Bike Month = Aurecon Active Travel Month - Wrap Up

Inspired by the DoT’s WA Bike Month, Aurecon launched an active travel program in the Perth office during October. To appeal to a wider audience, we rebranded it as Active Travel Month.

A Your Move working group was formed to coordinate a range of activities including end of trip facility tours, a bike workshop, an active travel advice booth and a photo/story competition on our new active transport Yammer page.

The first two activities were our most successful initiatives and were well received by those who attended. Our building has wonderful end of trip facilities that many people are unaware of, so we ran brief tours during lunchtime and followed up by sending access forms to participants. Furthermore, we were lucky to have an experienced cyclist in-house who volunteered to deliver a bike workshop, which focused on bike safety and basic maintenance.

Our active travel month activities were promoted in an email, on workplace social media and posters around the office. Half way through the month, when there had been very little responses to events, an invitation for just one event (end of trip facility tour) was sent out with the motivators of “last chance”, “free” and “only 15min”. This seemed to get people’s attention and just one mouse click to accept the invitation may have helped too. This approach was repeated for the bike workshop and again got a better reaction.

The only budget required for the activities was ~$100 for bike tubes and CO2 cartridges for people to practice with in the bike workshop. Rebel and Officeworks vouchers were offered as prizes for the competition but they were purchased with Your Move points.

One challenge for us promoting active travel is that less than 40% of staff are currently working in the office. Our strong flexible working policy has led to many people still choosing to work from home despite the office reopening in July and a team of staff have just moved to a project office.

Despite this, we have still managed to connect with a number of people and there is now an opportunity to further engage with those showing interest to drive behaviour change.