Ways to Make Your Office Environmentally Friendly – Running a business these days is only fun when you have a competitive edge or something unique that makes your company stand out. Otherwise, it can be stressful to compete for the market share.
Being environmentally friendly is one of the ways your business can have a competitive edge. That’s because it can boost your reputation, attract top talent, keep your employees happy, lower your operating costs, and allow you to partner with sustainable suppliers, among other reasons.
If all that sounds good, then you should take steps to make your business more sustainable. To help, here are a few ways to make your office environmentally friendly.
Ways to Make Your Office Environmentally Friendly
Go Paperless
The first and most beneficial way to be sustainable is to go paperless. Instead, give your employees access to word processing software and PDF software like PDFescape.
By doing this, you can make your employees do everything on the computer. No more corrections, revisions, and updates on paper. Your employees don’t even have to fill out forms, sign documents, or write notes on paper with good PDF software.
This will allow you to cut back on paper significantly while also reducing your ink and toner needs, along with maintenance for printers, scanners, and copiers. Also, it will reduce your stationary expenses.
Buy Sustainable Products
Since every business will be reluctant to throw out or sell perfectly good items around the office to buy sustainable products, you can try to buy environmentally friendly ones to replace whenever there is a need.
For instance, using energy-efficient lights and bulbs means lower energy bills and more light. But instead of spending thousands to change everything, buy energy-efficient replacements when a bulb stops working.
Similarly, you can buy sustainable furniture, organic cleaning products, and healthy food in eco-friendly packaging in the cafeteria.
Adjust the Thermostat
During the summers, offices can often over-air condition. They may not even know they are doing it, it can simply be to make the space cooler. However, that can be uncomfortable for some employees and also increase energy bills.
But, that doesn’t mean you should increase the temperature settings and make everyone around the office feel warm in their suits. You can see changes in your staff’s mood and the electricity bills by even raising it by one or two degrees.
READ: Safe Work Environment Law
For instance, you can raise it to 75 if your current setting is 73 or 74 degrees. You can save thousands and still have a cool office.
Create Departmental Green Competitions
Among the easiest ways to go green is by creating competitions with rewards. These will also help you raise employee morale and productivity significantly.
But, you don’t have to give out big rewards. It can be as simple as giving gift cards, free lunch for a day, or something else that will drive your employees without hurting the budget.
READ: Negative Effects Of Electric Cars On The Environment
For the challenges, you can try doing things like measuring the amount of paper each department uses or seeing who uses the most sustainable practices. You can also try having separate recycling bins in each department for paper, plastic, and metal and measure them to see who creates the least amount of waste.
