Embed Guide

When to complete - Before implementation of the system.

Activity:  Build a team to help you implement the system

Set up meeting with a stakeholder group and start to build a team to help you implement the system. No matter how brilliant you are, you cannot do it alone! The reuse and redistribution of surplus assets is a cross departmental collaboration and you need stakeholders to sign up head and heart. Guide here.

If you get this activity right your reuse program will be embedded into policy and practice in the most effective manner.

Action: Set meeting with representatives from the following:

Internal Sustainability, Procurement, Facilities Management and Waste.

In later meetings you may want to include: Building moves/decants/rationalisation, third sector support, Schools support/resources (if applicable), Health and safety, Legal, IT and Asset Management.

Outcomes

• Get the team to sign up with their head and heart!

• Each attendee should agree that they support the system. Get a public display of support- a photo maybe?

• Define what success looks like- what do you want to achieve? Savings, sustainability, engagement, collaboration etc.  BE AMBITIOUS BUT REALISTIC!

• Make a plan how this will happen.

• Set a goal for the first year. This might be £100K savings or 500 members etc.

• Define roles for the stakeholders

• Set quarterly update meetings or catch ups.  Get them in the diary now.

• Understand there will be barriers and "nay sayers"- you are trying to change years of poor procurement and disposal practice and the team can overcome the barriers!!

Time - 60 Min

When to complete – Before implementation of the system

Activity – Communicate to Director/ Chief Executive and senior players, the nature of the project and importance of having the right backing.  This is probably the highest impact activity of the whole embed guide. Get this right and the system will have high impact very quickly. 

You will know the most appropriate way to achieve this within your organisation – Meeting/ email / phone call however:

It is important to get backing at Director or even Chief Exec level at the least. This is a new way of acquiring and disposing of items and so sponsorship from the top management helps to pave the way for behaviour change in the staff. The director responsible for sustainability, assets, property, resources or similar is the most appropriate lead.

You may even wish to create a newsletter article or press release with the Director/ Chief Exec giving backing to the scheme. Use the templates here.

Time - 60 mins

Activity – If you are going to trade with 3rd party organisations you need to prepare for this legally.

Involve internal authorities eg – legal team and / or procurement.

We suggest you only start 3rd party donations once you and the Warp It implementation team are happy with how the internal mechanism works. We provide a template legal agreement which we suggest should be checked and amended to your organisation's requirements. This editable document can be updated in the customise messages section on the left-hand side. 

It might be that you want to keep your portal private for internal staff only to start with. This is a good idea. However you may also want to notify your legal department of the project to bring them on board early, as they can be good supporting allies in the future when you might want to consider donating externally. (Also they may take some time to process documents due to high workload)

Time 10 mins

Activity – Edit profile

Customise your home page by adding logo and specify your sector for easy partnering.

Add your logo under "Edit Profile" on the left hand side menu or click here. If the logos do not appear straight away it means your PC is saving a cache of the previous webpage visit Refreshyourcache.com to learn how to clear your cache. If you need to clip the size of your logo use www.webresizer.com.

If you want your logo to have a transparent background upload a .eps file.

Update field with your organisational sector ie – University, Council, Police by clicking on the "Company Type" on the left hand side or click here.

This is important when your organisation makes partnership with other organisations that carrying out similar activities. Your users want to filter what type of items they want to see from other organisations.

Specify your implementation team. They will get monthly reports. You can add in any other stakeholders who you think should get monthly reports also. Guide here.

Time - 100 mins

Activity - Get you communication team on board!

This is an easy win, with high ongoing impact. Once you get your communication team on board they will create comtent for you that will work for you as you sleep!

They will be informing staff of how to use the system and the content will be answering any questions they might have.

Get this strateggy right and you will reduce the number of emails and call you recieve from your staff about the system- so that you are doing more meanigful things! 

Putting some time into this task now will save hours later.  Your comms team should be helping you with newsletter templates, intranet site etc.

Time - 15 mins

The admin role is different to how your staff experience Warp It. Therefore, you really need to understand how your staff engage with the system. Furthermore: It is not possible to search or claim when you are logged in as the admin.

For these reasons you need to set yourself up as a standard user.

1. If you are signed in as the admin, in the top left there is a link to sign out.
2. Go to https://www.warp-it.co.uk/demo
3. Hit register and add your details.
4. You will now receive a notification to the admin account.
5. Log in as the admin. It is important to note that logging in as the admin is accessed through a separate link. When logging in as admin use USERNAME and password
6. Approve the new member (you) under pending members.
7. Log out of the admin account.
8. Log back in as the standard user account using EMAIL and password.
9. You now see that the standard user account is a bit different.
10. You are now signed up as a standard user and can search and claim items.

Time - 60 mins

Activity – Attend Training Webinar

Each member of the Warp It Team attends a relevant webinar. Webinars are 30 mins long. The sessions are great for embedding practice within staff and improving the knowledge and techniques for the administrators.

The sessions are 25 mins long and can be attended from PC, Laptop, Smartphone or tablet. Super easy access and we can have up to 100 staff in one session. 

Register for your first admin webinar here

Get your Warp It team to register for a staff webinar here.  

Time – 20 Min.

Activity – Set up controls in settings

In consultation with the Warp It team fix the settings to reflect your organisational practice and policies. 

There's a guide to settings right here. 

[Hint] - To start with these should be as simple as possible, with as least risk as possible. For example, you might want to make your network private to start with. As the new system gets used more and previous risk concerns are satisfied you can change the settings. 

Time – 20 Min.

Activity – Customise the reporting factors in settings

To better reflect your savings you can input institution specific factors into the system. These metrics are used to demonstrate the full value of reuse.  In 3,6,12 months etc the metrics can be used to report on savings made. At this point, it is worthwhile making a business case to invest more resources in staff time or storage to maximise the effectiveness of the system. 

[Hint] In the admin section it is possible to customise the KPI appearance, the staff time saved factor and the waste value factor.

Time – 20 min

Activity – Customise messages/ notifications

The system sends messages whenever your members engage and carry out a task. The messages are important for making sure your staff behave in the way you require and know what to do. There's a guide right here. To fix the content in accordance with how you want your staff to behave you should click here>to Customise messages/ notifications 

[Hint] – The set up and notifications can be amended at anytime. The mini pilot with stakeholders may result in some potential changes.

Time – 15 min

Activity 

Email your Warp It implementation team and any additional departmental representatives. Here is a template email to send. Please copy and paste and send it to the group.

Time 15 mins

Activity – Make sure notifications and the Warp It website are on your IT Department's "White List"

Your members will need to access the Warp It website. Warp It also sends your members email notifications.

This task is about making the notifications/ emails from Warp It as good as they can be for your users. When the notifications are as they are designed, you will get more participation and hence more savings.

1) The system sends a round up notification which is a digest of items added that week or day. This notification should come through nice and neat, with thumbnail pics of the item/s, the location and heading of the item/s available. See here for information about notifications. If the round up message arrives in your inbox differently please follow instructions below

2) Notifications from Warp It might come through either being flagged as spam or carrying a Mail Scanner warning or equivalent. This is an easy internal fix. 

3) When accessing Warp It you should not get any internal warning pop up message appearing. This should not happen and will deter members. Again this is an easy internal fix. 

If any of the above are applicable to you,  send the following content below (edit as you see fit) to your IT department.

If you do not have any issues with IT/ access please ignore this task.

"Dear [insert IT contact]

We have signed up to warp-it.co.uk / getwarpit.com to help us reduce our environmental impact and costs. However the notifications/ emails the system sends are 

• being flagged as spam*
• a mail scanner message appears on the notifications*
• the website is carrying an access warning*
• the notifications are not being delivered in the correct format*

*DELETE AS APPROPRIATE

Could I please ask you to add warp-it.co.uk / getwarpit.com and info@warp-it.co.uk info@getwarpit.com to our white/ safe list and allow staff access?

If you require any information from the service providers please see security info here or email here."

Top Tip

Your IT department will want to know about the standards of our data storage. You can send you IT department our security credentials here. 

Time 15 mins.

Activity - Email all new members to encourage your existing members to add and claim at least one item.

In the admin area you will see on the left hand side you will see the heading "Members". Under this you will see "Email members" . Click the link. Copy and paste this content:

Hi I see you have signed up to our Warp It system. Have you got any surplus items in your office? Why not add an item. Learn how here! Now, is anyone in your office buying an item today. Be a hero and see if you can find one on the system instead! But how to search for an item? Learn how here!

Top Tip

Use this function to communicate with members when you have an announcement

Time - 60 mins

Activity – Schedule a follow up meeting - once each member has had time to add and claim at least one item.

Call a meeting with the stakeholder group., the implementation team. Points to discuss might include

• How the process worked – positive and areas to improve.
• Any concerns around control of users, items or cross organisational trades. Remember to refer to the settings guide. 
• Talk about the customisable communications. Guide here. In particular how are items going to be transported and what do you tell your members about this. Transport guide here.

Top Tip

The  cohesion and commitment of the implementation team is what decides whether your Warp It system will be fair, good or AMAZING!! As we said earlier the team should back reuse with their heads and their hearts. This is about saving your organisation money, carbon and landfilling of valuable assets. It is also about supporting the local community sector. As well as saving staff time. Public, verbal and/or written commitment at this stage is vital- so why not take a piccie of the implementation team and blog about the meeting or do a newsletter article?

Time - 120min

Activity – Upload all surplus and stored items.

You will probably have a store or surplus items across your estate. It is a good idea to get these uploaded onto the system before you launch to the rest of your staff. The marketplace should be as populated as possible before the system is launched to the staff. 

This is best done as a team activity. Pull together a team and catalogue the items in the store.

The upload them to the system. Use this guide here to learn how to add successive items quickly. 

For a bulk upload guide and downloadable template see here.

Top Tip

View the Building Clearance guide here for more short cuts to success for adding items quickly!

Time 60 mins

Activity - Meet with stakeholders to discuss launch communications

You have already met with communications. You have seen the launch templates. Theer are other methods of communication you may wish to consider also. 

[Hint] This meeting should include Warp It Team, it may include the mini pilot team or other departmental representatives such as the marketing/communications department.

Time 40 mins.

Activity – Upload Warp It content to the intranet

You should have Warp It content available on your intranet site for staff. This is free passive communication and publicity. This is the low hanging fruite and can be used to help staff to adopt the system more readily. 

Please see here for template intranet content. 

Time- 20 mins.

Activity – Add your CEO , leader or other senior managers who may not have time to register themselves.

Leadership is vital for behaviour change. If the leader of the organisation is seeking to cut costs and improve sustainability then they will want to know about the service and the ambitions. Get them to sign up if you can!

[Hint] – You may get some great influencers and buy in here – Get permission to add them and then follow the link to add members and fill in their details. Alternatively email them to sign up at https://www.warp-it.co.uk/demo

Heads of department or similar should also be encouraged to attend a web show.

Time 30 mins.

Activity – Send out an email to all staff. (or whatever is appropriate for your organisation).

The simplest and quickest way to tell staff about the system is by an all staff email.  However this obviously has problems so you might want to target the procurers first.

This is the one easiest task with biggest impact. If you do not want to go "all out" to start with, you can select distinct groups of staff and grow incrementally. Long term you should be aiming for as many staff as possible to be using the system.

Email templates can be found here. 

Incentive encouragement

Everybody loves an incentive. What better way to get staff to sign up by offering an incentive which has been placed on Warp it? This is a great way to get staff registering and using the system.

Incentives have been used to great effect by a number of our early customers including Newcastle University, Northumberland Council and London University. The admin uploads a number of incentives onto the system. Staff are told about it. Log in. Claim the items. Staff are then sent a confirmation email informing where to collect the incentives. Popular incentives are chocolate, water bottles, bags for life and mugs.

Northumberland County Council offered a hamper of goods. Over 500 staff claimed a ticket. The ticket was drawn in a public raffle and the prize was awarded by the head of the organisation. This gave the organisation a really good foundation of staff right from the start. 

Estimated time 20 mins

Activity – Ask Senior managers to add Warp It as an agenda item in their team meetings.

There are some meeting resources at  this link including a template presentation and items to discuss in meetings. 

You can also download a meeting memo here.

Time – 60 min on ave.

Activity - Deliver Member training.

1. This can be delivered by Warp It or internally
2. Classroom Style training with 15-20 staff into a computer training suite and walk them through the system.
3. Face to face training at the desk side. This is time consuming but effective at getting staff to really engage with using the system.

Time – 180min

Activity – Feedback on performance through a newsletter/ press release.

[Hint] Once the system has been running for a while it is a good idea to feedback on performance. Get senior figure to publicly support.

Use the template press/ newsletter content here. 

Time -20 mins

Activity – Find preferred partners to link with go to building external network

[Hint] You can filter by type and location . Send friend requests to the organisations you wish to partner. There is more information about this in the admin guide here [link to building networks in admin guide]

Time – 10min

Activity – Communicate results to staff via your automatic quarterly report email.

Tell the world what you are doing- again!

A monthly  automatic email is sent to administrators advising of performance results. Use these emails as content for communications to staff. To embed a new behaviour into the staff body, you need to keep chipping away at the psyche! The early adopters are now well used to Warp It. Why not ask them what they think and use their answers as a newsletter, blog post or even a video- this will help to persuade the majority to jump on board!

Hints: 

• Tell them what you are doing and most importantly why you are doing it.
• What is the story behind the story? 
• Find some supporters within your staff members and get them to tell their Warp It Story. 
• Write a piece for internal distribution but also external to the local press. This can help increase participation internally!

Time – 60 min

Activity – Analyse performance reports and complete any outstanding embed tasks

You have introduced a new practice into your organisation. It might only be the mavericks or "early adopters"  using the system at the moment,  but we need to move it into mainstream practice. This is no mean feat! The vision, energy, persistence and stubbornness of you and the implementation team has made great change so far (hopefully)!

Embedding into standard practice might take 1 month, 6 months, 12 months or in some cases 18 months. You know how your organisation works the best. 

At month 6-9...you have only really just started.  This can be a low point in the project and maybe you have not seen as much progress as you would have thought. This can bring a dip in motivation. It is important to look how far you have come. It is time to remind yourself and the team why you started this journey in the first place! 

To give you another push to hit your original targets it is a good idea to 

1) Remind your staff what you are doing and why you are doing it

2) Tell them about your goals and deadline

3) Tell them about all the positive metrics below- tell them about the value of reuse.

4) tell them a story they can relate to ( real reuse stories from other staff or your partners preferably)

[Hint]

When you review your performance, Issues to consider are.

• Number of members
• Environmental social and financial value of internal trades
• New collaborative opportunities internally and the opportunity for improved working
• New links with 3rd parties- and value of assets donated
• Resilience of the organisation going forward

Time – 30min

Activity – Survey your members

Use an online form builder such as surveymonkey.com to survey your own members OR just keep it simple and send them a message via the "Email members" link on the left. 

[Hint] Ask what is good and what could be improved. If you want to keep it really simple just ask them which one feature would they like to see? (Remember to feedback to us!)

Time – Ongoing

Activity – Review how Warp It interacts with existing policies

You made it! You implemented Warp It. You had a vision about how this might work. You have taken an idea, nurtured it , pushed it and embedded it into practice within your organisation! Well done! YOU MADE IT HAPPEN! High fives to all the team!

However,  this new practice needs to integrate with old practices.

Warp It is a new way to acquire and dispose of assets. This, therefore may bump up against existing longer term policies. 

We have written a template Reuse Policy here. Please use this as you see fit. 

[Examples of policy ares to be explored]

Procurement - Staff can now claim items 2nd hand before buying. Can the purchasing department help by adapting procurement policies to encourage this activity? This could be as simple as a pop up message on the e-procurement system- or a full-scale block of procuring new items.

Facilities Management - The disposal policy should certainly be reviewed with the first action for anyone disposing of an item to be to "add the item" to the system.

Building Clearances-  This is traditionally a hard area to change but there are big impacts whe reuse (internal and external) are considered at the tender specification stage. 

Having a policy on reuse is really important. Policies are agreed by upper management to give the organisation a vision so that you can all work together towards a common goal. But you should involve all stakeholders in writing a policy- to get input and buy in. This is true collaboration. 

A policy tells us upper management believe this is how things should be.

A policy tells stakeholders "We are serious about this issue and it is important to us"

A policy tells staff "This is how you are expected to participate towards a common goal"

More policy advice.

Setting a Reuse and/or repair target

When a target is included in the strategic development of an organisation this sets out a clear objective for staff. Now that you have the evidence to show reuse and / or repair has significant impact make a case to include a reuse target in your next strategic review. 

[Hint] See this video here where we explain how reuse has a much greater impact than recycling.