Hug a gargoyle, save the world. Photo: Chris Andrews/Corbis
Goodness they're a grumpy lot over at the Financial Times. Lucy Kellaway's reaction last week to the announcement that the National Trust was giving staff leap day off to "green" their homes was just sheer stroppiness: it made her feel "uneasy" and "queasy" to hear that companies were telling staff what to do in their time off.
I suppose, given her cheery outlook on climate change and its likely implications for the National Trust - "if the climate gets a little warmer, that surely will encourage more tourists to the UK, and with the sun shining down they can traipse in ever larger numbers around the stately homes and gardens of Britain" - it was never likely that she'd think that the NT's idea was a wonderful one.
But actually I think the idea is sheer genius. I love it! It makes me want to hug the NT, gargoyles and all. I think that more companies should be considering giving their staff time off, to sort out their own homes and then to start sorting out other things, like, you know, homelessness, poverty, famine, etc.
First of all this appears to actually be good for staff -Community Service Volunteers organise employee volunteering schemes for big corporations such as BT, British Gas and the Guardian - and they found that 85% of the employers they dealt with said that productivity actually rose. (Dunno what the exact results from the Guardian were. Lefties - as anyone from the FT will tell you - are a pretty unproductive lot. Just the odd manifesto and an uprising every once in a while, really.)
But secondly, it looks like the only way we're going to get it done. It could be like a kind of "greed offset" - a company offsets the fact that it is driving the consumer society which is destroying our planet by making their staff sort it out on company time.
Win-win situations. Don't you love 'em?
