Page 324 - The Green Building Bottom Line The Real Cost of Sustainable Building

302 CHAPTER 10

journals for each employee. The journals featured perforated pages where the removed
portion could be used to exchange ideas with others, and each employee was provided
with a personalized stamp and inkpad. (See Figure 10.4.) The journals may never have
been used in quite that way, but the point of exchanging information was not lost on
the Melaver corporate family. The name CommPost, however, has stuck as the name
given to Melaver’s communications team, a team charged with, among other things,
coordination and dissemination of information through the company’s intranet site.
There are a few important things to note as a result of this initial phase of work with
Melaver, Inc. For one, while the company had done considerable work in prior years
shaping a sense of shared values as well as a powerful and empowering bottom-up
culture, its value proposition still needed to be clarified and better communicated. Put
another way, staff members needed to better understand how their shared sense of val-
ues connected to the business case for creating value. In the early years of the LEED
program (2000–2005), there was not only a strong perception but also a great deal of
truth to the idea that green cost more. Staff members, early on, needed to be convinced
that the company, with its sustainable orientation, was not heading down a path that
was “flavor-of-the-month” trendy or financially dubious.
Another critical piece in this initial phase concerned the degree to which it was
strictly internal. Marketing played a critical role in framing the notion of sustainabil-
ity for staff members, enabling them to share and exchange knowledge and informa-
tion with one another that would later shape the company’s delivery of products and
services. But at this point public relations was not at the table. The company knew it
was not even close to being ready for prime time. Lots of internal work—training,

Figure 10.4 CommPost stamp and journal.