How to Encourage Your Staff to Cycle to Work

Julie Starr • November 23, 2020



Cycling to work is a great way to stay fit and reduce your carbon footprint at the same time. If your staff are lucky enough to live close enough to cycle to the office then as an employer you should be encouraging this. Commuting actually costs businesses time and money and often cycling is a quicker option than being stuck in traffic or in public transport delays. Offer your team a little incentive to cycle to work instead of driving especially and find new ways to encourage them to get back on their bike.

Don’t forget to look into the right insurance before you send everyone out on bikes in your business. It’s a nice idea, to get everyone cycling to work rather than driving and pumping out more fumes into the environment, but that doesn’t make it simple. You have to make sure that your business consults with the insurers about a potential need for a truck accident lawyer on file. You also want to ensure that you are realistic – not everyone can cycle to work. Not just for the distance away, but their physical health. Make sure that you have some incentives that are similar for those who are physically unable to cycle to work every day!

Organize cycling challenges

For example, you could organize cycling challenges. A little healthy competition between employees is fine now again and it can be really motivating. You can organize cycling challenges to work or outside of work, whichever you decide. This way you’ll create a healthier company culture and more people will jump on the bandwagon. It’s up to you what to offer as a reward for these challenges. You could even get involved yourself and send around your progress as inspiration.

Offer cycling training courses

If some members of your team aren’t quite confident enough cyclists to bike to work then you could offer courses in cycling . You can even do courses for complete beginners, so even for your employees who are new to cycling, they’ll still be able to learn. This might give them the confidence they need to cycle safely. Many people feel they aren’t able to cycle to work because of their fitness level so you could also encourage your colleagues to get into shape as well with various schemes. 

Provide road safety training

If you’re going to push cycling to work you need to ensure you promote safety at all times. Provide road safety training or as a minimum some online resources for your staff to use as guidance. Give them the information they need to know how to prevent any accidents or what to do if they get into any problems on the road. Provide the details for a reliable truck accident lawyer and other important information in the case that they get into an accident.

Offer flexible working hours

In order to encourage your staff to cycle to work offer flexible working hours. If they can begin a little later in the mornings or don’t need to rush to work they’ll be more motivated to cycle. There are also many other benefits of flexible working for both staff and employers. Companies that offer flexible working hours often have more motivated employees. It helps to boost office morale and makes employees feel as though their individual needs are being taken into consideration. 

Provide changing facilities

Another way to encourage more people to cycle to work is by providing the necessary facilities. Commercial properties are required to have bathrooms so ensure these are adequate for your staff to change in. They might want to wash or change their clothes after a long cycling commute. Provide what you can so they feel comfortable. Lockers could also be useful for storing a change of clothes and shoes for cycling.

Install bike racks for staff

If you’re going to provide lockers for your employees’ belongings then you’ll also need to install bike racks for them to lock up their bikes safely. You can buy commercial bike racks online . Ensure you have them positioned somewhere secure and in plain sight, with lights if you’re working during darker hours. If you don’t have anywhere convenient outside to store bikes safely then you could make a space inside. Wall hooks are also a good option if you don’t have enough floor space. If you think outside the box then you should be able to provide the facilities your staff need to cycle to work.

Lead by example

One of the best ways to encourage anyone to do anything is to lead by example. It’s not fair to expect your staff to change their habits of you’re not going to make the effort to yourself. If you want to motivate more people to cycle to work, then you need to get back on your own bike and make a point of cycling to work as often as possible. 

Cycling to work is a great habit for your staff to develop. It’s better for their health and the environment. You’ll also end up with more motivated and energetic employees. Consider a bike scheme or organizing cycling projects and challenges to encourage your staff to cycle to work more often.

How Student-Led ‘Energy Audits’ Are Cutting School Costs (and Lighting the Way Forward)

By Julie Starr • July 14, 2025
What happens when students stop waiting for adults to fix things and start conducting their own energy audits? Money gets saved. The lights get switched off. Data gets analyzed. And a quiet revolution in sustainability begins—inside schools that once overlooked their own inefficiencies. Across the globe, student-led energy audits are proving that change doesn't always need to come from a policy shift or a major capital budget. Sometimes, it begins with a clipboard, a spreadsheet, and a group of curious minds asking: Why are the hallway lights on at noon when sunlight floods the building? The Energy Detectives These audits aren’t science fair projects. They’re rigorous investigations, often done in collaboration with facilities staff, local environmental nonprofits, or even engineering mentors. Students go from classroom to classroom measuring electricity usage, checking for phantom loads , and identifying where heat is escaping in winter or air conditioning is leaking in summer. One high school in Ontario saved over $12,000 a year after its Grade 11 physics students ran an energy audit and suggested simple changes—LED upgrades, motion sensors in bathrooms, and smarter heating schedules. They didn’t just propose ideas. They pitched them with spreadsheets, thermal images, and payback timelines. It worked. Learning That Pays Off—Literally Unlike textbook learning, these audits blend real-world math, environmental science, economics, and persuasive communication. Students aren’t just learning about sustainability. They’re doing it. And the savings add up. From dimming overlit hallways to reprogramming HVAC systems that run all weekend for empty buildings, students are surfacing blind spots that administrators often overlook. In some districts, their findings are influencing energy policy. Elsewhere, the audits have inspired school boards to hire sustainability coordinators—often alumni of the student programs themselves. There’s something poetic about a school funding new books or laptops from money saved by students who found out the vending machines didn’t need to be plugged in 24/7. Why This Matters More Than Ever With education budgets tightening and utility costs rising, every dollar saved is a dollar that can go back into classrooms. And here’s where it gets interesting from a family finance perspective, too. If you’re a parent setting aside money for post-secondary savings, every bit of school efficiency helps. Fewer energy costs might mean more programming, better STEM facilities, or even bursaries. That raises a broader point: when families save for their children’s future, they often look into RESPs (Registered Education Savings Plans). And many wonder—is a RESP deduction available on my taxes? While contributions themselves aren’t deductible, the gains grow tax-free, and students often pay little to no tax when they withdraw the funds during school. A Movement Worth Replicating These audits aren’t just an exercise in environmentalism. They’re leadership labs. Students learn how to spot inefficiencies, speak up in board meetings, and make a business case for change. They don’t just flip switches—they shift mindsets. And they carry these habits into adulthood. The result? A generation growing up not only with climate anxiety, but also with tools to tackle it.

Smart Sensors, Smarter Supply Chains: Enhancing Traceability in Food & Beverage

By Julie Starr • June 20, 2025
In today’s competitive food and beverage (F&B) landscape, traceability is no longer a compliance checkbox—it’s a differentiator. The ability to track every step of a product’s journey, from origin to shelf, is vital for regulatory accuracy and to ensure brand integrity, supply chain agility, and consumer trust. Add smart sensors to the mix: the quiet, tireless observers revolutionizing supply chain intelligence. Traceability Has a Data Problem Despite digitization across many F&B operations, most traceability systems still rely on fragmented or manual data inputs. Batch numbers, barcodes, and handwritten logs often stand between a supplier and clarity when things go wrong. This approach struggles with latency and scale. When contamination or delays occur, root cause analysis is slow, costly, and damaging. Smart sensors shift this paradigm by embedding real-time, contextual intelligence into every stage of the supply chain . Whether monitoring humidity in transit or recording fill-level precision in bottling plants, they remove the guesswork by turning physical conditions into structured, time-stamped data. From Passive Monitoring to Active Optimization Sensors used to be reactive tools, alerting operators to anomalies. But smart sensors now play a proactive role in process control. They measure, and they interpret. For example, temperature sensors embedded in cold chain logistics can dynamically adjust cooling systems or flag threshold breaches before spoilage occurs. These advancements reduce waste and loss at a systemic level. In a production facility, smart sensors integrated with PLCs can enforce recipe compliance, verify clean-in-place processes, and detect micro-stoppages in real-time. This enables operations to pivot faster and isolate inefficiencies before they cascade downstream. Trust is Built on Transparency Consumers are paying more attention to what they eat and drink. They’re looking beyond labels, expecting visibility into how ingredients are sourced, processed, and handled. Smart sensors make this level of transparency achievable —without burdening manufacturers with excessive manual oversight. By capturing metadata throughout production and distribution, these sensors create a digital footprint that’s tamper-resistant and instantly accessible. When this data is integrated with a central platform, brands can respond confidently to audits, recalls, and quality assurance challenges with a level of precision that would be impossible through legacy systems. Intelligence Without Infrastructure Overhaul One common misconception is that adding smart sensors requires a top-down reinvention of supply chain infrastructure. In reality, companies can deploy edge sensors in a modular, scalable way. Many modern solutions offer plug-and-play functionality, allowing for fast integration with existing machinery and MES systems. This is where suppliers like alps-machine.com are reshaping expectations. Rather than pushing proprietary ecosystems, they design sensor-ready equipment with interoperability in mind. This future-proofs investment and keeps businesses nimble in the face of regulatory or market shifts. Designing for Data Longevity Sensors are only as powerful as the context they capture. A smart implementation ensures the data collected can be standardized, stored securely, and accessed meaningfully across departments. This means moving beyond local dashboards toward centralized, queryable datasets that inform everything from supplier contracts to marketing claims. As AI and predictive analytics become more accessible, these data-rich environments will unlock new capabilities—such as predicting demand spikes based on real-time freshness indicators or adjusting production schedules dynamically based on in-transit sensor feedback. Final Thoughts: Smarter Isn’t Optional Traceability isn’t solved by more paperwork—it’s solved by embedded intelligence. Smart sensors don’t just help businesses know what happened; they help prevent the wrong things from happening at all. For companies in the food and beverage sector, adopting smart sensors is less about chasing innovation and more about enabling resilience, speed, and confidence in every decision.