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You, like many organizations, may believe that creating a greener workplace is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor.
However, innovative ideas demonstrate that leveraging technology for a greener workplace not only saves your business money but also enhances your reputation as an eco-friendly business.
Studies have shown that a greener workplace results in a more productive and healthier workplace and a lighter ecological footprint. Regardless of whether you are an employee, boss or business owner, leveraging technology for a greener workplace will result in a more productive work environment.
Many aspects of the workplace such as commuting options, product preferences and office management can use technology to achieve green objectives. The following list of suggestions, while not in any way exhaustive, will get you started on the path to a greener workplace.
Your modern workplace runs smoothly by utilizing equipment ranging from computers to coffee makers. Yet many of those gadgets use a lot of power. Consider the following to create a more energy efficient workplace:
While we are in the digital age, your workplace may still be creating a lot of paper documents that you use once or twice and then trash. The ideal situation is to eliminate all use of paper, yet this is not possible. Nevertheless, the greenest solution is to transition to digital documentation to the degree to which your business is able. Innovative and safe cloud solutions such as Google Drive make it easier to store all your documents on secure offsite servers. This eliminates the need to keep paper backups.
Moreover, keeping your data on computers and cloud servers makes it easier to store such documents. This prevents the inconvenience of losing documents when your moves offices. Also consider reviewing documents onscreen as opposed to printing them out. Invest in software such as Greenprint, which converts documents to PDF format for safe and paperless document sharing.
The average employee spends nearly 50 hours a year on the rush hour commute. That is a significant amount of potentially productive hours and petrol wasted in rush hour traffic. This reduces productivity at the workplace as employees arrive at the office tired and get home late. Consider the following options to reduce the impact of this waste:
Modern technology allows for efficient telecommuting. If you have not implemented telecommuting, you may be missing out on a lot of potential savings. If you or your employees can hold online conferences, use instant messaging or otherwise work from home, by all means do it. You will save time while reducing the pollution commuting creates. With telecommuting, it is possible to replace the five eight hour days with four ten hour days as the time you waste in the commute goes down by up to 20 percent.
That being said, you still have to ensure the security of your company’s sensitive data when you allow staff to work online from outside the office. You might even have a dedicated team for online marketing of your business that needs to be protected. Check out Secure Thoughts’ recommendations on using a Virtual Private Network to ensure the security of your corporate data from hackers. Staff may be using vulnerable public networks while telecommuting which can quickly lead to a disastrous data breach.
As I previously asserted, it is almost impossible to have an entirely paper-free workplace, hence the need for envelopes and paper manufactured using eco-friendly technologies. Try using some of these other methods to create an eco-friendlier workplace:
Try looking at the very design of the workplace and making it greener in both the products it uses and the plan it operates under. Consider some of the following options:
A green workplace aided through the use of technology will provide numerous productivity and health benefits to any organization. With a reputation for being environmentally friendly, your organization will likely attract more clientele. Moreover, adopting a technology-driven green framework will be efficient over the long term and help out your organization’s bottom line.
Alsco would like to thank Caroline Black of Secure Thoughts for contributing this article for Greenroom. Secure Thoughts is the industry leader in helping people make sure their information and loved ones’ are protected online.
For more green solutions for your business, visit the Greenroom blog. Spread the word about how easy it is to create a greener, safer and healthier workplace.
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