Next slide please.

Great. And so it’s important to think about how do we measure results. We can’t manage what we don’t measure. And so the Tongass has really been a frontrunner in thinking about how to quantify their sustainable operations and footprint area impact. So we talked before about energy and water audits is one way you could do that. The Climate Change Scorecard, that’s CCS element number 10 is another way that you can quantify your progress assuming that you’re reporting through Appendix G which is the list of [UNINT.] action items. If you use the narrative form, that tends to be more qualitative as opposed to a quantitative assessment so you really push that Appendix G. We talked about leadership in sustainable operations, that’s another way you could measure and then demonstrate progress. And then the Tongass has actually done a greenhouse gas emissions inventory. Many units have not conducted greenhouse gas emissions inventories at the unit level. The most that’s something that they might hear about being conducted

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nationally, but the Tongass has as well as several of the forests in the Greater Yellowstone area. Conducting greenhouse gas inventory is really a great opportunity to understand our corporate [UNINT.] systems as an agency, and your unit’s emissions profile. Because if you understand your unit’s emissions profile then it helps you target your largest emissions sources, and then begin to prioritize your mitigation [UNINT.]. So just something to think about. Next slide please.

So this is an example of, I was mentioning before that LISO as [UNINT.] just spit out these instant reports. If you’re using that to track your progress on the Scorecard? And this is one. So again you can see the way that it’s been displayed on the slide is I know a bit hard to read but you can get an idea that it’s a lot cleaner of a presentation than if you were to print out a multi-page Word document, that kind of thing. Next slide please.

Great, okay, so here’s another one. The LISO rating scale operates somewhat similar to a [lead] rating scale. There’s the bronze level, the silver level and the gold level. And this is one of the graphs that LISO provides that quickly allows a unit to show where they are with respect to their accomplishments of action items and the different footprint areas. And then by doing so one can say okay, we’re on our way to becoming gold or we’re on our way to becoming silver. And again, just something that with the click of a button you can provide for leadership or anyone else who’s going to be [sitting] on your unit. Next slide please.

Great. So these four we mentioned a little bit about greenhouse gas inventories. Federal agencies are required to measure and reduce our greenhouse gas emissions according to Executive Order 13514. There’s a lot of value on doing greenhouse gas inventories at a smaller scale, at a more detailed scale, to better understand what your emissions inventory is on the unit that you’re currently sitting. So next slide please.

So there’s an opportunity for you for those who are interested in engaging in this. The Sustainable Operations Collective has a team called the Greenhouse Gas and Emissions Tracking Team, and currently this team is conducting a field unit pilot with the title ‘Understanding Your Greenhouse Gas Profile.’ So if you are interested in learning about your unit’s carbon footprint I would highly

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encourage you to take advantage of this pilot opportunity. Over the past year the Greenhouse Gas Tracking Team worked with the National Renewable Energy [UNINT.] to test three different greenhouse gas inventory tools. From those tools, they did an analysis and provide – prepared a lessons learned document. And then we kind of parsed that down and took a look and said okay, what one tool might we want to test further and apply to other units. And the team selected what’s called the GSA carbon footprint tool. So if you are a field location that is interested in piloting this tool, you might think about whether you would like to do so at a compound, at a district, at a forest, at an RO, anything about the scope and scale. The [palette] will focus just on FY ’12 data, so we’re not going to ask you to dig all the way back in time, just this past year’s data, although of course if you’re interested in coming up with a trend analysis you might think about just reiterating the process after you have it down for the FY ’12 information.

The objective is basically, we want to help the SusOps program improve the accuracy of [UNINT.] greenhouse gas inventorying and tracking, and strengthen the connection between the field level and then this higher level national greenhouse gas inventory that we [conduct] every year. And in so we wanted to promote this two way [UNINT.] information sharing. -- likely things that we can learn from the field unit in order to conduct a better national greenhouse gas inventory. And then here, I’ve documented the time commitment that the team is proposing knows that we do, are asking it to complete pilots by Mid-May of 2013. And this is entirely so that the pilots are completed before field season goes into full swing. Next slide please.

So this is the follow up piece for the pilot opportunity. There is a connection to utility bill cleanup, I’ll let you go ahead and read that for yourself. Note that you’re not doing this alone. The team is willing to provide one to two, we’re calling them Greenhouse Gas Inventory Mentors, for the Greenhouse Gas Tracking Team. And they’ll help you through each step of the process. So depending on where you are in the learning curve on how to conduct the greenhouse gas inventory, they might start off with something like offering a webinar to the unit who’s interested in greenhouse inventories 101. But if you already have the 101 down then they might start thinking about, okay, let’s help you understand what your different data systems are that you can tap to get the information. So they would be customized help

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based on your level of expertise in the area, and also there are some limited funds available to cover some of the salary time, because we do realize that you know it’s not an [INTERRUPTED RECORDING] time that’s required to do this.

And you might be wondering okay, how does all of this relate to the objective of the Climate Change Performance Scorecard, and this is because Sustainability Leadership Action Item number 12 specifically talks about conducting a greenhouse gas inventory and then developing a mitigation plan after conducting a greenhouse gas inventory. So you’d be helping your unit achieve at least one of the action items here. And if you’re interested, there’s your key contact, her name is Beth Anderson, and please respond to her by February 8th. Next slide please.

Great. So this is just one more example of how you might go about tracking information. This is the Energy Staff Portfolio Manager. This is something that energy managers use quite extensively and it’s another way of putting in information, housing it in a way that can be easily visualized and is relatively easy to learn. There’s not a big learning curve for that one. Next slide please.

And so finally I want to touch on the idea of sustainable operations performance measuring. Part of measuring results is of course measuring yourself and measuring the employees that work for you, and although there is no one or two sustainable operations performance measures that are systematically integrated in every performance conversation, you might think about what you would do on your own unit. And so the next slide please.

And this is an example. So if you’re thinking about integrating the sustainability conversation into performance, you could have some, you know, broad overarching type questions that address all six footprint areas, or you could target a couple of them. If you’re thinking about energy, you might think of using these as measures. So again, now what kind of things employees can do directly and have full control over. Well, one is routinely turning off lights, electronics, appliances. Another one is frequently practicing computer energy-saving tips and turning off all unnecessary electrical devices at the end of the workday, or when you're not using them for an extended period of time, like if you go to a multi-hour offsite meeting. And so these are things that you might want to

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think about integrating into the conversation in a similar way to the way that we currently integrate safety into our performance discussions. Next slide please.

And so that is the end of this Sustainable Operations Training for Managers package. We just wanted to leave you with three things. One is the force of sustainable operations internal web site. Another is the Tongass Green Team web site. And then know that Michele Parker has developed this guide and is the main contact for questions, although Katie and I will do our best to address them now. And her email and phone are there. Thanks.

KN: Thanks so much, Laura. And if you have to get going to your next meeting that’s okay, I can handle questions. I appreciate you presenting.

LP: Sure thing. I’ll stick on for another five or ten minutes.

KN: Okay, great. So as Laura mentioned the Sustainable Operations Training for Managers, if you’re interested in customizing this for your unit contact Michele Parker. It’s a great, concise way that we took everything that, you know, a lot of things that Green Teams think and spend a lot of time working on and put it all into one document for managers and supervisors.

So I just wanted to highlight two quick upcoming learning opportunities. The first is the open mic, which is on Wednesday, January 16th at 10:00 a.m. and the next one is the next Peer Learning webinar, which is Wednesday, February 6th at 10:00 a.m. And the topics for the next Peer Learning webinar is Fleet and Transportation, and we’ve got a lot of really interesting topics lined up for you so I hope you’re available for that day.

And now we just have time for questions. If you guys have questions for any of the speakers on any of the topics please either type it into the notes section of the webinar or press *1 to ask a question over the phone.

And Eddie, whenever you get a question, just please let us know.

It looks like there’s one question. We’ll just wait for her line to get unmuted.

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And while we wait for her line, for the line to get unmuted, I just wanted to also mention that these three tools we shared today are great tools to use for Green Team success. But we have covered a number of other topics about Green Team in previous Peer Learning webinars so if you’re interested in example charters or how to get your Green Team up and running, what types of projects that our Green Teams are working on, you can scroll through the other recordings of previous Peer Learning webinars, a lot of that information is included.

So, Eddie, are we ready to take the question?

MV: Yes, Katie, we appear to have actually, we appear to have lost contact with [Jean Glenn], actually hang on one second, Jean are you still there?

JG: I am. You know what, it’s okay. I don’t [UNINT.] -- well, you know what, it’s more geared toward Fleet and I don’t want to take up a lot of time. I just wondered if there, with all the, everything’s electronic, and with all that capability, with – you know, we do these transaction registers come all the time. There should be a real easy way of just getting our miles per gallon without us doing manual calculations or anything like that. It should be real slick the way it’s set up, we use our credit cards, credit cards are all electronic, and for some reason we had trouble just having an easy way to access that. So I wondered if you guys in other regions had a line on any of that. Because we shouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel.

KN: Yeah, Jean, that’s a great question. That’s actually come up quite a bit on previous Peer Learning webinars and you are not alone.

JG: Oh.

KN: I think of regions are struggling with that –

JG: Good! I was going to wait for, because I’m on an [Eco Fleet Team] and I was going to wait till they kind of started it there too, but, good! Well, do you, is there any resolution or do you know anything?

KN: I be--, now I might be corrected next month on the Fleet and Transportation, they can dive into this topic if you are interested, but I think that right now it’s, they’re still

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having trouble with the credit card system but they’re working on getting that fixed, and in the meantime they’re still doing manual calculations.

JG: Yeah, I meant to just, like, so retarded, I mean, people don’t have time, you know, like it’s, we wear a lot of hats and just, I don’t know, it’s just that seemed like such a simple thing that would be, you know, readily available. And so I was just surprised about it. But okay, well, that’s all it was, I’m sorry.

KN: No, that’s okay, thanks for bringing it up, I’ll make sure to mention it to the, well you’re on the Fleet Team but I’ll make sure that that gets [UNINT.].

JG: Yeah – no, they know. Yeah, we know. Okay.

KN: And I actually just got a note typed from Brian [UNINT.] --

JG: I see it! From Brian, yes, and he’s our head, so no problem. I’m sorry! I almost, that’s why I hesitated and I hung up because I thought no, I, we’ve already got this going, and that’s why I was, yeah.

KN: No worries. We appreciate the comment. Thank you. So I’ll leave the comment up from Brian, and then if you need, if you want to ask a question over the phone, press *1 or you can type it in. You can press the ‘send note’ button at the top of your screen.

MV: And Brian, your line has been unmuted if you want to chime in.

MV: Okay, great, I wasn’t sure how this would work and if everybody would be able to see it, but one of the things that we talked about – and, again, we’ll cover this for the Fleet’s discussions in a month but we’ve got a month in the meantime where folks might be concerned. And if anybody out there needs to kind of spread the word that one of the things they’re looking at right now at the Department level is in perhaps a different fleet car provider. We’ve had some serious problems with U.S. Bank, and I think it’s because they’re basically a bank and they’re not a fleet car provider if you will. And so we’ve had some serious issues with calculating gallons used and things like that, which, you know, makes things very difficult if you’re trying to manage fleets. So just to answer that question, maybe in the

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meantime if folks wouldn’t mind spreading that word. We may find out as early as the middle of next month who that new provider might be. And I guess I’ll just leave it at that.

KN: Great. Thanks, Brian, for chiming in.

MV: Okay, thank you.

MV: Katie, there is a question in terms of how soon these slides will be made available.

KN: Oh, yeah. I’ll have a PDF of some slides up to the SharePoint site by the end of the week. I’ve got lots of meetings today but they’ll be up by the end of the week. [MUSIC] And Eddie, I don’t know if I’m the only one but I hear some background music.

MV: Yes, I just muted that. I apologize for that. There was a line, I don’t know who it was. Okay and for anybody else who would like to ask any question you may go ahead and dial *1 on your phone, or you may send a note using the ‘send note’ button at the top of your screen.

KN: While we’re waiting for other questions I’m going to post the link to the SharePoint site that I keep referencing where all of our Peer Learning documents are, just for those of you who are new to the Peer Learning series. So I think if you click on the ‘notes’ section you’ll be able to copy and save that link. Are there any other questions over the phone, Eddie?

MV: We do not appear to have any more questions over the lines at this time, Katie.

KN: Okay, I don’t see any in the notes either. So I guess last call for questions, otherwise we can end a bit early today. Thanks everyone for participating. We appreciate your time on this Peer Learning Series. And that, I don’t see any other questions popping up.

MV: Yup, I don’t see any questions over ‘notes’ or the phone line, Katie.

KN: Okay, great. Thanks for your help.