Fit for change

Looking at one of the Les Mills health and fitness clubs, green isn’t the word that springs to mind. Red, maybe – or fluorescent yellow with a splash of blue to match their high-energy paint job, but green? Not so much.

That’s set to change though, thanks to a big push from the top to make the chain of gyms one of the best known restorative businesses in New Zealand, with environmental care one of its core values.

Joanna Ealand, the newly appointed sustainability manager at Les Mills, explains what they mean by ‘restorative’:

“It means we know we’re always going to have a carbon footprint – because we’ll always have to turn on the lights and use electricity, so we’re never going to be zero. But we can use our influence to convince suppliers to reduce their carbon footprint, and offset that against ours.

“And at the same time we are trying to reduce our own footprint – it’s not an excuse to relax for ourselves, it’s a balance.”

For Les Mills, being restorative means being forward in addressing some of the impact of running their 10 clubs.

To date that’s involved some heavy lifting: their club in Auckland’s Britomart has changed all of its showerheads to low-flow nozzles, thereby slashing the amount of CO_² released by their gas heating system. And the business as a whole has prepped for that hard work with some lighter warm-ups: Joanna notes how little changes have had an effect on the culture. At Monday morning meetings at head office, staff are traditionally bought takeaway coffees, which for the last six months have been served in reusable cups instead of disposables. At the staff Christmas party, everyone took the bus instead of taxis. And Christmas cards now go out digitally instead of on paper.

Attitude is everything

Joanna believes these little efforts have subtly changed the company: “The phrase ‘be green’ is really sneaking into our language – in our emails and conversations around the office.

“People say, ‘how green is this?’ Or ‘that’s not very green’ – it’s being looked at and questioned a lot more than it was before. People are naturally thinking about it.”

One of the lessons of their big move towards sustainability has been the importance of leadership. You need buy-in from everybody in a company for it to embrace green thinking in a meaningful way, and to get that buy-in you need a commitment from the top.

At Les Mills, CEO Reece Zondag has been a vocal advocate for the programme, and with managing director Dione Forbes has guided the company into formalising its green intentions by encouraging clubs to be accredited through the government-owned eco-label Environmental Choice New Zealand. ECNZ has a new programme especially for fitness centres and Les Mills now has four clubs that hold this ECNZ certification – the first gyms in the country to do so.

To get ECNZ certification the company had to look not just at its own activities, but at those of its suppliers – from the paper used in printers, to the companies who make their treadmills and the cleaners who come in after hours. Les Mills has been around since 1968 and has built up a significant stock of goodwill in its business relationships, so it was important to approach this aspect of greening their business with the right attitude, says Joanna.

“It’s not a matter of wiping the slate and saying ‘you’re not green, you’re gone’ – it’s a matter of saying ‘this is where we’re going, we’d like you to come too’.”

“For instance we worked with our cleaners to encourage them to use environmentally friendly products. We don’t say ‘we don’t like what you use, you’re out!’ We say, ‘these are the things we’d like you to use’.”

The company is also reaching out to its members to tell them about its new green priorities and is encouraging them to join in by working towards their fitness goals in ways that are helpful for the environment – for instance by running or cycling to work where possible, rather than taking the car.

Greener and leaner

Les Mills’ efforts to reduce its carbon output have also brought savings for the company.

All electricity and gas bills, all travel expenses and waste information from individual clubs are collected by head office and assessed annually by a greenhouse gas auditor. Each club is told what its carbon footprint is on a per member basis – “so it’s a bit of a competition,” says Joanna – and in working to slim down their carbon waistlines, clubs have been saving cash. In particular, the project to reduce hot water wastage at Britomart brought savings faster than had been anticipated, with the cost of installing low-flow shower heads being recouped after one month by way of smaller gas and water bills.

However, it’s crucial that their customers felt they were making this change for the right reasons Joanna points out. The new shower heads use 9.5 litres of water per minute, compared with 16 litres from the old units, making the change an attractive low-hanging fruit to pick – yet it was imperative that taking a shower still felt the same. Cutting back on luxuries in the name of the environment could be seen as penny-pinching green-wash, so they only went ahead with the refit once it was clear it didn’t compromise the experience.

“Our core business is being a gym and providing that service to our members,” Joanna says. “So we try to do things that have a positive impact and that don’t compromise the member experience.”

And it’s important that people know they’re not just doing it because it’s the cool thing to do, she adds.

“We’re doing it because we really believe in it.”