University of California, Berkeley
EN-8: Employee Orientation

All incoming UC Berkeley staff receive a briefing on campus sustainability options at employee orientation sessions. They are also offered opportunities to practice sustainability through committees, via newsletters and through social media channels. The campus also offers energy savings campaigns and sustainability learning events.

UC Berkeley provides an introduction to alternative transportation as part of their outreach for New Employee Reception & Orientation (NERO). Parking & Transportation shares the benefits of taking alternative transit as an effective substitute to driving alone.

Everyone, faculty and staff, interacts with Parking & Transportation as a new employee to find commute options, and the employee orientation offers information and sign-ups on the commute alternative programs. Among the sustainable traveling options featured, Parking & Transportation highlights Bear Transit and public transit options such as AC Transit and BART for Bay Area travel. The presentation also encourages bike commuting by highlighting UCB's Gold Level Status as a Bike-friendly University, ample bike parking on campus, secure bike cages, and bikeshare programs. Sustainable transport is also featured with BerkeleyMoves!, UCB's official RideMatching & Trip Planning Platform. BerkeleyMoves! is exclusive to the Berkeley community and offers carpool matching & prize incentives for calendar entries. Lastly, Golden Bear Trip Planning is a personalize planning service offered to the Berkeley community to identify ideal and sustainable travel options for your trip.

At NERO, Cal Zero Waste is allocated a 10-minute time slot to present on the campus’ zero waste by 2020 goal, the campus standard for waste signage and bins, as well as how to properly sort materials while on campus. This presentation also includes information about how to practice reducing and reusing materials. In order to give new employees on campus a starting point to put some of these ideas into practice, Cal Zero Waste distributes reusable mugs to each NERO participant at every session. This action is directly tied to the Refreshing Refills campaign. Moving forward, Cal Zero Waste will continue to present at each monthly NERO and will work with NERO staff to develop a plan for how to continue to prompt zero waste actions after attendees have gone through the orientation.

Zero Waste, The Office of Sustainability, and Environmental Health and Safety are featured under additional resources. The upcoming NERO version will also have a virtual scavenger hunt in which the Office of Sustainability is featured.

Information from this field was provided by the UC Berkeley Office of Sustainability.

New Employee Orientation Slide Deck
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1Ko8_015YksUuT62nabENmcnDX6eG618PC6i2MjbCG_Y/edit#slide=id.g4d30f89833_0_0