There are plenty of benefits of changing the way you do this in your business to embrace a more eco-friendly outlook. There’s the effect it has on your costs, for a start.
Your electricity and energy bill will be much lower, and you will find that it improves your bottom line. It’s also great for your reputation – more people every year choose to do business with companies that actively work in a greener way.
With this in mind, we thought we would go through a few things you can do to develop a culture in your business that always thinks green.
It can be tough to make the change, as people get used to working in a certain way.
However, these ideas should help you get on your way.
Encourage your employees
Your persuasion skills will come in handy here, as you try and encourage your employees to work in a more responsible way.
It will be easier to impress your ideas on younger staff, who are, by and large, used to taking the environment seriously.
Older employees might struggle a little bit, but praise and encouragement in the right places will only help matters.
Make it easy for them
At first glance, people might see changing the way they work to embrace environmental issues as hard. But, let’s be honest – in many cases it is easier.
Make sure you look at these changes first to get people feeling happy about it. For example, starting a car pool scheme can bring many benefits to your workers. They will save a lot of money on gas, and don’t have to drive to work themselves every day.
Lead from the front
There are a lot of little everyday things you can do to start saving energy – turning out the lights when you leave a room, for example. It sounds obvious, but if everyone sees their boss doing this, most of them will start to do it themselves. It’s also a good idea to have targets to work towards, and task different departments to come up with new and ingenious methods of saving energy. This will get your employees more involved, and shows your leadership takes green matters seriously.
Go paperless
Another great way of going green is to take away some of the issues altogether. For example, if you have concerns about the amount of paper employees are using, just get rid of it. There are plenty of services out there that can help you go paperless – from email fax services to online signing tools for legal documents.
You can also cut back on the amount of printed materials you use. So, instead of sending out festive cards to your clients this year, go for electronic Christmas cards for business instead. If you remove temptations, then your employees will have no choice but use their alternatives.
Start a green audit
Finally, make sure that everyone knows you are serious by having each department hold an environmental audit. The can go around their offices and look at where they are wasting energy and resources.
It will help focus them on what needs to be done, and will help them identify areas that they need to improve.
Do you have any more tips on achieving a greener culture for your business?
Let us know in the comments section below.
